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# Field notes from a month without recommendations
- URL: https://connect.ghost.preview.themeanax.com/month-without-recommendations/
- Published: 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T12:25:48.000Z
- Description: I turned off every algorithmic feed for thirty-one days and wrote down what I actually chose. The results were duller and far better than expected.
- Author: Adaeze Okonkwo
- Tags: Field notes, #Import 2026-11-13 08:50

For thirty-one days I turned off every algorithmic feed I could find and wrote down what I actually chose to read, watch and listen to. I expected to feel liberated. Mostly I felt bored, and the boredom turned out to be the finding.

## The first week is bad

Without a queue, there is a gap between finishing something and starting the next thing, and that gap is where the recommendation used to live. I had not realised how completely I had outsourced the question of what next until I had to answer it eleven times a day.

I filled it badly at first — rereading things, refreshing pages with nothing new on them, abandoning three books in four days. The habit of being handed something was stronger than any preference I had.

> I was not choosing worse than the algorithm. I was discovering that I had stopped choosing at all, which is a different problem.

## What changed by week three

Things got slower and noticeably better. Not better in quality — the recommendations had been fine — but better in fit, because I was selecting against what I actually wanted rather than against what was adjacent to my last choice.

- I finished more and started less. Without a queue there is no next thing making the current one feel optional.
- My choices got older. Almost nothing I picked unprompted was published in the last two years.
- The range narrowed sharply, which is the honest cost: left alone, I read a smaller set of things than the feed gave me.

## What I kept

Not all of it. I turned two feeds back on, because the narrowing is real and I do not trust my unassisted taste to find anything genuinely unfamiliar. What I kept was the gap: I no longer let anything autoplay, and the queue has to be built by hand.

Thirty-one days was long enough to learn that the feed was not making my choices worse. It was making them for me, and those are easy to confuse until you have spent a month on the other side.