AKRON, OH — Derek Paulson, 38, announced Sunday that he has watched every title flagged as “recommended for you” on his primary streaming platform and is now experiencing what clinicians are calling an interest-free interval he describes as “very quiet inside.”

Paulson, who began the project in October after his wife went to visit her sister for a long weekend, estimates he logged approximately 340 hours of content across 22 series, 14 films, and one documentary about competitive cheese rolling he cannot explain. He reports that somewhere around episode four of a Scandinavian crime drama he had no interest in starting, the algorithm stopped making suggestions and simply displayed a gray screen with the words “You’re all caught up.”

“I didn’t realize the algorithm was basically my whole inner life until it ran out of things to say to me.”

“I thought I was a person who liked things,” Paulson told reporters in his living room, the television off behind him for the first time in four months. “Turns out I was a person who liked being told what to like. That’s a different thing.”

His wife, Renata Paulson, 36, said she returned home to find Derek seated quietly in a chair with no device in his hand. “He was just… sitting,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with that. We talked for a while. It was good, actually.”

At press time, Paulson had downloaded a Bible app, not for spiritual reasons he was careful to note, but because it was free and had a lot of content.