If I check my screen time, the app sitting smugly at the top is NetNewsWire. Not Facebook. Not TikTok. Not some game designed to squeeze every last drop of dopamine out of my brain. An RSS reader. Welcome to being Gen X, where reading headlines from hundreds of websites somehow counts as entertainment.

The funny thing is, RSS feels like the internet before it turned into one giant screaming match. No algorithms deciding what I should care about. No influencer trying to convince me that I need a $47 water bottle to become spiritually hydrated. Just the sites I actually chose to follow, showing me new posts in chronological order like some kind of civilized society. Imagine that.

I can burn through articles about Linux, retro tech, local news, science, geocaching, weather, and whatever random rabbit hole catches my attention that day. Twenty minutes somehow becomes an hour because every headline leads to three more. It’s basically channel surfing for people who still remember when websites had personality instead of endless pop-ups begging you to subscribe before you’ve even read the first sentence.

Do I feel bad about it? Not even a little. There are far worse ways to waste screen time than actually learning something. If my biggest digital addiction is reading news through an old-school RSS reader instead of doomscrolling whatever social media is melting people’s brains this week, I’ll happily take that trade. Some habits are worth keeping, even if they make me look like I never left 2004.