Something happens to me when I’m scrolling through the scroll machine. I start to feel a sense of dread, or grief, or nausea.

Rather than concluding reasonably that scrolling is bad for my health in every way possible, I try to scroll back to what bothered me. I have a vague sense that one of the images or words I drifted past planted a seed of discomfort. If I can only find that, I can get rid of the bad feeling and keep scrolling in contentment.

I go back to try to find it. Sometimes it’s there, five slides ago—a joke that reminds me of something distasteful, or a picture that made my vicious little hindbrain remember that I’m a worthless compost heap in comparison to some perfect person on the internet.

Ultimately the scroll-machine giveth dopamine and the scroll-machine taketh dopamine away. It’s a really on-the-nose example of how affected I can be by small events. Little shards of experience can throw me into an emotional state.

Someone says one quiet word and my whole afternoon rotates around it.

It’s wild. 

Anyway, if you’ve landed here on your scroll journey, take a moment to take a breath. Consider this a digital resting point.