Now, the screen is bigger, and much flatter.

Instead of a portal, it feels like standing before a conveyor belt that never stops going. Thumbnails glitter and scroll endlessly, offering the illusion of infinite possibilities and ideas. Choose anything, they whisper. Choose everything.

But choice isn’t freedom when it starts to isolate you. When every damned selection becomes a risk, a fear of missing out, or an anxious bet against your own future happiness. Instead of falling into these stories, you float above them, weighing, comparing, and second-guessing.

This is not liberation. It’s labour. Invisible, endless labour.

Freedom, we were told, would be the power to consume anything at any moment. What they didn’t tell us was that freedom could hollow itself into aching paralysis. That too many doors, endlessly available, would mean you never feel at home inside any of them.

We traded away the ritual of arrival for the anxiety of endless curation. And with it, we lost the old electric hum that once told us, “This is your time. You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.”

Not just watching, but crossing over

There was a time when television brought us together. Before every pocket glowed with its own private, curated feed, there was shared time. Shared narrative. A lattice of simple rituals and routines that held us inside the same flow.

We had Saturday morning cartoons, Friday night family blocks, Sunday night dramas, and Toonami after school.

These weren’t just shows, they felt like public squares. They were the campfires that we gathered around, a fragile but powerful commons where viewing was communal, not privatised into a thousand isolated playlists.

For so many, especially for kids growing up isolated by geography, race, class, and queerness, these rituals weren’t luxuries. They were lifelines, and a way to feel part of the world without having to earn it, optimise it, or buy it back in another form.

They made time feel shared, and breathable. They turned loneliness into something bearable, even beautiful. The knowledge that somewhere out there, other kids were holding their breath through the same cliffhangers, laughing at the same stupid commercials, and whispering the same theories to their friends.

Capitalism’s long project, its slow, patient goal, was always to fragment that. To break the commons. To turn collective experience into a thousand isolated "user journeys." To turn routine into infinite, lonely consumption.

They didn’t just sell us endless options, they stole our rhythm. They stole our ability to feel time together.

We used to be around each other.

The human mind was built for routine. It’s built for repetition that showed us who we were without asking us to reinvent ourselves every hour.

Endless choice, marketed to us as ultimate empowerment, floods the nervous system with friction. Every small decision becomes giant. Every act of selection demands mental labour, until even leisure collapses under its own weight.

Studies show that an abundance of choice increases anxiety, decreases satisfaction, and creates profound emotional exhaustion. Basically, the more paths you’re offered, the less any of them feel real. And the more you optimise your free time, the more it begins to resemble work.

We weren’t designed to live and scroll inside these infinite menus. We were designed to move through rhythms. To belong to times and seasons and events that anchored us inside something larger than ourselves.

Streaming platforms, with their endless scrolls and auto-plays, flattened time into a blur. They promised a feast. But what they delivered was famine — a famine of meaning, a famine of belonging, a famine of presence.

Television and TV blocks like Toonami didn't ask us to optimise. It asked us to trust the rhythm.
Trust the story, and to trust that showing up would be enough.

And it always was.

When everything is possible, nothing feels real.

I think about it quite a lot, that specific, electric hum of my old CRT Television before it came on. The way the room seemed to lean forward alongside us, breathing slower, as if it, too, was waiting. The carpet under my legs, rough against my bare skin, and the heavy, clunky remote abandoned on the arm of the couch because there was no need for it anymore.

That world would offer itself to you, whole and certain, if you were just willing to be there for it.

It didn't matter what had happened during the day, if school was brutal, if your friends weren’t speaking to you, if the whole world outside felt like it hated you, because at 4:00 PM, the rules changed. You weren’t lost. You were right where you needed to be.

That was the power of the routine, it didn’t demand perfection. It didn’t ask you to be the smartest, or the fastest, or the happiest. It simply asked for your attention. Your willingness to step through the gate.

And in return, it gave you belonging. It made time itself feel merciful, like the day was holding out its hand to you, saying, “You made it!”

That is what we lost. Not just shows. Not just those bumpers and intros and half-remembered toy commercials. We lost the map in time that told us who we were, and when we had arrived.

Choice without rhythm becomes a weight.

The world has changed a lot still then, but somewhere underneath the surface noise, the rivers still run.

