The Unpicked Bramble: On the Fertile Chaos of the Overgrown RSS Garden
There is a particular quality to the light in late September. The sun slants, casting long, clarifying shadows that seem to ask for an accounting. It’s an instinct baked deep into the season: the harvest. The urge to gather, to preserve, to tidy the field after the summer’s wild growth. And for a certain kind of mind, this instinct turns naturally, almost anxiously, toward the digital plot we’ve been tending all year: the RSS feed.
My own feed reader, neglected through the lush and distracted months of summer, has become a thicket. It is no longer a curated garden but an untamed wilderness. The number of unread items, a figure I once monitored with monastic discipline, has bloomed into the thousands. The neat rows of topic-specific folders are now obscured by a tangle of headlines—political analyses I meant to digest, long-form essays on obscure topics I felt obligated to understand, and the ceaseless, chattering bloom of news alerts. Facing it feels like standing at the edge of an overgrown field, scythe in hand, overwhelmed by the sheer, fecund chaos.
The harvest-mind tells me this is a failure. It whispers that I have been inattentive, that my system has broken down, that I am falling behind. It tempts me with the nuclear option: the satisfying, decisive click of ‘Mark All as Read.’ A clean slate. A winter fallow. But this time, I hesitate. Is this mess truly a sign of negligence, or could it be something else? Perhaps this overgrowth is not a problem to be solved, but a state to be appreciated.
There is a certain wisdom in the bramble patch. While the cultivated rows of a vegetable garden yield their intended crops, the wild edge is where the most unexpected berries can be found. To ‘Mark All as Read’ is to declare that only the planned, the expected, the timely has value. It is to privilege the efficiency of the harvest over the serendipity of discovery. But the most enduring insights often come not from dutifully reading what we think we should, but from stumbling upon a forgotten thread, a curious connection between two seemingly unrelated articles that sat side-by-side for months in the digital undergrowth.
This autumnal standoff is not about catching up. It is about re-evaluating our relationship with the flow of information. The tidy feed is an illusion of control, a attempt to domesticate the inherently wild nature of thought and curiosity. The overgrown feed, by contrast, is a more honest map of a mind engaged with a world too vast to be neatly categorized. It is a system that has been living, breathing, and accumulating potential, even in my absence.
So, I will not wield the scythe. Instead, I will take a different seasonal approach. I will wander into the thicket without the pressure to clear it. I will scroll not to consume, but to forage. I will look for the bright, ripe ideas that still catch the light, and I will leave the rest to decompose into the humus of the archive. For now, the value lies not in the harvest, but in the fertile, unpicked potential of the garden itself, a testament to a summer of abundant, if unattended, curiosity.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: