I currently have forty-three tabs open on my laptop, and that is a conservative, disciplined estimate. It doesn’t include the forty-six tabs quietly nesting in my phone browser—where the tab counter has given up on numerical values entirely and now simply displays a tiny, non-judgemental smiley face to signify that I have crossed a threshold of digital hoarding. It doesn’t include the separate, hidden browser window on my computer containing an assortment of articles I fully intend to read when I become a radically different, more intellectual version of myself. It doesn’t account for the seven half-drafted emails currently lingering in my inbox like social debts I lack the capital to pay. If you were to peer into the digital architecture of my devices right now, you would see a frantic, crowded skyline of microscopic icons, each one representing a tiny, unfinished fragment of a thought I abandoned midway through an afternoon.
The icons on my laptop screen have shrunk so much that I can no longer read the titles. I just have to guess the contents based on a pixelated favicon. Is that the logo for my online banking, or is it the Wikipedia page for the history of the fork? There is only one way to find out, and frankly, I am not emotionally prepared to face either of them right now.
Instead, I will simply open another.
We talk a lot about digital hygiene, as if the solution to an overcrowded browser is simply a matter of clicking the little grey cross. But the reason my laptop is constantly on the verge of a thermal meltdown isn’t a lack of technical literacy. It is because my digital tabs are an exact, terrifying reflection of the tabs currently left open in my own brain.
At any given moment, my cognitive background processes are running an ungodly amount of administrative and existential data. There is a tab dedicated to wondering whether the strange noise the boiler made this morning is a sign of impending doom, and another quietly calculating how many days are left before I have to navigate the NHS automated phone menu again. There is a tab running a continuous loop of a minor conversational misstep from 2014, and a tiny, flickering tab wondering if I actually turned off the hair straighteners, despite the fact that I haven’t used them since Tuesday.
It is a miracle my central processing unit hasn’t completely shut down.
The modern world is aggressively designed to keep these tabs multiplying. We are encouraged to optimise every passing second, which means we are never just doing one thing. We are reading an essay while listening to an ambient playlist while waiting for a delivery while trying to remember if we took our vitamin B12 tablet. We treat our minds like a high-powered corporate server capable of handling infinite simultaneous requests, when in reality, my brain is much closer to a slightly damp toaster that occasionally sparks if you put a crumpet in it wrong.
The ultimate peak of this madness occurred last night when I found myself looking up the optimal temperature for sleeping, whilst simultaneously watching a video about a man who restores rusty nineteenth-century cameras, whilst waiting for a webpage to load so I could pay my council tax.
I sat there in the dark, the blue light reflecting off my face, and realised I had reached a state of pure, unadulterated cognitive gridlock. I was entirely paralysed by the sheer volume of things I was technically doing, none of which were actually being accomplished.
The temptation in these moments is always to seek a profound, life-altering breakthrough. We want to believe there is a grand philosophical shift—a digital detox, a sensory deprivation tank, a sudden moment of Zen—that will permanently clear our mental cache. We crave the cinematic montage where we close every tab with a dramatic flourish, take a deep breath of crisp mountain air, and finally achieve absolute clarity.
But that isn’t how the brain works, is it? You can’t just force-quit your own personality.
I eventually managed to close three tabs on my laptop last night. One was a recipe for a sourdough starter that I know deep in my soul I will never make, and the other two were clothing items I had left in a basket as a form of emotional window shopping. It wasn't a spiritual awakening. The fan on my laptop didn't stop whirring, and the low-level hum of modern existence didn't suddenly fall silent.
But as I shut the lid and watched the little white indicator light slowly pulse in the dark, I felt a tiny, microscopic relief. My brain was still running about eighty-nine programs too many, but for the next few hours, they’d have to run in sleep mode.
Except for the boiler noise. That tab is definitely staying open until morning.