Crawling back To reading From Scrolling

I think I have a problem.

This image sums up my current relationship with scrolling:

Sometimes one reel during a coffee break would devolve into an extensive survey of borzois “doing it for me” alongside some British guy telling me how the Queen eats a banana. “I must stop scrolling,” I tell myself as I move on to another reel.

Like gorging on cookies, a long scrolling session usually leaves us empty: how did I waste two hours? And these are two main issues with scrolling I want to explore this week: that empty/gross feeling and the fact that time seems to slip out of our grasp when we do it.

This piece isn’t here to guilt you into not scrolling, but an explanation for why we feel so horrible after we do it. The end goal isn’t to stop scrolling but to feel better, but one could argue one naturally follows the other. So, let’s begin.

Problem 1: Where the hell did time go?

I learned not to talk about time with people who are 25+. They’ll either storm out of the room or spiral into a spell of anxiety because it’s true: time accelerates as you get older.

When we were younger, certain structures kept time from slipping away: going to school, doing homework and weekend sports & outings. These points of reference opened up empty gaps between events for us to sense the duration of time. We were probably bored out of our minds during these gaps, but they kept our idea of time intact.

But as we get older, there are less distinctions between events. We always feel like we’re moving from one event to the next with virtually no gaps between them. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han called this phenomenon Atomized Time. For him, this mode of time lets

“Sensations follow each other in quicker succession, in order to keep the empty intervals from lasting long”

-from The Scent of Time

As a result, it’s impossible to form a stable idea of time without those in between gaps to take stock; to form a narrative about the duration of our experiences. And without this narrative, time slips out of hands and starts to accelerate.

Let’s apply this to scrolling. Unlike a book or a full-length film, short-form content lacks narrative and it has no gaps for us to take stock. Reels/Tiktoks follow one another in rapid succession, displacing any possibility of experiencing duration. As a result, time is fractured into sudden interruptions, producing what Han called a diffused anxiety as a result of a lack of narration.

Therefore, spending hours scrolling is a result of losing hold of duration. We can no longer see time pass because time has

 “Lost its hold and having been atomized, its being without any inhibiting gravitation.”

Problem 2: That Gross Feeling…

In the 1980s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered a deep paradox in our relationship with leisure/fun. We’d think that more fun = more happiness by any measure, but Csikszentmihalyi’s research revealed that the best moments of life

“Usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.”

It starts to make a lot of sense when we apply this finding to scrolling. Since the algorithm is designed to curate the best content that’s supposed to maximise pleasure/fun, the fact that we still feel gross afterwards points to an unflattering conclusion: maybe these videos are not giving us what we want.

In this case, the algorithm merely promises the reward of information/pleasure but never really delivers it. We can waste hours and never get to scratch the itch and here’s why:

Csikszentmihalyi argued that pleasure only works if there are feedback rules. There has to be a clear end and a reward. But unlike finishing a chapter of a book or a feature film, activities like scrolling provide no metric/feedback for how much we’ve learned or how long we’ve been entertained. This is why scrolling rarely delivers the pleasure it promises.

Plus, the constant attention-switching makes it hard to form any sustained engagement. This engagement is what Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state and it is deeply satisfying to the mind. With scrolling, however, there is only a long string of undifferentiated information that prevents us from going deep on any one thing, leaving us with that gross sense that we’ve learned nothing with those few hours on the platform.  

Crawling back to books after scrolling too much

Sometimes the best way to limit/quit something is to overdo it. Last week, I set aside a day and scrolled myself into oblivion just to see how far I could go. The results were horrifying.

I skipped a meal and spent 80% of my waking hours snacking in bed. My scrolling sped up and eventually, I was in a catatonic confusion. What time is it? What have I done? Who am I?

When I realized that the experiment ended in a 7-hour scrolling marathon, I thought to myself: anything is better than this. I turned off my phone, picked up a book and noticed how reading calmed everything down. It felt like I’d just moved to Zurich from London.

Then I spent the rest of the week replacing scrolling with reading. It didn’t matter how much I read, I only wanted to replace the habit because reading provides two things scrolling struggled to provide:

1: the stabilization of time

2: the feedback from reaching the end of a chapter

Am I perfect at it? Absolutely not. Do I feel better? Without a doubt.

Until next week

Robin