My thumb is hovering over the glass, a millisecond away from the next vertical flick that will reveal a video of a man in 2002 eating a giant sandwich or a tutorial on how to fix a leaky faucet I don’t actually own. The countdown timer for the next episode on the TV is already at 2 seconds, and the remote is buried somewhere under a pile of laundry exactly 2 feet from my outstretched hand. I know I should move. I know the rational part of my brain has already checked out for the night, but the environment is designed to keep me paralyzed. The ‘next’ button isn’t a choice anymore; it’s an inevitability. It is the digital equivalent of a slide that has no bottom, and I am currently traveling at a speed that makes my eyes burn.

We often talk about the loss of time as a personal failing. We call it a lack of discipline, a weakness of the will, or a character flaw that makes us susceptible to the siren call of the glowing rectangle. But that’s a lie we tell ourselves to maintain a sense of agency that has been systematically stripped away. I realized this while googling a guy I just met at a coffee shop-I spent 32 minutes looking through his old high school track results before I even realized I didn’t actually care about his 400-meter dash time. The issue isn’t my willpower; it’s the destruction of the stopping cue. In the analog world, things ended. Books had back covers. Magazines ran out of pages. TV shows had credits that rolled into a black screen, followed by the terrifying static of a channel that had gone off the air for the night. There was a physical limit to the consumption, a natural boundary that allowed us to look up, blink, and realize we were tired.

The Pursuit of Completion

Maya K.-H., an industrial color matcher I spoke with recently, lives her entire professional life in pursuit of the ‘end.’ In her lab, she works with 112 different pigments to find the exact resonance of a specific shade of teal for a line of medical equipment. For Maya, the work is binary: either the color matches the standard, or it doesn’t. When the spectrophotometer gives her the green light, the task is finished. She can close the lid on the sample, wash her hands, and walk away. It is a satisfying, tactile conclusion. Yet, she told me that when she gets home, she frequently loses 182 minutes to a bottomless feed of interior design photos, unable to find that same sense of completion. She is looking for a ‘match’ in a digital space where the standards are constantly shifting and the content never stops flowing. She is a professional at identifying when something is ‘right,’ but her phone doesn’t care about right; it only cares about ‘next.’

This lack of boundaries is not an accident of design; it is the core feature. Think about the famous ‘bottomless soup bowl’ experiment conducted years ago. Participants were given bowls of soup that were secretly refilled by tubes under the table as they ate. Those with the bottomless bowls ate 72 percent more soup than those with normal bowls, yet they didn’t feel any fuller. They didn’t even realize they had eaten more. They relied on the visual cue of the bottom of the bowl to tell them when to stop, rather than their own internal signals of satiety. Our digital feeds are the soup bowls of the 21st century. We keep scrolling because the visual cue for ‘finished’ has been deleted from the code. We are waiting for a bottom that doesn’t exist, and in the absence of that bottom, our brains just assume we should keep eating. It’s a physiological trap that exploits our evolutionary need to finish what we start, except the developers have ensured we can never actually start finishing.

I’ve made the mistake of thinking I could just ‘be better.’ I’ve set timers, I’ve put my phone in other rooms, and I’ve even tried those grayscale modes that are supposed to make the screen less appealing. But these are individual solutions to an environmental problem. It’s like trying to stay dry while standing under a waterfall by holding a single sticktail umbrella. The sheer volume of the ‘next’ is overwhelming. I find myself clicking on links I don’t want to read, watching videos I find offensive, and digging into the digital history of strangers just because the path is paved with zero friction. We have entered an era where leisure has been decoupled from the ritual of the ending. Leisure used to be a discrete block of time-a 2-hour movie, a 42-minute album, a 12-chapter book. Now, leisure is a slurry that fills every crack in our lives, from the 2 minutes we spend waiting for the microwave to the 2 hours we spend lying in bed before sleep.

Memory and the Missing End

There is something deeply unsettling about the way this erosion affects our memory. When an activity has a clear beginning, middle, and end, our brains can package it into a coherent narrative. We remember the book we read because it had a physical weight and a final page. But what do we remember from a 322-minute scroll? It’s a blur of disconnected images, a fever dream of outrage and aesthetics that leaves no lasting impression other than a vague sense of exhaustion. We are consuming more information than ever before, but we are experiencing less of it. We are like tourists being driven through a museum at 62 miles per hour; we see everything, but we witness nothing. Maya K.-H. mentioned that she can remember the exact pigment ratio for a job she did 12 years ago, but she couldn’t tell me a single thing she saw on her phone last night. The lack of a stopping cue prevents the brain from performing the necessary housekeeping of memory consolidation.

In this landscape of infinite consumption, the most radical act is the creation of a limit. Some platforms are beginning to recognize that this bottomless model is unsustainable for human mental health, or at least, they are pretending to for the sake of public relations. However, the most genuine examples of healthy digital environments are those that respect the user enough to provide a finish line. This is where the philosophy of responsible leisure comes into play. It is the idea that an activity is more valuable when it is contained. For example, when engaging in online entertainment or gaming, the experience is significantly improved when there are built-in breaks or session limits that force the user to acknowledge the passing of time. A platform like Tangkasnet aligns with this idea of structured play, where the emphasis isn’t just on the thrill of the game, but on the importance of maintaining a healthy boundary between the digital world and one’s actual life. By encouraging responsible limits, such environments provide the stopping cues that the modern internet has tried so hard to erase.

Reclaiming the Ending

I find it ironic that I am writing this on a device that is currently buzzing with 22 different notifications, each one an invitation to jump into another endless loop. I’ve noticed that when I don’t have a stopping cue, I become a worse version of myself. I become more cynical, more distracted, and less capable of deep thought. I once spent 52 minutes reading a Wikipedia entry about different types of industrial fasteners because I saw a picture of a screw that looked slightly like a face. I didn’t need to know about the mechanical properties of a Grade 8 bolt, but the ‘See Also’ section at the bottom of the page was a siren song I couldn’t ignore. I find that I am often angry at the developers who designed these systems, but I am also angry at myself for being so easily manipulated. It’s a strange contradiction-to be both the victim and the accomplice in the theft of your own time.

Maya K.-H. told me that she has started bringing her spectrophotometer home, not to use it, but to keep it on her nightstand as a physical reminder of what a ‘match’ looks like. It’s her totem. It represents the reality that things *can* be finished. She says it helps her put the phone down when the clock hits 10:02 PM. I don’t have a spectrophotometer, but I’ve started trying to find my own stopping cues. Sometimes it’s as simple as closing every tab on my browser before I get up to get a glass of water. Sometimes it’s deciding that I will only read 2 articles before I turn off the computer. These are small, fragile dams against a massive tide, but they are necessary. We have to build our own endings because the world we live in is no longer interested in providing them for us.

The tragedy of the infinite scroll isn’t just that it wastes our time; it’s that it robs us of the feeling of completion. There is a deep, primal satisfaction in finishing something. It’s the feeling of closing a heavy door, of putting the last piece in a puzzle, or of seeing the lights come up in a theater. Without that feeling, life becomes a series of ‘nexts’ that never lead to a ‘finally.’ We are perpetually in the middle of something, caught in a digital purgatory where the only way out is a sudden, jarring interruption-a dead battery, a crying child, or the sun coming up through the blinds. We deserve better than to have our rituals dictated by an algorithm that doesn’t know how to say goodbye. We need to reclaim the ending, to find the bottom of the bowl, and to remember that the most important part of any ritual is the moment when it finally stops.