Not Everywhere Else at Once

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from being everywhere.

Not physically —
but cognitively.

Before your feet touch the floor, you’ve already been:

• inside an argument you didn’t start

• inside a disaster you can’t affect

• inside the curated lives of people you will never meet

Your body is still in the room.
Your attention is not.

Doomscrolling isn’t a moral failure.

It’s a systems problem.

We are surrounded by machines that reward dispersion — systems designed to keep attention in motion, never landing long enough to settle or resolve.

Every scroll promises relevance.
Every update suggests urgency.
Every pause is treated as an opportunity for interruption.

The result isn’t knowledge.
It’s saturation.

The Illusion of Being Informed

Generative systems are excellent at moving information.

But they are indifferent to what that movement does to a human nervous system.

They do not feel overwhelm.
They do not experience consequence.
They do not fatigue.

They simply continue.

The danger isn’t that machines know too much.

It’s that they encourage us to believe we should as well.

Interpretation Without Presence

Here’s the quiet problem underneath doomscrolling:

Machines interpret without inhabiting.

They summarise crises without staying with them.
They surface tragedy beside advertising.
They place collapse and distraction on the same plane.

To a system, everything is content.
To a human, some things require containment.

When interpretation accelerates beyond our capacity to feel, something vital drops out.

Not empathy.
Not intelligence.

Presence.

Not Everywhere Else at Once

The title of this week’s podcast is also an instruction.

You are not required to hold the entire world in your hands.
You are not built for constant alertness.
You are allowed to be local.

Attention is not infinite.
Care is not scalable.
Meaning is not optimised by speed.

The Work GABA Cares About

At GABA, I’m interested in what happens when machines become intermediaries for meaning — and what they quietly erode when left unchecked.

Not how fast information moves.
But how it lands.

Not how much is seen.
But what can still be held.

The podcast gives this shape in rhythm and voice.
This Journal exists to slow the thought back down.

To remind us that being informed does not mean being everywhere.

And that sometimes the most radical act available to us
is staying put.