The American diet is the same whether the plate holds food or media. It is passive feasting: endless, frictionless consumption that asks nothing of you. The portion never runs out. The feed never ends. You do not reach for the next bite; the next bite is placed in your mouth before you finish the last one. You are not eating. You are being fed.

Rumi wrote about fasting and feasting as spiritual acts, chosen ones. Fasting hollows you out so you can be filled with something better; the emptiness is the point. But passive feasting removes the emptiness entirely. There is no hunger before the meal and no space after it. Consumption with the appetite surgically removed, which is to say, consumption that has stopped meaning anything.

There is a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

Rumi

Here is the part worth being angry about. The people who built these systems did not forget how to be hungry by accident. The capitalists forgot on purpose. They engineered away their own appetite for anything but growth, and then they built machines to make the rest of us forget too. A person who is never hungry never asks whether the meal is any good. That is not a bug in the feed. That is the business model.

The antidote is not abstinence. It is a little deliberate hunger. Choose the emptiness. Let attention go unfilled for a stretch so that when you do consume something, you actually taste it. Active engagement (the show you chose, the book you sought out, the meal you were hungry for) is a different substance from what the feed pours down your throat, even when the calories look the same. Stay hungry on purpose. It is the only way to know whether any of it was worth eating.