5The God Unfed

The point is to name what has been eating your days and stop feeding it on a stated and dated day, and to arrange the support to survive the withdrawal — because the people who stop feeding a god still need to eat.

This practice is for gods made of attention, not for substances. Alcohol and benzodiazepines are the ones that kill people on the way out, and a dated stop for either belongs with somebody who can prescribe. That is a different practice and it is not in this book.

Bring numbers rather than adjectives, and a calendar you actually use.

iName it. A platform, a metric, a schedule, a feed, a person's approval. The fiscal quarter, the performance year, the school term, the billable month — any counted period somebody else set is a god made of attention like any other, and it can be named like any other. Write the name. Do not write "social media" if the god is more specific — write "the impression count," "the response time," "his mood when I walk in," "the thing I check before I get up."

iiDefine it plainly. A pattern of attention that is outside any one person, can outlive them, and runs on being fed. It is not your weakness and it is not your boss. It is a shape that predates you, will outlast you unless it is starved, and eats attention.

iiiMeasure it. Answer with numbers, not adjectives. Hours a day. The first thing in the morning. The last thing at night. How many times a day you turn toward it. Total it. Write the total at the top of the page. That number is the offering.

ivStop feeding it, dated. Not "I will cut down." Say: "From the fourteenth I do not open it before noon and not after nine." What, when, how long. Write the date. A god unfed on a stated day is a withdrawal; a god unfed "soon" is a negotiation you will lose.

vArrange the support. If you are the only one who posts, checks, replies, keeps the number up, stopping is not private — it is an event others must absorb. Tell one person and ask them to check on you on the date. Ask a colleague to hold the channel for two weeks. Tell the person whose approval you have been working for that you are going quiet, and why. Cover the thing you actually owe, so that leaving the god is not defaulting on a person. If the god is a number at work, tell whoever will notice the number move before it moves.

Then decide what occupies the first hour you would have given it, and make it something with a body — a walk, a kitchen, another person, a job with an end on it. The hour arrives on the date whether or not you have decided, and an undecided hour goes back to the god.

viCheck back. Pick the date now. At it, measure two things: the hours the god took this week, and whether the support held. Not how you feel. Whether the offering dropped and the floor held.

When the first week is loud, that is not a verdict on the decision; it is the shape of a habit losing its hours. Do not mistake stopping for dying.

viiThe floor. Most of these gods are not starved by one person.

Find out who else is feeding it. Ask two people what it costs them — the hour, the sleep, the thing they stopped doing. Do not lead with your own answer.

If more than one of you wants to stop, do the four things The Web asks before any refusal: the names, what each person risks specifically, who is covered and by what, and the one sentence someone on the other side could say yes or no to.

Then pick the date together and stop together. A god unfed by one hand finds another hand by Thursday.

Afterwards, ask the same two people what changed and whether the cover held. Write their answers, not your reading of them.

Then spend one of the hours you took back on something nobody can count.