In Defense of the Mindless Scroll

hey everyone! Thanks for being here. Quick reminder that my stand up special REGRESSION is out now, as is my Audible book starring Mae Whitman. If you like either of them, reviews are super helpful! And you can find tix to all my upcoming shows here, including my free NYC show 10/8. enjoy!

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There’s nothing I find so annoying as someone telling me I could be doing something more “efficiently.” Inefficiency is one of life’s top pleasures (along with consolidation of various CVS-goods in my apartment). Time is the one thing we all have. Where’s the fun in optimizing everything?

I often choose the inefficient option, even when I know I could be moving more quickly. The time required to manual-task is a known quantity. I can project out how much time something will take, and I work through it steadily. Besides, what if automating something requires me to pay $3/month, or worse, remember when to cancel the free trial? Or what if I can’t find the right tool? Or what if I end up spamming everyone in my contact list, as has happened with an automatic subtitling tool I tried in 2018, before TikTok just did the whole thing for me? Or what if I just want to be inefficient, goddammit, because doing a menial, mindless task is so deeply satisfying!

But of course, menial work is still menial. I’d rather have no work. Whenever I hear someone say that “modern” people don’t let themselves get bored anymore, I almost get jealous. I’m always bored. Who are these sociologists who live such fascinating lives that they can look out at the masses and complain that everything is just too interesting?

On the other hand, when I squint, I can see where they’re coming from. I’m often idle, but I’m never unoccupied. When I’m waiting in line or stalled on public transit, I don’t just sit. I type, I text, I search, I send, I post, I read, I scroll. For those of us with careers where it’s possible to make substantial progress from our phones, this can be a massive windfall—I often free up time later in my day by working through my to-list during a long commute or a wait at the doctor’s office (I’m also a career hypochondriac).

Sometimes, it backfires: I give myself anxiety trying to finish a task on my phone that should actually be done on a computer. Sometimes, I get too dependent on working from my phone, so plan my day around having access to LTE on the subway, which is a disastrous choice. Never expect anything good from the NYC subway. Sometimes, I try and fail to be productive. But sometimes, I don’t even try. Sometimes, I really just scroll. I’m not doing anything, I have no goals. I’m truly mindless. And I need this. I need the mindless scroll.

For a few reasons.

One: it’s addictive. I know what you’re thinking: that’s not good, right? Well, maybe not, but when something is addictive, you have to do it.

Two: there are worse ways to spend your time. If your mind isn’t going to be engaged anyway, you may as well be scrolling. You won’t hurt anybody. Mindless scrolling is surely better than mindless unicycling, right? Sometimes, I’ll see headlines along the lines of: “STUDY: Protein Bars Are Unhealthy.” That’s a nonsensical statement. The better question is: what would you be eating if not the protein bar? if the answer is a Twix, maybe the protein bar’s not so bad. If the answer is a salad, maybe is it. But then again, if you eat too many salads, you run the risk of looking like a tool. Which has health consequences, I hear. Sure, social media can be toxic, but have you ever had the experience of clicking out of Twitter, shutting off your phone, turning your attention to what’s going on in the world around you, and thinking, “wait…this is also really bad”? This happens to me a lot when I’m in work meetings and also at family gatherings. Maybe it’s safer to just scroll.

Three: it’s motivating. After a 30-minute scroll, I usually feel like I’ve wasted enough time, and I’m onto my next task. After a 30-minute job, I usually feel like I deserve a long break. So which one is really more productive?

Four: just piling onto point #3, it’s occasionally directly productive. I’ve seen listings for jobs I could apply to or editors I could pitch while scrolling mindlessly. Plus, I think mindlessly scrolling Twitter has given me a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the Middle East (that is a JOKE i am just KIDDING).

Five: I can’t take a shit without my phone.

Six: It’s relaxing. A mindless scroll is just that—mindless. I’m not thinking. I’m resting my brain in the same way I would if I were staring out into space.

Seven: People who don’t waste any time are annoying. Kinda like the salad-eaters. Actually, exactly like that. It’s easy to dismiss “mindless scrolling” as something for unproductive people, for people who don’t realize how much better their lives would be without social media. I reject the binary of productive vs unproductive. But that’s not the only one I reject – bored vs engaged. Distracted vs peaceful. Online vs in the real world. You can be all of these things at once. You can value your time, and still choose to waste some of it.

It’s just a thumb action, after all. Maybe it’s the fact that we need it so badly, but we’re told it’s so wrong. Maybe it’s that modern capitalism simultaneously makes us believe all our time can and should be converted into money, but also requires us to waste so much of it through meaningless tasks like filing expense reports or sitting in “all hands” meetings (what if everyone just put in one hand, and got to use the other hand however they saw fit? I’m not suggesting masturbation at work; it’s not my fault that’s where your mind jumped).

Maybe we’ve totally warped our sense of time, and now, we beat ourselves up over it. Maybe it’s not about mindless scrolling, after all. In fact, maybe mindless scrolling – taking complete ownership of how and when to waste our own time – is one way to get it back.