I scroll too much?

John Singer Sargent, Simplon Pass, 1911

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.

It doesn’t really matter what’s on the screen. What’s being shoveled into us is 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.

Aimlessly scrolling is like choosing to eat at the all-you-can-eat buffet every single day, with a rule that only strangers can decide what goes on your plate. They pile it on. You accept it and shovel it in, unquestioned.

What makes it stranger is that the internet also gives you nearly endless opportunities to satisfy that 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 it’s a trap.

Scrolling feels like entertainment, but is it? There’s nothing focused about it, and trying to summarize what happened after 30 minutes makes you sound like the character from Memento piecing everything together.

It can be informative, but rarely about the thing you actually meant to learn. It’s the ultimate half-measure. Not a decision. Just letting others fill your plate.

That’s why examining this behavior is important:

• How do I feel before reaching for my phone?
• How do I feel after?
• What patterns am I practicing and reinforcing here?

I’ve written about how to stop scrolling so much, and how I’ve turned my phone into more of a tool than an entertainment zone by making it boring and useful. But it was only after asking these questions — really holding a mirror up to the behavior — that I felt any real motivation to change my relationship with social media and places like Reddit.

And in doing that, something else became clear.

These apps exploit something really positive: our curiosity.
We’re deeply curious creatures. Ever since we were staring down from those trees to see what opportunities existed elsewhere, we’ve been rewarded for searching and examining new information.

Scrolling is like a drug for curiosity. It gives you the hit of discovery without the vegetables of actual learning: context, depth, examination, reflection.

But I don’t want to be a person who scrolls. I want to be someone who learns, creates, shares, reads interesting things, listens to a wide range of music, develops new skills, calls friends out of the blue, and always has something going on — a fun fact ready to pull out of my sleeve.

Not to say you can’t do those things and still be on 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 so much of my focus and energy consuming things that don’t always advance those goals.

I guess I just want to save my reserves of curiosity to spend outside of a feed. What if I spent my scroll time investigating stuff like:

• How did Pavement become Pavement?
• What do we actually know about the fate of the crew of The Terror?
• Who were the main artists of Belle Époque Paris?

So here’s the experiment. I’m assigning myself homework. In the moments I used to scroll endlessly, I’m going to point that curiosity at specific research topics and see what happens. I’ll report back.

In the meantime, if this sounds interesting to you, 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!