The Neverending Curse of Doomscrolling

What's the first thing you do when you wake up?

Do you stretch, get up and drink a glass of water? Put some clothes on, open your curtains and bask in the glory of a brand new day?

Or do you reach over to your bedside table and pick up your phone?

If you were like me a few years ago, the default option upon waking up was to reach for your phone.

It may seem like an innocent gesture but this has wider implications for how we live. Before the invention of the smartphone, none of us thought to reach for our phones the minute we woke up.

Now it's become a reflex. Reaching out for a quick hit of dopamine.

We've unwittingly become addicted to our phones, and social media apps, in particular.

I'm sure we've all lost hours scrolling through Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. During the pandemic, this will have only increased.

The problem?

Our need to secure from dopamine is keeping us trapped in a narrow window of time. David Perell calls it the 'never-ending now.' A present that's readily available, on-demand and overwhelmed by small acts of chaos.

Reading a book on your daily commute is now a radical act. An act of defiance against the hordes bent over in front of their screens.

Addiction to our phones prevents us from appreciating the world around us. It shortens our attention spans and keeps us trapped in a cycle of '24-hour living.' Consuming material only created in the past day or two.

Everything has been said before. Nothing revolutionary is contained on these apps, yet we can't turn away. Our gaze fixed on the black mirrors we hold in our hands. A perverse version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

It's not pills or drugs we're addicted to, it's our phones.