You can’t stop scrolling. It happens everyday. When do you stop the madness? When do you stop your unconscious fixation?

Yes, I know that scrolling YouTube is just ‘taking a break from work’ but I’m nonetheless worried about the long-term toxicity of what we’re doing to our brains and bodies.

We can’t focus at depth.

We can’t create at depth.

We can’t connect at depth.

To be blunt: I think we’ve scrolled past the point of no return, and I don’t see a sustainable solution for unconscious escapism for 95% of the population.

To put that another way, I don’t believe there is much hope for intentional consumption and deep-attention for more than about 5% of the population… and that’s tragic, but I see very little reason to be optimistic.

I’m somebody who takes four days offline per week and I’m still in the danger zone. I’ve likewise helped many private clients unplug for multiple days offline but I see them drop right back into old scrolling habits when they come back online.

What hope is there for the everyday social media user?

What about content creators - how do we use these platforms for positive influence rather than perpetuating the issue?

I don’t think content creators are evil, but we’ve trapped ourselves in the algorithmic crab bucket.

The algorithm is both catcher and container, and it feels like we’re clawing at each-others viral strategies to optimise the number of seconds spent peddling cognitive junk food to the people we’re supposedly trying to ‘help’.

We’re fixated on engagement and watch time, overlooking the fact that each individual viewer forgets what they’ve seen within minutes because they consumed the content in a semi-altered hypnotic state.

These aren’t groundbreaking reflections, but I’m worried that screen sucking is the new drug and I’m deeply concerned about the long-term damage of our ‘normal phone use’.

Cigarettes were cool in the 60s; we were fed junk food commercials between cartoons as children; and we’ve yet to fully comprehend the mental toxicity of our idle scrolling thumbs.

Jordan