About
Welcome. ScrollCure is my attempt at embracing digital minimalism in an age where screens dominate our lives. It documents my reflections, musings & methods at seeking to establishing a more intentional relationship with digital technology of all kinds.
I grew up a as a normal kid. Nothing too extraordinary, nothing too abysmal. My childhood & teens were pretty normal too. The furthest that my memory recollects I always had a personality type that was naturally averse to addictive habits & substances. Yet when it came to digital technology, the devices were stickier than I had expected. It wasn’t so easy to disconnect from computer & phones.
Something changed around 2010s. Technology started evolving rapidly. Social media websites arrived on the scene & alongside it visual content superseded text content as the Internet’s preferred medium of communication, together resulting in permanently altering the very fabric of the society. And not only did it alter culture, it forced culture to accommodate itself to the technology instead of the other way around.
Within a course of few years long form text was replaced by shorter content. Language degraded & made room for emojis. Memes proliferated and voices became extremist & more polarised. Para-social relationships started developing between people and virtual entities they’d never meet in real life. Internet became the forefront in public discourse. It built people up & then tore them down. Trends appeared & vanished more rapidly.
Websites turned into mega-corporations and some of the richest companies in the world. For example, a social media website would not only let you stay connected to friends but would also offer you news, local communities, chat functionality, cat memes, videogames, video content, birthday reminders, a ticketing platform, ability to stalk past partners & new, photo-albums, horoscopes and a hundred other tools. A bunch of other new websites followed suit. Each a microcosm on it’s own. Some exist to this day, others have disappeared to obscurity & replaced by newer ones.
Meanwhile, people started realizing despite all these multifaceted thrills of social networks, they didn’t feel very good after spending time on these websites and that it had an adverse effect on their life either directly in the form of wasted time accounting to nothing or indirectly in the form of feeling insecure, depressed, burnt out, tired, anxious etc. Nobody could pinpoint what exactly felt off but something did. Yet at the very same time they also discovered that it was very difficult for them to detach & unglue themselves from these screens even at the cost of feeling continually worse or crucial aspects of real life deteriorating.
Alongside this, an another very critical development that was underway was the evolution of the smartphone. Smartphones had existed for a while by then but with each passing day, it grew task by task a substitute to the desktop computer and getting better & better on every front. One of the biggest benefits of the smartphone, speaking strictly technologically, was that the phone was easily portable everywhere. It could easily fit in the pocket of your pants and the palm of your hand. You could use it whether you be in a classrom, in a park or in the loo. You could now carry your misery & source of infinite distraction, with you, everywhere.
What this amounted to in simple, succinct terms is one of the the most permeative, cross-cultural, cross-societal, age-gender-race-education-no-bar global addiction epidemics. Not very unlike to the devastating epidemics caused by hard drugs when they first showed up on the scene & continue to be a menace to this day. Initially it was a few anomalous folks who’d always have their eyes glued to their devices. They were looked down upon with a sense of ridicule & amusement. Yet very quickly, it became a new normal across the society to spend 9 hours of the day in front of your work laptop, interspersed with 4 to 6 hours of phone usage and then a few more hours in the evening of watching OTT, sports or news in front of another screen of your choice in a single day. What you did or consume in those 15 hours on your device was even worse.
This was even before COVID happened when human isolation & it’s dependence on digital technology went up by a magnitude. This was before the advancements of data science & user tracking. Before the advent of infinite scroll. Before Instagram & TikTok became the forefront platforms of content consumption where content reduced to as little as 5 to 10 seconds a piece while being designed to be as stimulating, as attention drawing and as filled to the brim as possible.
Today we are at the cusp of AI being integrated & leveraged in every technology, possibly leading to a dystopic scenario which until recently might have only seemed plausible in a science fiction novel. We are already beyond the point where people are JUST-NOT-ABLE-TO stop scrolling & tapping on their devices no matter how strongly they will to. Even at costs of losing a job or losing a relationship or missing watching their child growing up, people rather even if unwilling to their desire, spend it in front of a screen.
ScrollCure is me finding myself at the same crossroads of realizing the adverse consequences of digital technology to eventually getting a constraint back on it. It is my reflections on & resistance to the digital lure. It is coming to terms with the fact that deaddicting oneself today is not a simple matter of exercising your will power or uninstalling an app or keeping your phone away. It is navigating a complex landscape of psychology, technology, human behavior, human needs, ethics, design science & addiction science.
Digital technology has enmeshed itself in every nook & cranny of human life. The voices on the side of reason & solution are few & not comprehensive. I’ve tried my best at bit-by-bit figuring out the solution, having it fail, rebuild it, break it down to an atomic level, re-constitute the pieces, test it again & repeat this loop N number of times till it finally worked for me consistently and to translate it into a methodological solution to help others and in turn help a generation that has been left to fend for itself against ever-evolving nemesis.
If you’re struggling with digital addiction, know that you’re not alone. ScrollCure is here to offer support, accountability, share insights, rant, critique, work out solutions and provide a space for those looking to break free from the relentless grip of technology. Together, we can forge a path towards a more intentional, meaningful life.
Thank you.
If you’d like to speak with me you can reach out on hi@scrollcure.com
If you’d like to seek help for digital addiction, I offer 1-on-1 counselling. You can read more about it here