I Am Tired of Scrolling: What Are We Actually Looking For?

Sometimes I pick up my phone without knowing why.There is no message I am waiting for and nothing I particularly need to check. A few minutes have simply opened in the day and, before I have properly noticed them, the phone is in my hand. I might read something, follow a link, look at a photograph and then another, moving onwards with the vague expectation that whatever I am looking for is perhaps one more movement of my thumb away.

Eventually I put the phone down.

What interests me is the feeling that sometimes remains afterwards. I have seen plenty, yet very little has stayed with me. The few minutes I was trying to fill have disappeared, but whatever prompted me to reach for the phone in the first place does not necessarily feel satisfied. Occasionally I find myself picking it up again only moments later, as though I have forgotten that I have just looked.

I don't think this makes phones particularly sinister, nor do I think we need to feel guilty about using them. A small object that allows us to speak to people on the other side of the world, find our way through an unfamiliar city, hear music we love and discover ideas we may never otherwise encounter is an astonishing thing to carry around in a pocket. There are people I have known, places I have discovered and work I have been able to do because the internet exists, and I have no desire to pretend that life before it was universally better.

But I have become curious about that almost unconscious reach. If I am not looking for anything in particular, what am I hoping to find?

The Moment Before We Reach

I suspect the answer begins before the screen lights up. There is a small interval in many days when one thing has finished and the next has not yet begun. Perhaps I have arrived early somewhere and must wait. There is no task available to occupy me, no conversation requiring my attention and no particular reason to do anything at all. For a moment, I am simply there. That moment can feel surprisingly exposed.

An empty five minutes once had relatively few places to go. We might have looked around, thought about something, become bored or simply waited. Now those minutes contain a doorway into an almost inexhaustible stream of other places, other people and other things to think about. It is hardly surprising that we walk through it.

What seems more interesting is how quickly the choice can disappear from our awareness. I don't always think, I would like to spend the next few minutes looking at my phone. My hand moves before the sentence has been formed. By the time I notice what I am doing, I am already somewhere else.

There is a peculiar intimacy in recognising this habit because it asks us to look at the moment we usually skip over: the few seconds in which nothing is happening yet.

Perhaps we reach because we want company. Perhaps there is a small discomfort in being alone with an unfinished thought. At other times, I suspect there is no great psychological explanation waiting to be uncovered. The phone is simply there, and over thousands of repetitions it has become what the hand knows to do when the day leaves a gap.

The question, then, may not be why we love our phones so much. It may be what happened to the gap.

Tired of Scrolling - The Promise of Something Else

Scrolling has an unusual quality because there is always the possibility that the next thing will be the thing worth finding.

Most objects have edges. A newspaper ends. A book eventually closes. If we walk to the end of a street, sooner or later we have to decide whether to turn left, turn right or go home. A feed has no such natural conclusion. There is always another piece of the world waiting immediately beneath the one we are looking at. The next thing might be wonderful.

That possibility matters. Among all the forgettable material we encounter online, there are moments of genuine discovery. We find a writer whose work seems to put words around something we have felt for years. Someone sends us a photograph that makes us laugh in an otherwise difficult afternoon. We stumble across a place, an idea or a piece of music that remains part of our lives long after we close the screen.

The problem is that we cannot know which movement of the thumb will reveal it. So we continue.

There is something almost hopeful about scrolling when I think of it this way. We are searching through an enormous crowd of things because occasionally something reaches us. The difficulty is that the search can continue long after curiosity has faded, when we are no longer particularly interested in what we are seeing but have not encountered a reason to stop.

Perhaps this explains the strange contradiction of feeling tired of scrolling while continuing to scroll. We are tired of what we are doing, but the possibility of finding something remains. I wonder, though, how often the thing we hope to find is actually available there.

If what we wanted was a feeling of connection, another hundred glimpses into other people's lives may not provide it. If what we wanted was rest, consuming more information may leave the mind feeling strangely crowded. If we reached because the evening had become quiet and we did not know what to do with ourselves, the screen can certainly make the quiet disappear, but that is not quite the same thing as discovering what the quiet might have contained.

Sometimes we find exactly what we were looking for. Sometimes we simply stop noticing that we were looking.

