On Scrolling to Avoid Myself
On Scrolling to Avoid Myself
We do it all the time. We sit and look at our phones, scrolling the day away. Scrolling the to-do list away. Scrolling the crucial conversation away. Scrolling to avoid life itself.
We avoid what needs doing. We avoid the inner work and the outer work. Most of all, we avoid meeting ourselves. When was the last time you did something you truly wanted to do — something you came up with on your own, instead of being told, instead of being "inspired" by somebody else's feed? We save so many things that interest us on these apps. So many things we mean to someday try, do, experience. Then we go back to scrolling. A few people actually stop to try the thing. But what of everyone else's ideas — are they really worth the effort and mental space, when what we need is to sort our own stuff? Our own desires, wants, needs?
There's a dulling that comes with all of it. A dulling of the senses, of our humanness — compounded now by AI doing our thinking for us, and by phones keeping our pleasure centers on a steady drip of dopamine. What are we doing? What are you doing? Where are you going, and where did you come from? Where will you be in five years — in ten? Is your body already showing the signs of aging, the signs of menopause? What then? The clock keeps ticking. Seconds, minutes, years.
What then, my friend? Will you look back on a long life with the pride of having lived it well, or the emptiness of having scrolled through it? Here's the hardest part: what would you even do if you weren't scrolling? Once you admit that this is an addiction, that you're forfeiting your actual life to a soul-sucking device, what's left? You've forgotten how to be bored. How to find the regular old things to do. If you're anything like me, there's a lot of time these days that I don't know what to do with anymore — and that leaves me standing in a strange place, asking: what am I doing? What do I want? What do I want out of life? What do I want my days to look like, now that scrolling and avoiding are off the table?
They say your life improves more from fixing your worst habit than from adding several good ones. Mine is social media. It started with Myspace, with discovering code, with putting every detail of my life online — photos, thoughts, all of it. Somewhere along the way that turned into a machine built to sell me things, to entertain every idle minute I have. What happened to love? To communal laughter and purpose? To dancing under the stars around a campfire, grateful just to be alive another day? I think about how much more I would have accomplished without a phone pulling me out of my own life.
This is the root that feeds my other, smaller shortcomings. My lifelong battle with procrastination is fed easily by scrolling. My imposter syndrome is fed just as easily — I see other photographers and think I am nothing, my work is nothing, instead of simply working for the sake of working. Photographing things for my own enjoyment, not for comparison.
Getting back to what we loved as children might be the most beautiful thing we can rediscover. I think we arrive in this world already drawn to certain things, and then aging, and socialization, and all the rest slowly talk us out of them. I loved drawing, playing basketball, climbing trees, imagining, writing poetry, writing songs, jumping on the trampoline, exploring, swimming, building whole worlds out of my toys. I pretended to be strong, capable, a creature of nature — Mowgli from The Jungle Book, Pocahontas listening to the wind and the earth, Lara Croft: archaeologist, badass.
Maybe that's the way back. Not fixing myself all at once, but remembering her — the one who didn't need a screen to know what she wanted to do with her day.
