An Apology to the Websites I Never Finished Reading
A formal statement issued by the Department of Digital Abandonment
Esteemed websites:
We regret to inform you that you have been left unread.
We, the undersigned, acting on behalf of the modern attention span and in consultation with three half-charged devices, wish to express our sincere apologies for our failure to complete your thoughtful, painstakingly crafted articles.
This was not your fault.
You were informative. You were well-researched. Some of you even had footnotes. But circumstances beyond your control—and quite frankly, beyond ours—intervened.
Exhibit A: The Longform Article on the Mongol Empire
Abandoned at: Paragraph 4
Reason: Had to Google whether Mongol and Mongolian were interchangeable, then somehow ended up reading about fermented horse milk and forgot to return.
You deserved better.
Exhibit B: That Personal Essay That Was Definitely Going Somewhere
Abandoned at: Mid-scroll
Reason: Opened another tab to check the weather for a trip that does not exist. Also checked three email inboxes. Essay now floating alone in a browser graveyard somewhere between tab 37 and entropy.
Exhibit C: A Data-Driven Piece on Why Nobody Finishes Articles Anymore
Abandoned at: Ironically, immediately after the first pull quote.
Reason: Brain chemistry. No further explanation available.
On the Matter of Bookmarks
We acknowledge that “I’ll come back to this later” is, in 97% of cases, a euphemism for “I will never look at this again, but I’d like to feel virtuous while not doing so.”
We currently have 214 bookmarked tabs. None have been reopened in good faith since April of last year. Some date back to a time when “dark mode” was still a novelty.
Remedial Measures (Under Review)
We are currently exploring the following initiatives to prevent further incidents:
Reading one full article per week, in a chair, without checking notifications¹
Printing long articles out like it’s 2003
Subscribing via RSS and pretending that helps
Staring at a wall for five minutes to rebuild pre-2010 brain patterns
¹ This initiative was paused due to an unskippable video ad.
Final Thoughts
To all the websites we left mid-scroll, mid-sentence, mid-thought: we see you. Or at least we saw you, for a moment, before the dopamine hit of a notification pulled us elsewhere.
You mattered. And in some quiet, guilty corner of our soul—or our browser history—you still do.
Please accept this apology as a small token of remorse.
We’ll finish you someday. Probably. Maybe. Assuming nothing shiny happens.
Sincerely,
The Committee for Well-Intentioned Digital Abandonment
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. CC BY 4.0
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