Louis C.K. said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who admit they pee in the shower, and f*cking liars. I think there is another way to split people; there are people who close a tab when they’re done with it, and people who always have about fifteen tabs open. I am the latter. I don’t know why I don’t close them, often I’ll hand my laptop to a friend and hear the familiar, “Why the hell do you have so many tabs open dude?” It’s oddly compulsive, I had an ex-girlfriend who would close all of my tabs when she used my laptop and it drove me round the bend. It gets even more bizarre when I realize that I have all of those websites bookmarked to the top of my browser, essentially eliminating the need for keeping any of the tabs open. I literally have a Chrome extension, called TooManyTabs, that lets me save tabs for later so they don’t use up too much of my GPU. I literally found and downloaded an app to save tabs because the number of them was slowing my computer down. I could have just started closing tabs, now instead the app reads twenty-one saved tabs. I’m a tab hoarder, if the internet had it’s own version of TLC I’d be on it.

The problem with this is that every time my eyes wander there’s a tab calling to me. Like a little square friend peeking over a wall and quietly yelling my name. Right now I have three Youtube tabs and a Netflix one at the top of my bar. Why I would need three tabs for Youtube when I’ve already seen the videos in them is beyond me. They are a distraction waiting to pounce whenever I get writer’s block. It’s like I’m a chicken who just kind of likes hanging around near the edge of a forest full of wolves, just because I ate some nice worms there last month. Over the course of this term I’ve really seen a trend emerging; most of my distractions are self-inflicted or easily avoidable. Why don’t I just put my phone on silent when I start my homework? Why don’t I say, “No thanks, I’ll hang out with you guys later,” why don’t I just close the tab that is only open because I couldn’t remember the lyrics to Fluorescent Adolescent? Writing this has been mildly cathartic though, but I don’t know if I feel good because I acknowledged the problem, or just because writing is one more distraction.

It certainly seems the internet is the biggest distraction in history, and perhaps the internet facilitates these compulsions we have; it could even be a healthier alternative. Better to hoard tabs than something physical, right? It seems everyone does it in some fashion; people’s iPods are full of music that they never listen to. People save everything they’ve ever written, or taken a picture of, on their laptops, even though they know they’ll never need to read a Writing 121 essay they wrote freshman year. Although… the internet and the abundance of storage could also exacerbate people’s compulsions. Maybe, instead of my hoarding spreading to my tabs, will it spread to other parts of my life? As our lives become more and more digital, will we start running out of space online too? Will the line begin to blur? Someday there could be no distinction between a digital distraction and a physical one. I make an arbitrary distinction between reading a book as a distraction verses reading an article online. Does the medium of a distraction matter? Is deleting tabs, or never removing unread emails from your inbox, on par with saving every card you ever got, or keeping clothing in your closet that you literally never wear? It really depends on what you personally define as a distraction verses a nuisance or a quirky habit.