There’s things like passive streams, and these spaces offer glimpses of the old world stitched into the new. NSV Streams showing forgotten shows, Pluto TV offering rigid schedules where you can only watch what's playing, YouTube channels recreating TV nights from the 80s, 90s and 2000s without apology.

They are not polished experiences. They are not hyper-optimised. They don't promise you perfect alignment with your mood or your demographic profile.

They offer something rarer, the chance to surrender. To slip into a rhythm you didn’t curate, and to accept a moment you didn’t spend 30 minutes scrolling Netflix and review sites for.

When you watch a passive stream, you're no longer the CEO of your own isolated empire of leisure. You're a body in a river again. A mind joining a current older and kinder than the market-driven logic that surrounds us.

And in these forgotten corners of the internet, the sacred pulse of belonging still hums. Not as nostalgia, but as comfort.

It's still there, if you just look.

If you really want to step back into that current, and to remember how it felt to show up for something instead of scroll for it, if you know where to look:

Channel99: An old lovingly curated online TV network that shows their own retro anime blocks and specials, stitched together like it’s still 2000. No menu. No pause. Just show up and dive in. The one I frequent has been running non-stop since 2003.

YouTube TV Rerun Channels: Small channels that recreate Saturday morning cartoons, Toonami nights, or 90s/2000s TV blocks in real-time streams. Complete with commercials, old promos, and sometimes even the original station IDs.

That’s So Disney: A stream that shows old disney era shows, streaming at fixed times whether you’re ready or not~

Toonami Aftermath: A stream that shows old Toonami, Cartoon Nework and Adult swim.

These places aren’t perfect solutions, but that’s why they matter. Because they aren’t trying to sell you the illusion of control, they’re offering something rarer. The chance to enjoy media communally.
 

Tune in, my friends.

Sometimes, wonder how much loneliness today isn’t just about social media or urban isolation or the collapse of community. I wonder if it’s the loneliness of not having fixed stars anymore, of not having anchors dropped into the flow of time.

Routines, even small, ultimately meaningless secular ones like after-school cartoon blocks, gave life a shape that wasn't constant images on a screen to choose from. It gave it peaks and valleys, rhythms of feast and pause, rush and stillness.

Now everything bleeds into everything else.

Work into home -> Home into scrolling -> Scrolling into sleeplessness.

Without proper routine, life doesn’t just speed up. It flattens out. It loses contrast, and without contrast, memory itself begins to rot. We weren't meant to live in an endless feed. We were meant to live with meaning and impermanence. Not an infinite scroll, but a turning, breathing world of beginnings and endings and sacred hours.

And even now, underneath the noise, you can still hear that need.

A heartbeat asking: “Where are the places I can simply... belong?”

Without proper routine, life just crawls to a halt.

Real freedom has never been about endless possibility. It has always been about knowing where you are, knowing when you have arrived, and knowing when it is time to stop reaching and simply... be.

Capitalism, the same machine that privatised the commons and devoured our rituals, taught us that choice was the same thing as freedom. That if we had enough shows, products, and platforms, maybe we could build meaning from scratch every day.

But meaning isn’t built from excess. It’s built from structure, patterns, from the hope that some things will return if you let them. From the courage to believe that you don’t need to optimise your joy. You only need to be present for it.

Routines are refusals: a refusal to reinvent the wheel every day. To commodify every minute of attention. To let the rhythm of life be dictated solely by profit-driven fragmentation.

The routine of showing up... even for something as simple as an after-school anime block, was a quiet unconscious fight against meaninglessness. And it still can be.

The best thing sometimes is simply... staying still.

Sometimes, when the night stretches out too thin and the glow of endless screens starts to ache behind my eyes, I close them. And I can still find it... That old hum from a long time ago. The flicker of the old television. The dusty golden light slanting across the floor. The faint buzz of voices down the hallway. The plate growing cold in my lap because what mattered was the screen, the countdown, the world opening its arms.

It wasn’t perfect, nor was it grand. But it was real, and it was ours.

We live now in a world obsessed with skipping ahead, but the things that mattered most always lived in the waiting. That countdown never ended. It still ticks, waiting for anyone willing to remember how to listen.

All we have to do is stop scrolling, stop curating, stop grasping. And just let it go... like we used to.

You’re still right on time.

It’s just waiting for you.