Last week, I checked in to a hotel in Tokyo and was asked whether I'd like the Financial Times or The Japan Times delivered to my room the next day. When I woke up, instead of frantically checking Twitter to see who had left Survivor: White House Edition overnight, and why morning TV hosts were debating the merits of another Stolen Generation, I got informed story by story, page by page. The news wasn't good, but the experience was soothing; time itself seemed to extend.

A rash of recent news stories consider what it's like to unplug. In The New York Times, a former corporate executive moved to Ohio to erect what he calls a "blockade" against all political news, and, in a separate piece, the Times tech reporter concluded that reading the "dead tree" version of the newspaper for two months did wonders for his mental health. Slate wondered what Twitter would look like without all the stats on who liked what, and a Vice writer spent a week in the woods without a computer and came away "calmer than ever".

The digital giants know something's afoot: that we are increasingly unhappy with how technology makes us feel. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced at the start of this year that he wanted to prioritise "meaningful social interactions" to ensure "time spent on Facebook is time well spent". Twitter is slowly attempting to make its platform less friendly to Nazis and misogynists. And YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently unveiled plans to counter "fake news" clips with reliable news content, whether users wanted it or not.

But you're ahead of the curve on all this. You're most likely reading this in hard copy, unencumbered by browser windows and notification alerts and pop-up ads for cars which take up the whole screen. These are all reasons why it's preferable, psychologically speaking, to read something on paper. But I think there's another reason people in their millions are turning away from the digital world. It's because the information available online is infinite. Print is finite.

You can never feel like you've read everything you need to read on the internet. But make it through the newspaper, and there's a sense that the world has been captured, in snapshot form, at least for today.