This is the number one killer of time. There is so much better shit to do than scroll, but gen Z has:
- Cooked attention spans
- Conditioned for maximizing dopamine
I don’t find myself scrolling often during the day, but its really easy to bookend your days with scrolling. To combat this, I want to bookend my days with Reading.
Why do people scroll
The easy answer here is quick dopamine and convenience. This is only partly our faults since our apps are engineered to keep us engaged and to maximize the amount of time we spend scrolling. It is really easy to put in an hour into scrolling. You would think you would get bored after a while but there is some sort of variety since there are different platforms to scroll on:
- Reels
- TikTok
- Shorts Each platform has a different algorithm so you feel like you get some change of pace. I also heard that scrolling mimics an evolutionary foraging behaviour, but I’m not sure overall how true that statement is.
Where did it come from?
Scrolling didn’t come out of nowhere. Before the scrolling epidemic, there was the “binging” epidemic which is where people would binge watch Netflix, or youtube, etc which is kind of like long form scrolling except probably a bit better since it requires you to hold attention for longer periods of time. An interesting comparison, is that watching a movie to wind-down before bed is more socially acceptable than telling someone you scrolled for 2 hours to wind-down before bed.
Consequences
Other than lost time, the consequence I’ve noticed the most from scrolling is mental fog. Your Focus is what makes you dangerous and productive, and scrolling has caused my focus to regress. Therefore, this is a habit I need to severely limit (let’s be real, completely eliminating it is next to impossible). I was fine off of youtube videos so I’ll try to revert to that.