What Happened to the Empty Minutes?

I have begun to think about boredom differently. For much of my life, boredom seemed like a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. If there was nothing to do, then obviously I needed to find something. The arrival of a device capable of filling almost any spare moment felt, in that sense, like an extraordinary solution.

But boredom may have been doing something I didn't understand.

I remember the particular boredom of childhood afternoons when there was no plan and nobody appeared especially concerned about providing one. At first the hours seemed impossibly long. Eventually, however, something would happen, although usually nothing that could have been predicted at the beginning. An idea emerged because the empty afternoon had remained empty long enough for us to become responsible for it.

Adult boredom feels less familiar now. I can remove it almost immediately, and usually do.

On the occasions when I don't, the first few minutes are rarely magical. I don't put my phone down and instantly become a more observant, creative person. Often I simply become aware that I want to pick it up again.

If I leave it where it is, however, the moment eventually changes.

Recently I was sitting somewhere with time to wait and decided not to fill it. For a while there was nothing to replace the screen, which felt almost embarrassingly difficult. Then I noticed a bird beneath a nearby table, moving with complete confidence between the chair legs in search of whatever people had dropped. It kept returning to the same place, disappearing for a few seconds and then appearing again from another direction.

Nothing came of this. I didn't have an important revelation nor did I become calmer, healthier or more productive because I watched a bird instead of looking at a screen. I simply watched it.

The thing is, I remembered the bird but can't remember what I had been scrolling through earlier that day. That difference interests me.

The Life Beneath the Noise

There is a temptation, when talking about screens, to imagine that the alternative must be a beautifully analogue life. We put away the phone and immediately begin writing letters in fountain pen, tending vegetables or reading an old novel beside an open window. The image is appealing, but I don't think ordinary life makes the transition quite so elegantly. Often what waits beneath the screen is much less picturesque.

There is a room that needs tidying. There is somebody beside us with nothing particularly important to say. There is our own mind, which may not produce thoughts we especially wanted to hear. There are stretches of the day that remain genuinely dull.

Perhaps that is part of what makes constant access to somewhere else so difficult to resist. The screen does not merely entertain us. It offers an exit from the immediate moment.

Sometimes that exit is useful. There are long waits and lonely evenings when a conversation through a screen can make the world feel larger. There are circumstances in which the people who understand us are not physically nearby, and dismissing those connections as somehow less real would misunderstand what technology has made possible. But an exit is different from a home.

If every unremarkable moment becomes somewhere to leave, we may gradually lose our familiarity with the place we are leaving from. That place is our ordinary life.

It is rarely as polished as the lives we encounter through a screen because we experience it from the inside, where the washing is still damp and the conversation occasionally goes nowhere. We know all its repetitions. We see the unflattering angles. Yet it is the only place in which we can actually be.

This is why I am becoming less interested in how many hours we spend looking at screens and more interested in what happens during the moments when we choose not to. The number alone cannot tell us very much. Two hours spent talking to someone we love is not the same experience as two hours spent moving restlessly through a feed, even if a screen-time report records them in much the same way.

The better question may be whether the screen is helping us enter our lives or continually offering us somewhere else to go.

What Are We Actually Looking For?

I don't think there is one answer. But I have started asking the question before I reach.

Often I still find the phone in my hand without remembering the decision that put it there. Habits built over years do not disappear simply because we have become interested in them. Occasionally, though, there is a fraction of a second in which I notice.

What am I looking for?

If there is an answer, I pick up the phone.

I want to speak to someone. I want to read something. I need directions. There is a photograph I want to send. I want to listen to something. I am curious about a question and would like to know the answer. And sometimes there isn't an answer. There is simply a gap.

I am beginning to leave a few of those gaps alone. Not because I have discovered some superior way of living, and certainly not because every empty moment needs to become meaningful. I leave them because I want to remember what happens when nothing arrives immediately to fill them.

Usually, very little happens. The kettle finishes boiling. The person beside me eventually says something. A thought wanders somewhere unexpected. The bird beneath the table returns. The ordinary world, which had been there all along, slowly comes back into view.

Perhaps that is what I was looking for.

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