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Systems

Ten(ish) Ways To Scroll Less

These are mostly helpful suggestions for how to spend less time on your phone.

2 min read

Mostly serious. These get increasingly more effective.

  1. Look yourself in the mirror and intensely, unblinkingly, and without a hint of embarrassment ask: what type of person do I actually want to be?
  2. Examine how you feel before, during, and after you open your phone to scroll Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter. What are the bodily reactions? What’s the emotional residue?
  3. Recognize what gives you the “ick.” Is it causing unnecessary anger? Does it make you frustrated, envious, or weirdly dispassionate about your own life?
  4. Remove, without prejudice, the things that trigger the strongest negative reactions. Unfollow people, topics, subreddits - whatever reliably makes you feel worse. Your feeds should feel tailored and occasionally boring. Running out of things to consume quickly is good.
  5. Set aside times and places when you will not, under any circumstance, open the apps. Go to the bathroom 90s-style. Don’t look at your phone while you’re watching a movie. Read a book on the morning train instead.
  6. Need a better barrier? Sign out of the app every time you use it. Having to log back in is annoying. That friction is the point.
  7. Too good at finding candy hidden in the back of the cupboard? Remove the apps from your phone entirely and only access them on your computer.
  8. That still too easy? Make your phone boring and slightly inconvenient.
  9. Still struggling? Take a good, hard look in the mirror. If none of this is working, what are you searching for in the infinite scroll? It will never fill your cup the way a good conversation with a friend will. And nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time scrolling r/nba on this mortal coil.
  10. Delete all the apps entirely. Get rid of your profiles. Achieve peace. Go outside. Re-enter society.
  11. Apply for and get accepted onto the History Channel show Alone. Survive 100 days in Northern Canada on nothing but the land, your skills, and whatever good fortune shows up. Finally understand that you cannot, in fact, eat social media posts.
  12. Launch yourself into space in a 1980s-style sci-fi rocket - advanced enough to travel light-years, but powered by a flickering CRT monitor with fewer pixels than a Texas Instruments calculator.
  13. Or do the one thing that is truly impossible: make no changes at all and simply stop looking at the apps. Let them atrophy out of your brain through sheer willpower.