The verb is agree.

Not receive, not endure, not get flooded — William James, the American psychologist whose 1890 textbook was the first serious attempt to describe how a mind works, reached for a word people use for contracts. He is telling you that your life is a document you keep signing.

Run that against yesterday. Every notification you opened, every thread you scrolled to the bottom of, every meeting you sat through with nothing to add — under James's grammar, none of it happened to you. You agreed to each one. The fourteen minutes on a stranger's argument are in your experience now, and they stay. The hour you meant to give the work you care about is not there at all.

The objection arrives fast: nobody agrees to a group chat going off through dinner. But James is not talking about the buzz. He is talking about the second after it — the one where you could have turned the phone face down and instead read the whole thread to the end.

That is the real cost: not the time, which you can sometimes claw back, but the record, which you cannot.

The upside of a contract is that it needs two signatures and you hold one. What you decline to look at does not enter the mind, does not shape it, does not surface at two in the morning.

Declining is not willpower. It is a setting you choose once instead of relitigating every time something flashes.

So today: name the one feed, thread or group chat that took the most from you this week, and agree to nothing from it until evening. Not forever. One day, to find out what you have been signing.