The Logic of the Scroll | Outsourcing Our Sense of Meaning and Belonging

[I wrote this with my phone face down. It kept lighting up. I kept not answering.]

I made a list.

I made it over the course of a week, in the margins of other things — on my phone, between the things I was doing instead of being present, which is its own kind of honesty about the conditions of the making. I had promised it in the first part of this series. I said: The next part is called The Logic of the Scroll. It is a list of things I have done instead of being present. I did not know, when I said it, how many items there would be.

There are thirty-seven.

Some are trivial. Some I wish I had not remembered. A few I wrote, deleted, and wrote again before deciding that the deletion was its own form of self-protection and that self-protection was not the point. I am putting them here because you will recognise them — not all, but some; maybe the specific one you had hoped nobody had written down, the one that sits quietly at the back of the things you have never said aloud — and the recognising is what the exercise is for.

This is not self-flagellation. I have tried not to write it in the register of performed remorse, because performed remorse is its own form of staying very close to the mirror, and there are enough mirrors in this series already.

The list is a description. A description of what the attention economy looks like from inside one particular mind, over the course of several years, in the ordinary Tuesday texture of a person trying to live their life while dozens of systems run optimised interference against that attempt. It is the shape of a habit made visible. Habits only become amenable to choice once they can be seen.

Here is the list.

Opened the app before I opened the curtains.

Checked the glass before I said good morning to anyone in the room with me. I did this before I had consciously decided to do it. The motion had completed before my awareness caught up with what my hand was doing.

Scrolled in the bathroom, long after I was done. I was aware, at some low level, of the comedy of this. I remained in the bathroom for another six minutes.

Refreshed a page that had nothing new on it. Refreshed it again. Noticed what I was doing. Refreshed it again.

Watched a notification arrive and left it unread for six hours — not because I was busy, but because I wanted to feel wanted. I knew this at the time.

Read an argument between two strangers about something I had no stake in and felt, briefly, righteous on behalf of one of them, and briefly contemptuous of the other, and then scrolled past without doing anything with either feeling.

Watched a video that was forty seconds long. Then watched it again. Then watched the next recommended one. Then looked up and thirty-seven minutes were gone and I had no memory of most of them.

Saw a photograph of someone I used to love and did not call them. Liked the photograph instead. Put the phone down. Picked it up again.

Opened a group conversation, read two weeks of messages I had not replied to, and closed it again without replying. The people in the conversation were people I cared about. I knew what I owed them. I closed it anyway and told myself I would reply tomorrow.

Scrolled through the holiday photographs of someone I have met exactly twice.

Read a brief post about the death of a person I did not know, felt — for perhaps forty seconds — genuinely moved, and then scrolled down.

Typed a message, deleted it, typed it again, sent a different version from either, felt wrong about all three, did not follow up.

Bought something I did not need because the same image had appeared in my feed seven times across two weeks, and I had confused familiarity with desire.

Checked the glass while someone was mid-sentence. They did not finish the sentence. I did not ask them to.

Watched a video of a child doing something completely surprising, felt genuine tenderness, immediately sent it to three people, and went back to scrolling — having mistaken the forwarding gesture for connection.

Read about grief instead of calling someone I missed.

Stayed awake past midnight, looking at strangers' lives, because my own felt, in that particular hour, insufficient. I was not enjoying myself, exactly. I was not learning anything, exactly. I could not stop.

Laughed at something on a screen while someone in the same room waited for me to look up so they could laugh with me. By the time I looked up, the moment had passed. They had given up waiting. They were looking at their own glass.

and I opened the app because the room felt like too much and I scrolled and I read a thread about what we are all doing to ourselves and nodded along and closed it and opened something else and I watched two minutes of something I will not remember and I scrolled past a face I recognised and did not stop and I picked up the glass because the silence felt like something that needed managing and I put it down and picked it up again and I read six sentences of an article about solitude and did not finish the article and I checked the time by opening the glass and then forgot what the time was and opened it again and I refreshed something that was already current and I looked at a face I had been looking at for weeks without being able to name what I was feeling and I scrolled to avoid naming it and I stayed in a thread past the point where I was learning anything because leaving felt like a small loss and I read about the attention economy while sitting inside the attention economy and felt briefly clever about noticing and kept reading and I made a mental note to live differently starting tomorrow and forgot the note before I stood up and I reached for the glass because I did not know what else to do with my hands and I scrolled past something that would have mattered if I had given it the time to arrive and I did not give it the time and something came through the feed that was genuinely important and I saved it to read later and did not read it later and I fell asleep with the glass in my hand and woke and the first thing I did was look at it and I looked at it before I looked at the room and I looked at the room second and the person beside me third and I began the day already elsewhere and the day started without me fully in it—

Took a photograph of something beautiful before I had finished looking at it.

Looked up a person from my past — not because I missed them, but because I needed to know they still existed. They seemed fine. I closed the screen.

Watched someone else's argument while my own kitchen went quiet.

Made a decision about someone based on their posting history before I had spoken to them.

Shared something I had not finished reading because the headline felt true.

Read a post that said put your phone down and did not put it down.

Felt envious of a life I knew, at the level of reason, was not as it appeared. The envy was real. The life being envied was a curated selection from a life that almost certainly contained its own version of this list, somewhere off-screen.

Checked the glass during a film I had waited two weeks to watch.

Felt the weight of a conversation I needed to have, and reached for the thing instead of beginning it. The conversation still waits.

Replied to someone professionally within three minutes. Did not reply to someone personally for four days. The professional message felt urgent. The personal one required a kind of attention I had not yet located in myself, and I kept putting it off until the locating happened, which it did not.

Explained to someone why the thing I was reading mattered. Continued reading instead of finishing the explanation.

Scrolled with one hand while doing something with the other that required both hands.

Let a relationship thin without noticing, because the feed had filled the space where the noticing would have happened.

Promised myself I would put the thing away at dinner. Did not put it away at dinner.

Watched someone else's grief move through a comment section and felt something real. Did not name what I felt. Scrolled on.

Checked the glass during the exact kind of quiet I had been telling myself I needed.

Read an account of a life that seemed more alive than mine in that hour and did not examine the comparison.

Opened the app because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

Wrote this list on my phone.

I wrote this list instead of calling someone I love.

She was in another country. I thought of her. I told myself I was working — and some of this is working; these words are real, the thinking behind them is real — but most of it was a way of staying very close to the thing I was describing, which is its own form of not putting it down.

The list is not complete. There are things I did not include because they are not mine alone to put here. There are things I did not include because I am not ready to see them listed. Any honest accounting of a habit stops at the edge of what you can bear to count. What I can bear to count has its limits. So does this page.

There is also this: I wrote this list and I am going to publish it, and people will read it, and some of them will feel less alone in their own version of the list. I will have used the apparatus of the attention economy to describe what the attention economy does to attention. I notice the irony. I am not sure what to do with it.

What I want to say, at the end of the thirty-seven: writing them down did not make me feel better. I thought it might. I thought that naming them precisely would produce some kind of clarity, or at least the brief relief that comes from the act of confession. What it produced instead was a kind of vertigo at my own ordinariness. This particular way of half-living is so widespread and so expected that a detailed accounting of it produces nothing new. You have already seen this list. You have lived some version of it. Probably today.

I am not better than you.

I am not worse.

I am the one who wrote it down.