#4 Harshly Fascinating Scrolls

First of all, thank you for your patience and letting me take my time to overcome my fear. A fear of floating thoughts that “what if it's bad writing?; what if it’s not valuable to you?; and other what IFs that all end up giving me an excuse to not write.” I feared that my creativity may be judged, especially without AI. While many validated, I focused on the few judgemental.

Lately, I realized that I gave so much importance to the opinions that I randomly encountered since I came of age. Now, I intend to listen to my body and mind and give my energy to what they feel like doing. I found one thing that I don’t want to do, at least excessively or every day, and wanted to share the journey as it’s been meaningful part of my recent life.

As teased in the last piece, I still believe that meaning is to be created. Created through novel experiences, the meaning comes to us. Yet it takes time and intention.

Recent experiences didn’t help me to find something meaningful; instead, my companion and I found something absolutely meaningless: Scrolling. 

The problem is that scrolling is infinite.

According to a theory called Attention Restoration Theory (ART), developed by environmental psychologists the Kaplans, there are two types of fascinations: soft and hard. Merriam Webster defines fascination as the quality or power of [interest]. In our ART context, the Kaplans used fascination to mean effortless, involuntary attention. Though their studies focus on nature, I was more interested in learning about day-to-day fascinations and how they are categorized as hard and soft based on the effort it takes to pay attention.

We can think of the fascinations as activities we do for relaxation and restoration. Then, categorize them. Turns out, most things we love doing to relax are hard fascinations that don’t really relax us:

Playing games and watching TV can be softly fascinating depending on the pace and content, how stimulating they are, and what kind of attention is required to stay engaged.

Here are more examples:

Whether it is doomscrolling, shopping scroll, or notification sweep, the scrolling seemed to steal my free time. Truly, I allowed it to steal. Don’t get me wrong: scrolling can soothe at times and connect those who are physically away. It’s the design of social media applications and technology that have been evolving in a way that scrolling has become a normalized part of a day. It is not only social media apps like Instagram and TikTok, but the act of scrolling seems inevitable throughout the web.

Now with these realizations, you and I can choose how to spend my attention. I want to decide what I want to do with my time, not to let the designs of tech companies take over, at least when I am not working.

It’s been about a month with little to no scrolls. The withdrawal urge is still there but if I can just be a bigger person and not let my “brain cigarette” conquer my addiction, it goes away in no time. Reading books about shamanism, Jungian psychology, and randomness in life, my brain is nourishing.

🎧 Media Rec

Got to learn about the fascination types from this podcast while hiking in nature one weekend, instead of scrolling.

The fact that we found the scrolling meaningless to our lives was meaningful. It opens up the door for us to find something more rewarding and truly relaxing to do.

Lifestyle Rec — Enjoy soft fascinations

🧘🏻 Take it slow. Watch nature documentaries; do gentle yoga; or bundle up and go for a walk fo 10 minutes even if it’s not that enjoyable out.

🚶🏽Try 24-hour no scroll.🤳🏻

📲 Go to Settings > Screen > Screen Distance > Turn on (for iPhone users). If your phone is too close to your eyes, like on your face all the time, it’s going to remind you how absorbed you are in the scrolling scheme and you can put away your phone then.

One step closer to finding what’s more worthwhile and restorative. I think the key is not finding the most meaningful thing to do but identifying what can be more meaningful while embracing the reality.

On the journey,

~ Soka ~