Three nights, three forfeits, fifteen dollars gone.

Sarah covered city council and housing policy, which meant she lived adjacent to national politics without being on the politics beat. That adjacency made the 2024 election cycle worse, not better. She had opinions but no professional obligation to track every development, which meant the refreshing was entirely self-inflicted. By the third week of October she could account for roughly four hours a week she had simply lost to the news — NYT live blogs, Reuters push notifications, a Discord group of journalist friends passing links back and forth, and two podcasts she was listening to at double speed so she could start another one. The sleep logs on her phone told the same story: average bedtime had drifted from 10:45pm in September to 12:20am by the last week of October. She was not following the election more closely. She was following it more frantically, which is a different thing, and the difference mattered. She had written, two years earlier, a piece about how information overload degrades decision quality. She knew the theory. She was doing the thing anyway.

Tuesday, 11:34pm. The live-results map refreshed every 90 seconds on the Associated Press site. Sarah had been watching it since 8pm, when the first Eastern states closed. She told herself she would stop at 11pm. At 11pm there was a close call in a Senate race she was not professionally covering and had no stake in except the general ambient anxiety of the moment. She kept watching. At 11:34 she glanced at the Screen Time widget on her home screen. Fifty-seven minutes. She had crossed the limit by twelve minutes. The Lockin contract registered the forfeit automatically. Five dollars to the mental-health fund. She put the phone down, then picked it up again at 11:40 to check one more time whether the Senate race had been called. It had not. She went to bed at 12:15am. Wednesday, 1:08am. A recount thread had appeared on a political reporter's account — not a recount that affected any outcome she could name a reason to care about personally, but a thread that linked to three other threads, which linked to an archived filing from a county clerk, which linked to a county map she had never seen before. She was reading the county map at 1:08am when the Screen Time notification appeared: daily limit reached. She had been over by 24 minutes. Second forfeit in two days. She scrolled a little further. The county map did not resolve anything. She closed the app. She lay in the dark for twenty minutes before she fell asleep. Thursday, 10:52pm. She opened the news at 9pm knowing she had already forfeited twice. She told herself this made Thursday's behavior essentially free — she had already paid for a bad week, and one more night would not change the number meaningfully. At 10:52pm she noticed she had been reading for 53 minutes. Eight minutes over. A third forfeit. The logic she had used to justify Thursday — that it did not matter because the week was already compromised — was available to her on Friday as well, and Saturday, and any other night she chose to invoke it. She recognized this. She closed the app anyway, fourteen minutes later, at 11:06pm.

On Saturday, Sarah renewed the contract with a tighter configuration. The daily limit dropped from 45 minutes to 30. She added a 9pm hard-stop window — any news-app minutes logged after 9pm counted double against the daily total. The second week of election coverage ran from Saturday through the following Friday. She did not forfeit once. On some nights she came close. On Wednesday she hit 28 minutes before 9pm and put the phone in the drawer again, the same method that had worked in week one. The drawer still worked. The news did not resolve faster because she stopped checking it. The outstanding Senate races were called over the following ten days, on the news desks' schedule, not hers. She read about each of them in the morning, in under fifteen minutes, and the outcomes were the same ones that would have been there whether she had been watching at 1am or not. The $15 stayed forfeited. She did not think of it as wasted. She thought of it as the most legible record she had of what the habit had been costing her in a currency that was easier to measure than sleep.