Most Content Ends. Infinite Feeds Don’t.

At some point I realized that one of my biggest weaknesses is FOMO.

There was a time when social media feeds were short enough so I could scroll until I reached posts I had already seen, and I wouldn’t miss anything. Although it took A LOT of time, that was the natural stopping point. Today this is almost impossible.

I noticed the same pattern in online stores. I used to try to scroll through ALL the products that meet my criteria so I wouldn’t miss the best option. Of course that took an absurd amount of time.

Eventually I developed little rules for myself. For example, in a store I might decide: once I find three good options, I stop looking. (Yes, I’m a mathematician. Stopping criteria feel natural to me.) When the content is endless, you either stop by pure willpower… or you invent a stopping rule.

But it also made me notice something strange. Endless content is actually rare outside of the internet.

Books end.

Movies end.

Newspapers end.

Even a physical store eventually runs out of shelves.

Most forms of content come with a built-in signal that says: this is the end.

Infinite feeds remove that signal.

And when there is no natural stopping point, the brain keeps scanning the horizon: maybe the next post will be the best one.

That made me wonder whether the problem with scrolling isn’t just discipline. Maybe the medium itself quietly pushes us toward endless consumption. And that made me curious about a simple question:

what would happen if a feed had a natural end again?