I want to be honest with you before this article starts: passive consumption is not my worst battle. Compared to what food and video games did to me for years, scrolling Instagram for a few minutes while waiting for water to boil is barely a problem.
But I’m writing about it anyway, because I think it’s a lot of people’s main issue.
“Why is it the main issue? How can you be so confident?”
Let me tell you about that time I stood in a train station and saw something I can’t unsee (and trust me, I wish I could).
It was during university, more than ten years ago. I was waiting for a train home, in one of the rare periods of my life when I had decided to actively try to connect with people. I put my phone in my pocket and looked around.
I might as well have been alone. Almost everyone in that station had their eyes locked on a screen. Someone was surely doing something that required the phone, like answering a message or checking work emails, but let’s be honest: how big of a percentage of people could it be? How many of them had a legitimate use for their phone in that moment and how many were actually numbing their minds?
I remember feeling something between sadness and relief. Sadness because human connection was dying right in front of me, one notification at a time. Relief because at least I wasn’t the only one who had trouble with it — the whole world was practicing avoidance now, not just me.
That was more than a decade ago. The situation has not improved.
Here is what passive consumption actually looks like in my life, on an average day.
I open Instagram while I’m cooking, waiting for something to boil. I scroll for three minutes. Everything looks the same as yesterday. I close it, mildly irritated at myself for opening it in the first place.
During a work call where my presence is technically required but practically irrelevant, I scroll again. Same content, same irritation, same closing.
YouTube is different. YouTube I’ll watch while eating, I’ll go on a binge watching streak I can’t predict the end of. When it does end, though, I feel like I’ve wasted time, even when I had nothing else to do. Even when the video was genuinely interesting.
I’m lucky, I manage to limit passive consumption to the times when I have nothing important to do, but I know it’s not the same for everyone. The thing is: if I perceive it like a (small) problem because it inconveniences my focus capability every now and then, what happens to a person who uses social media several hours per day? What do they feel, if then even feel anything?
Of the three escapes I’ve had in my life — video games, food, and this — passive consumption is the weakest and the strangest.
Video games were stimulating; they asked something of me, I could keep my mind busy, I could lose myself in them for hours and feel genuinely engaged. Food delivered physical pleasure, a pleasure I wasn’t capable of saying no to.
Passive consumption delivers nothing. It’s not stimulating, it’s not pleasurable, it’s not even particularly relaxing. Sometimes I find something funny, but seeing it reposted ten thousand times by ten thousand content creators in the following days makes it much less fun. It’s just where your brain goes to when it doesn’t want to be where it is.
That’s why I don’t call it an addiction, at least not in my case. I can go a full day without any of it pretty easily. What it is, instead, is an automatic reflex, something my hand does without a conscious decision of my brain, because my brain is busy falling half asleep in a boring moment.
The problem is that boredom is so important for the development of our brains. Being bored is the reason we pick up new things to learn, we choose habits to introduce in our lives, or fantasize about the life we want to live and new ways to obtain it. That’s the very thing that makes us human.
If we fill those void moments with meaningless content, we’re going to have nothing but meaningless thoughts.
What actually helps, in my experience, is less glamorous than you might think.
Deciding in advance works. If I decide I’m not opening anything today, I don’t. The timer Instagram lets you set — I have mine at 45 minutes, which I rarely reach — creates a small moment of friction that’s often enough to make me close the app instead of continuing.
In my opinion, though, the most reliable solution is simply having something better to do, like a book, or music that requires actual listening. I love my karate three evenings a week, but even reading the list of the ingredients on a shampoo bottle while you’re on the toilet (ah, the good old 90s) is a better choice than scrolling social media.
When the alternative is genuinely good, the brain wants nothing to do with my phone.
The goal isn’t to eliminate boredom — that’s a losing battle, and not one you want to win, anyway. The goal is to take control of your brain, a magnificent machine that is capable of unimaginable things.
Now I’ll tell you something social media influencers won’t: dropping your phone isn’t going to help you form meaningful connections. It’s probably the other way around: nowadays everybody is always glued to their phone, it has almost become an extension of our hands, and if you try to sit through an empty moment (like waiting for a train) unarmed you will likely find yourself surrounded with people who are only there with their bodies, and not very willing to have a conversation. If you read my articles, you have understood by now that I’m trying to live a full and meaningful life even in the periods of absence of deep social connections. I believe we only need to make ourselves happy, and living a constantly online life isn’t going to help with that. That’s the reason why I always encourage others to keep their phone in their pockets, even if it damages their social lives.