The Choice Between Doomscrolling and Life
Some technologies are now designed to enslave our time and not to free it
“For no matter what you do, you will be overtaken by death. If you have something better to be doing when you are overtaken, get to work on that.” — Epictetus 3.5.6
I was hiking with Carson the other day at a nearby state park, when I was passed by a small group of teenagers.
None of them were looking north at the lake, neither east nor west at the forests, nor were their eyes cast south towards the green valley stretching off into the distance. Each was slow walking in a small gaggle, and every neck of the bunch was angled downwards until their chins rested on their chests. Their eyes were locked on to their smart phones. There was no visible interest in one another, or even the signs of pretending not to be interested, and no interest in the rocky soil, cirrus clouds, and blue-green water surrounding them.
What then? Let us take a walk with the Hewa of New Guinea to provide a counterpoint. One ethnographer of the Hewa left us with a vivid description of a hunt.
The moment a Hewa hunter leaves his home with bow and arrows in search of meat, he does not speak. He heel-to-toe stalks through the rainforest, shying away from man-made trails, slipping into the raw, thorn riddled wilderness for two to eight hours at a time. “Once he has seen or heard a bird he will slowly and quietly go directly under the bird’s perch, point his arrow straight at the bird, very slowly draw back the bow string, place it on the end of the unfletched arrow, and aim for about five seconds before releasing.” The hunter may only hit one bird out of every four or five.1
To lose focus, to complain about the heat, to blame his neighbor for borrowing his favorite bow and leaving him with the smaller one, or for his eye, hand, arm, and torso to be uncalibrated through laziness or lack of training, might mean stomach gnawing hunger. It might mean starvation. Or death.
A voice whispers in the hunters ear every second of every day and it reminds him of the thin thread that ties his life to this world. The binary between becoming a corpse and marveling at his lungs cycling oxygen and his heart pumping blood was simple and pure. We were designed for this sort of ultra intense engagement with the natural world of cause and effect, sweating to feed ourselves and bleeding to feed our kith and kin.
What happens now? Most of us no longer stalk eight hours in the rainforest for nutrient-dense meat. Our lives are therefore no longer dependent on our attention. Our attention has shifted from what may cause injury or death to that which, for the most part, is not deadly. What follows?
Technology was initially designed to save our time for more stimulating endeavors. Instead of spending two hours splashing about in the closest creek washing clothes, we could throw our clothes in a metal washing machine to do it for us while we spend our time writing books, becoming journeyman electricians, or whatever. We cannot use the primitive technology within our washing machines to drop our chins and doomscroll.
It is significant, then, that many new technologies are now deliberately designed to capture our time as opposed to free it.
The teenagers at the state park were a case in point. The world within the smart phone was all that mattered. Had they been born in a Hewa village, they would have had a voice quietly whispering in the back corners of their minds to remind them that each second of gnarled roots, chittering birds, and deep breathing is a gift beyond measure.
As it is, they have no context for each of the little things that make up a day. There was no covert eye contact and no facial twitches hinting at smiles. There was no stalking of cockatoo and no sense of awe at the golden fingers of the sun cutting through the canopy of leaves overhead. No sense of awe at why our eyes are bright and consciousness burns within our skulls. Without the sweaty and bloody business of survival, the other flesh and blood human beings walking nearby were worth nothing.
The teenagers, however, are not the only chin droppers. All too many of us do the same, including myself.
What else can capture our attention and make us feel as though we are engaged, only for us to shake our heads thirty minutes later and realize our time has vanished, never to return? If we are asked in the morning if we desperately want to spend two hours out of our twenty-four staring at our smart phones, what would we say? “Yes, I hope to get two hours closer to my death with nothing to show for it.” Who says this ahead of time? Yet how many do it every day?
The voodoo within the smart phone and its apps is not the problem. We have been given the choice to drop our chins or not. The voodoo does not issue orders, it merely poses questions: Are you a tool of technology or is technology a tool of yours? Are you in command of your mind or am I? Do you decide your next thought or shall my algorithms do it for you and relieve you of the burden of self-command?
It may not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that so many life hours have been siphoned away by smart phones and their apps that even the most murderous tyrants might blush at the waste.
This reminds me of the law of compounding. Two hours per day accumulated over one year is 730 hours of our lives. Over ten years, it is 7,300 hours. Over twenty years, it is 14,600 hours. What do the doers do with their time? Do the ascetically inclined doomscroll pictures on Instagram about water fasting and meditation instead of actually fasting and meditating? No. Do Marines watch war porn on TikTok to learn immediate action drills for when their teammates are shot? No. Do paramedics watch cat videos on YouTube to learn how to remain calm while stopping a bleed in the back of an ambulance swerving through traffic at seventy miles an hour? No.
The world that the smart phone and its apps open up to us is a farce. It is a lie. The scythe in a bone hand continues its inevitable approach, and we neither see its drift of inevitability towards us while the glowing screen stands in the way, nor do we see the vultures circling overhead while our chins are glued to our chests. It is within our power to doomscroll our lives to a blurry death. It seems then that if we do not want to live our lives in a rush while simultaneously getting nowhere, the chin dropping must end.
I am not disparaging all technology. Far from it. I am simply disparaging the idea of merging our soul with a liquid crystal display at the expense of the natural world and those we share it with. Let us do as the Hewa did – as the ancient Stoics did – and task the voice within our skulls to keep us sane.
Should I doomscroll at the red light? The voice will whisper, “Remember you will die: what is more energizing than a conversation with a flesh and blood human being that leaves you questioning everything you once thought you knew?” Should I go one video further down the YouTube rabbit hole? “Remember you will die: what is more gratifying than muscling up and down some hills beneath the pastel colors of the nautical twilight while the world is your own, the burn of lactic acid proof of your aliveness?” Should I swipe my thumb across the screen of my phone for the forty-fourth time today to check my messages and email? “Remember you will die: what is more entertaining than watching a single drop of water slowly swell on the edge of a green fig leaf that just might make you feel as though you are either a newborn child or ten thousand years old? What is more stimulating than this?”
What then? If this is to be the last twenty-four hours we have on earth, how would we want to spend it? With a machine? Or with a human, a dog, a cat, a tree, or some other living, breathing thing with blood or roots? With a detached, half committed attention, grunting in response? Or with the most intense awareness we can conjure?
Thank you for reading What then?
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Steadman, Lyle B. “Neighbours and Killers: Residence and Dominance among the Hewa of New Guinea.” Australian national university, 1971.
Excellent. Definitely a cause for introspection. On the one hand, I've almost entirely quit social media other than Substack, but even so I'm reading this, other articles, and Notes on my phone. I guess the key is being deliberate about it and always prioritizing real world experience. Thanks!
Substitute food, or gambling, or dope, or booze for "devices" and the essay will still read well. The challenge is this: each person afflicted (and we all are) must alone face these perils designed and aggressively maintained by an army of marketing professionals. We are under-dogs before the fight even starts. This takes a level of self-discipline beyond most and, because the damage is insidious and not dramatic like other addictions, is therefore not urgent. There have been days when I have felt physically ill from screen time. Will there be a reckoning?