It’s shameful, but we’ve all been there.
In a moment of boredom, stress, anxiety - or just recognizing that we possess a human brain and would love to push back the onslaught of sonic chatter for half a freaking second - we reach for our phones and begin greedily staring at our favorite app, moving our thumb up and down, to CONSUME.
What’s being shoveled into our brains is usually unfiltered for usefulness, not marked down for future study, not expected to do anything other than repeatedly hit our dopamine receptors - like we’re some kind of lab mouse being studied to see how bright lights and sedatives change brain chemistry.
We flee to it to shut out the world and instead give others the unfettered opportunity to influence us.
What makes it stranger is that the internet also gives you nearly endless opportunities to satisfy that same hunger with the equivalent of a five-star tasting menu. Exactly what you want, no matter how niche or esoteric. Entertainment. Knowledge. Humor. Self-reflection. Anything.
But scrolling is way easier (by design) than finding stuff for yourself, but it’s not how I want to be spending my time and mental energy.
That’s when I started examining the behavior itself:
- How do I feel right before I reach for my phone?
- What feelings am I trying to ignore while scrolling?
- How do I feel 20 minutes later?
- What patterns am I rehearsing every single day?
The answers weren’t great, and I didn’t like the habits I had built - the patterns I was reinforcing.
But here’s the twist: it’s not because I’m a bad person, or because of some innate weakness or laziness. These apps exploit something genuinely positive in us - our curiosity.
We are deeply curious creatures. Ever since we were staring down from the trees to see what opportunities existed elsewhere, we’ve been rewarded for searching and examining new information.
And scrolling on our phones is like the ultimate drug for our curiosity. It removes all barriers and gives you the pure hit of discovery without the hard part of actual learning - context, depth, examination, reflection.
Don’t believe me?
Try summarizing right now what you learned during your last 30 minutes in the feeds without sounding like the guy from Memento piecing everything together.
I want to, instead of this, spend more of my free time pulling together enough energy to keep learning, creating, sharing, reading interesting things, listening to a wide range of music, developing new skills, calling friends out of the blue - always having something going on, a fun fact ready to pull out of my sleeve.
I’ve written before about how I’ve made my phone more boring and useful, and about increasingly more effective ways to quit social media. But it was only after really holding a mirror up to this behavior that I felt any real motivation to change my relationship with social media my true favorite place to waste time, Reddit.
And I’m not trying to say you can’t be successful or happy while having a different relationship with Instagram or whatever. I just know that for me, it’s hard to do as much of what I want when I’m giving away my focus and energy to things that don’t always advance those goals.
What I constantly think about is this: if I spent less time on my phone, could I explore things I know little about but would genuinely like to understand?
- How did Pavement become Pavement?
- What do we actually know about the fate of the crew of The Terror?
- Who were the artists shaping Belle Époque Paris?
So here’s the experiment.
In the moments I used to scroll endlessly, I’m going to point that curiosity at specific research topics, attempt to go deep on it, and see what happens.
I’ll report back.
In the meantime, if this sounds interesting to you as well, use the widget below to get your own “Bored on the Couch” research topic the next time you’re half watching Bob’s Burgers and pretending you’re going to bed early.
Let me know what you dive into.
Bored on the Couch?
Click generate to get one topic to explore for the next month.