Endless-scrolling world and the slow death of deep thinking

Last week, I reheated my coffee for the third time. The oven wasn’t the problem. I just kept getting pulled into Instagram reels. Pretty funny, but there are many messages hidden in this scenario. Also interestingly, I had seen about 50-60 reels, but I do not remember any of it precisely. And I know a lot of us can relate to this type of situation.

We unlock our mobile to spend 2-5 minutes, and somehow end up spending half an hour or even hours scrolling through reels/shorts. I have also seen people just scrolling, not even seeing the 10-15 second reels that they have opened. And what I do is quite weird, watching those at 2x speed, just to finish every 10-15 seconds in a shorter time. Meaning that we do not want to pay much attention to the shortest seconds. This has become a type of habit we cannot get out of, which is actually a bit scary.

The issue is bigger than just thinking of like just entertainment. Especially the youth tend to spend hours watching reels as well as burying their ability to give proper attention and thinking. It is like, what the algorithm is showing us, we are seeing those, but just keep swallowing those with our eyes.

So, what happens is we are not really paying attention, not thinking about what we are seeing, so we do not even recall most of the things that we have seen earlier. This pattern shows what we are doing to our brains. We are not giving it good input, as we are losing the potential to sit with our own thoughts.

We can turn to a few relevant examples. Many of us notice that nowadays, whenever we get a longer task to complete, we get bored easily. What we do is procrastinate, ‘I will do this a few moments later’, then start poking the phone again, then again the next day, ‘I will do this, but okay, maybe a few moments later?’… And this keeps going on.

I used to finish watching a full 2-hour movie. But now, even if I have time, I watch a quarter or half of it and leave the rest to watch another day.
A friend of mine was saying one day, “I used to read a lot, sometimes one book needed 2 days at the highest. But now I even struggle to read a paragraph of an article”.

Some of us have problems focusing on studies, assignments, or even having conversations. These are due to lower focus and a decline in deep-thinking abilities. One of my colleagues was saying, “This 5-page report, I reviewed it in no time before, but now this is taking days”.
Our brain cannot concentrate like before; it is more into preferring ‘speed over depth’.

Watching shorts or reels is not specifically a bad habit. Even though there are a lot of interesting things going on- old movie clips to remind us to rewatch the movie again, cute cats, and many other animal videos which relax our brains, short cooking tutorials to give ourselves treats, self-care, and motivational videos, etc. Reels can also boost our happiness and make us learn about various things. So, I am not taking against watching these, but just to see the negative side of how we are seeing it.

We can set boundaries on it, taking control of ourselves. We can minimize our screen time, leaving our phones slightly at a longer distance while doing important work, which I do, etc. Creating our own habits will help us to balance. Doing our activities with proper focus and attention, as well as watching reels.

Reels and shorts give us huge entertainment, but they should not be in a position to replace our thinking and focusing ability. We should become very careful. Because we should know that, if we do not protect our attention, someone else will freely and happily take it.

#Tasmia Sistri is a first year student of Masters in Communication at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.