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Mindless scrolling

“Mindless Scrolling”. I presume that all of you reading this, have experienced this phenomenon at least once, especially in the past few years where we have been imprisoned in rectangular screens all day. All it does is keep us merely occupied for long periods of time, and the reason why it is so successful at it, is because we want to be preoccupied in every moment of our life, and a mindless, meaningless activity such as scrolling through social media fills the empty gap of “disengagement” in our lives, either while we’re partaking in a monotonous activity or are simply because of a generalised feeling of meaninglessness or lack of purpose. Now let’s dissect each of these terms and see how they correlate with each other.

The science behind the scenes

A lot of you may have experienced your parents bawling you out for spending too much time on meaningless virtual activities, mainly outlined by something on the lines of “I wish I had nothing to do”, or “I would love to be bored”, which left me puzzled. But after doing a substantial amount of research on this topic, I can validate part of their claims.

“Boredom”. What exactly does it imply? In layman’s terms you could associate it with “idleness” or “doing nothing”. This is what we have come to know as “the state of boredom”, but in reality its fundamental definition differs. According to boredom studies, boredom can be technically defined as a negative state of meaninglessness, which can be directly associated with a lack of interaction with our surroundings. To further break this down, it’s essentially the sense of wanting to engage in an immersing and entertaining activity, but being unable to do so due to certain constraints.

So, if we understand boredom as a state of meaninglessness, it opens us up to a completely new and fresh aspect of boredom as a whole, and gives us several perspectives from which we can decode the science behind the effects of “mindless scrolling”.

So, with this completely new perspective, and all this information in place, how prevalent is boredom actually in our lives and how does social media usage fit into all this?

We as a society are more bored than ever before

Generally, our devices serve as a tool to alleviate stress…they’re supposed to.. right? But sometimes we use this statement to justify our excessive usage of our devices. As time passes it shapes into a mindless activity that we involuntarily force ourselves to do, which as a result makes us miserable. Though a lot of us might perceive the experience of boredom negatively, the truth is that our method of dealing with boredom is flawed. As a matter of fact boredom is a valuable indication that we should reflect on our daily actions, change something and move on, try something new, go out, and ultimately break free of our meaningless and mundane activities in which we aren’t even completely involved in, and to find ourselves in “the zone” no matter what we do.

Thank you for listening to my ted talk.