What You Consume When Nobody’s Looking
Your curated feed is a costume. Your midnight rabbit holes are the truth.
I spent three hours yesterday watching a man I’ve never met explain why another man I’ve never met had systematically destroyed his own career through a series of increasingly unhinged Instagram stories about protein powder.
Three hours.
The fitness influencer in question had 2.3 million followers before the meltdown. He had a supplement line. He had a podcast. He had one of those haircuts that costs $400 and looks like it costs $12 on purpose.
Now he has a cautionary tale and a deleted Instagram.
I watched the whole saga. Every screenshot. Every dramatic pause. Every “but wait, it gets worse” that somehow kept getting worse. By the end, there was a cryptocurrency subplot, a lawsuit, and a 47-slide PowerPoint presentation with the unhinged energy of a man whose publicist had stopped returning his calls.
Not writing. Not reading the “how-to-write-better” books stacked on my desk like tiny headstones for ambition. Not “training my taste” like every creator-advice goblin insists I should.
Just... watching a man’s protein empire collapse in real time.
And I couldn’t look away. Nobody could, apparently. The video had four million views. We’re all sick. We’re all going to hell together.
Here’s what nobody admits when they’re preaching about curating your information diet and becoming what you consume: We all have two feeds. And one of them is a goddamn liar.
The Performed Feed vs. The Shadow Feed
You know the Performed Feed. You built it yourself.
It’s the newsletters you restack so people see you restacked them. The books you mention at dinner parties. The “craft resources” you reference because referencing them signals you’re the kind of person who consumes those resources.
The Performed Feed is a costume. A very nice costume. Tailored, impressive, professionally appropriate. It signals taste and sophistication and all the things your industry says you should signal.
Then there’s the Shadow Feed.
Mine is YouTube rabbit holes past midnight. Maybe yours is Reddit threads you’d never admit to reading. Fan fiction. Romance novels with covers you hide on your Kindle. True crime podcasts that are essentially gossip with production value. Tabloid articles about celebrities you pretend not to recognize. The 4,000-word forum post dissecting drama in a community you don’t even belong to.
We all have a Shadow Feed. The content we consume when we’re exhausted, checked out, half-asleep. The stuff we’d rather not discuss at networking events.
Nobody sees the Shadow Feed. Nobody judges.
Which is exactly why it’s the only one telling you the truth.
The Performed Feed tells you what you think you should like. What fits the identity you’re constructing. What makes you look like someone worth taking seriously.
The Shadow Feed tells you what actually works on you when you’re not performing for anyone.
The first is convergent by design. Everyone in your industry reads the same newsletters, follows the same thought leaders, consumes the same “essential” content. That’s the point. Shared references create shared identity. You’re fitting in.
The second is divergent by accident. Your specific rabbit holes. Your particular flavor of can’t-look-away. The exact combination of topic and pacing and voice that hijacks YOUR attention when you have every reason to close the tab.
One feed tells you how to fit in. The other tells you how you’re wired.
Guess which one is more useful for building work that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s slop.
The Mechanisms Are Hiding in the Garbage
Whatever your Shadow Feed looks like—video essays, thriller novels, gossip columns, subreddit drama, podcast feuds—something in there works. Obviously. You’re a reasonably busy person with actual responsibilities, and you keep going back.
The content might be objectively pointless. But the craft is often surgical.
My protein powder documentary had no business holding anyone’s attention for three hours. But the creator understood something:
Pacing. New information every 60-90 seconds. Just when I thought I understood the situation—another layer. Another screenshot. Another revelation that recontextualized everything I thought I knew.
Stakes escalation. Started as a minor disagreement between fitness bros. By the end: lawyers, financial ruin, blockchain fraud. The temperature rose so gradually I didn’t notice I was boiling until I was cooked.
Specificity. Names. Dates. Dollar amounts. The exact wording of deleted tweets. Details make fiction feel true and truth feel like a thriller.
This applies to everything in your Shadow Feed.
That romance novel with the shirtless duke on the cover—the one you read in a single feral sitting and immediately deleted from your Kindle history? The author understood something about tension and release that would make a screenwriter weep. The true crime podcast you’ve recommended to exactly zero people but have listened to religiously for three years? Those producers have turned the pre-ad-break cliffhanger into a form of psychological warfare. The Reddit post where someone spent 8,000 words and four updates exposing their sister-in-law’s pyramid scheme at Thanksgiving, complete with a diagram of the family seating chart? Absolute psychopath. Also: flawless narrative structure. No notes.
The creator probably didn’t consciously architect any of this. They just understood, intuitively, how to hold attention when attention doesn’t want to be held.
That’s craft. Hiding in content you’re embarrassed to admit you consume.
Your Critical Filter Is the Problem
When you consume your Performed Feed, you’re analyzing. Evaluating. Deciding whether this content matches the taste you’re developing. Judging if it’s worthy of your attention.
Your critical filter is ON.
When you consume your Shadow Feed, you’re just... following. Absorbing. Going wherever the content leads without deciding if you should be there.
Your critical filter is OFF.
This is exactly why Shadow Feed consumption matters for understanding craft.
When your filter is on, you’re asking: “Is this what I should like?”
When your filter is off, you’re getting pure signal: “This is what actually grabs me.”
The content that works on you when you’re exhausted—when you have zero motivation to engage, when you’d rather be doing literally anything else—that content has cracked something. It solved the problem of holding attention when attention wants to leave.
Whatever mechanism it used, you can steal it.
The Exercise (For Tonight or Tomorrow)
You’re going to consume some guilty pleasure content over the next couple days. We both know it.
The rabbit holes. The reads you’d never recommend publicly. The listens that don’t fit your personal brand. Whatever your particular flavor of “I would never admit to consuming this” happens to be.
Here’s what I want you to do differently:
When you notice you’re locked in—don’t close the tab in shame. Don’t deliver the internal lecture about being a more serious person.
Just pause and ask: Why is this working on me right now?
Document the mechanism. Not the content.
Write down three observations. That’s it. Three notes about why this thing grabbed you.
What’s the pacing doing?
How are stakes or tension building?
What specific details make it feel real or important?
You’re not doing this to feel better about your consumption habits. (That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and is currently being covered by a true crime podcast you’ll binge through next week.)
You’re doing it because the craft that grabs you when your defenses are completely down… that’s the craft that actually works.
The Divergence Connection
Your Performed Feed is convergent by design. Everyone in your industry reads the same newsletters. Follows the same thought leaders. Consumes the same “essential” content.
You’re converging on shared taste. That’s literally the point.
Your Shadow Feed is divergent by accident.
The specific rabbit holes you fall into. The particular combination of format and pacing and voice that grabs YOUR attention when nobody’s watching. That’s not shared with everyone else in your industry.
That’s data about how you’re actually wired.
When you understand what works on you specifically—not what you think should work, but what actually does—you’re collecting information about your own patterns. The hooks that get past YOUR defenses might be exactly what gets past your readers’ defenses. The pacing that feels natural to you might be the pacing that makes your work distinctive. The guilty pleasures you can’t resist might share DNA with the content you were meant to create.
Most people throw away that data because they’re embarrassed by what it reveals.
Don’t throw it away. Document it.
I’ll be honest. I’m going to consume some garbage over the holidays.
Commentary videos about people I don’t care about. Rabbit holes that lead absolutely nowhere productive. Content that will not make me smarter, wiser, or more employable.
But this time, I’m taking notes.
Not to feel better about my consumption habits. (Still indefensible.) But because the mechanisms that work on me when my defenses are completely down—those are the mechanisms worth understanding.
The Performed Feed is where I signal taste. The Shadow Feed is where I learn how attention actually works.
Both are useful. But only one is honest.
The content you consume when nobody’s watching knows something your curated feed never will. Stop being ashamed of it. Start documenting it.
What’s in your Shadow Feed—the content you’d never admit to consuming? And have you ever noticed what mechanisms make it impossible to stop? Drop it in the comments. Judgment-free zone. Just craft analysis among friends who contain multitudes.
Crafted with love (and AI),
Nick “Shadow Feed Sommelier” Quick
PS…I’m supposed to tell you I post Sundays and Wednesdays. That was the plan. The plan has been abandoned. Right now I’m posting whenever something worth saying claws its way out of my head, which lately is every day. Subscribe before I find my chill again.
Brilliant insight. The Performed Feed is about who we want to be, but the Shadow Feed is about how we are actually wired. As creators, if we can’t hold attention in the ‘shadows,’ we’ll never hold it in the light. Time to start documenting my rabbit holes🙏
That darn YouTube rabbithole. The "insights hides in garbage" is gold, my best written pieces all came from a doom scroll session... I wonder why 😂