Infinite Scrolling Has Ruined Society Forever

I am sorry. Those were the words uttered by AAR Rasin, the creator of the infinite scroll, after realizing his invention destroyed billions of people around the world. This one simple feature turned us into addicts. Is it too late for us to stop doom scrolling?

If you've ever felt this searing pain going up your arm at the end of a long day, it's most likely caused by an inflamed tendon that runs along the inside of your hand and forearm. One of the most likely causes of this inflammation is infinite scrolling. Like any other muscle tissue or joint in our body, the muscles in our hands and arms can get aggravated with overuse. The repetitive, constant motion of scrolling might not be some grand act of athleticism, but considering how much time we spend swiping our thumb or finger up and down, it's no surprise that many have developed this pain from overuse.

It's not just our bodies feeling the effects of infinite scrolling; we are increasingly isolated, anxious, and addicted as we're bombarded with endless content that, for the most part, isn't improving our lives. Almost none of us can say we haven't felt negatively affected by a post or a video we've seen on social media. It's impossible to avoid.

So how did we get here, and how did the infinite scroll become so ubiquitous in modern life? How does it keep us so engaged, and do we have any hope of escaping it? Humans weren't made to sit and stare at screens all day. Our ancestors were always on the move, running, jumping, and hunting. That's why I love the Olympics; it's a celebration of our natural athletic spirit.

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It's time to look up from your screens and tap into your inner athlete!

Back to our story. In ancient Egypt, scrolls were physical papers that were dramatically unfurled, revealing paintings and writings meant to enrich society. These scrolls, which were used for centuries, were finite singular items that expressed specific ideas. That finality is exactly what the concept of infinite scrolling has eliminated.

Despite the lingering pain you might feel in your forearm, scrolling has also taken the physical act out of being on the internet. In the days of the desktop computer, we needed our whole body to scroll. We had to sit in a chair and use all our fingers to type, moving one hand to the mouse. The early days of being online had athletic terms like surfing. They hinted at some sort of deep, active exploration of the internet.

And then the screens shrank. The devices shrank. We could have the experience of being online without moving anything but a single finger. With the invention of infinite scrolling, the adventurous nature of being online started disappearing. It became a passive activity rather than an active exploration. Now it's less like surfing and more like exposure therapy.

We're stuck in place, with our eyes locked on the screen, and we can't pull ourselves away to experience the actual world around us. The inventor of the infinite scroll, web designer AAR Rasin, has now made a second career out of his regret for inventing it back in 2006. While the passivity of activity might feel good in the moment, it's hard to argue that it is good.

Of course, there are important educational and amazing things to learn on the internet and social media. There are communities to be found and skills to be taught, but the endlessness of it all has made us slaves to the algorithm instead of curious, intentional users. Scrolling has become a key element of our digital lives, so much so that we sometimes don't even realize we're doing it.

How many times have you picked up your phone and, seemingly without realizing it, ended up 20 scrolls deep on TikTok? Scrolling is so second nature that it isn't even an intentional act. Instead, it's how we spend our passive time. The mega corporations behind all the popular social media platforms wouldn't want it any other way. Our instinctive behavior to scroll reinforces their algorithms and has created an entire economy built on our attention spans. If we stay hooked on our phones longer, we present more opportunities to advertisers to sell us things, and therefore, more opportunities for large tech companies to make money. The infinite scroll makes this cycle all but certain.

Human brains have adapted to consume what is in front of us. It’s not just puppy videos and vacation pics that keep us returning for more. In a 2005 study, researchers presented participants with bowls of soup connected to a tube that would automatically refill the bowl. The participants ate 70% more soup than others with normal bowls, without even noticing. You can think of infinite scrolling like that tube at the bottom of the bowl, constantly there to refill our brain with a soup seasoned with content, without us even realizing it.

Tech companies have hijacked our brains and gotten us hooked on their products by tapping into our reward system. The brain's reward system produces dopamine, a neurotransmitter known as the feel-good hormone. When we're hit with a shot of dopamine, we feel excited, elated, and motivated. We need dopamine to be productive, to feel creative, and to get out of bed.

But social media triggers a massive and quick release of dopamine that makes us feel like we're on a high. Normal dopamine levels help us get through our day and are often released at a slow, steady pace. These big spikes in dopamine that we experience when someone likes a photo we've posted or discovers a video that excites us can be deceiving. They trick us into thinking we will only feel good if we keep getting those big spikes, and that is called addiction.

You might have felt something like this if you've ever parted ways with your phone for a day or even an hour. When we're disconnected from that addicting infinite scroll, our brain releases the stress hormone cortisol because it's not getting the intense hits of dopamine that it's used to. Our neural pathways are used to feeling activated, and suddenly they're stripped of that feeling. For some of us, this can happen with merely a few minutes away from social media.

But if you can last a day, you might start to feel your heart rate increase, your blood pressure jump, or anxiety set in. The lack of reward you've been promised by endless scrolling on social media is hitting you, and you feel deprived as the stimulus has been removed. This reaction—or rather craving—is exactly how social media companies keep us using their platforms, even in the face of our own unhappiness.

Social media takes human connection and turns it into a drug. When we interact with social media, our brains light up in the same way as when we take drugs or drink alcohol. However, this drug on our phones, that we can endlessly scroll through, is available 24/7. The algorithm learns what we like and pushes us toward content we didn't even know we wanted.

Our brain on the drug of social media isn't a brain that's sustainable. One way to know if the infinite scroll has trapped you in its fangs is by tracking the three C's. The first is control. Are you able to control your consumption and retain a sense of autonomy over your decisions when it comes to phone and social media use? The next is compulsion. Do you feel yourself regularly reaching for your phone, aimlessly scrolling just to feel like your mood is regulated? Have you become dependent on it to feel normal?

The third C is consequences. Are you suffering consequences in your actual life because of your social media use? Have you isolated yourself from friends and family or noticed emerging struggles with your mental health? If any of the C's apply to you, then it might be time to reassess your relationship with the infinite scroll.

Even AAR Rasin says his goal was to create a seamless user experience, but he didn't foresee the consequences. He admits that the goal of the infinite scroll wasn't to help the user but to keep the user online for as long as possible. He also acknowledges its contribution to rising rates of social media and smartphone addiction. "I regret that I didn't think more about how this thing would be used," he told London-based The Times in 2019.

Like many of us, Rasin senses the dangers of the infinite scroll, and there's a lot of them. Endless content on social media reinforces negative thoughts and feelings. If we feel depressed or anxious, we have a tendency to seek out news or information that will confirm those feelings, leaving us in a harmful cycle of negative reinforcement.

It can also worsen any existing mental health struggles we're having, whether it's other people's cute photos with their partner that make us jealous, or someone expressing their own sadness that reminds us of our own, or a clickbait post filled with anger. We're susceptible to falling deeper down the hole we're already trying to climb out of.

These symptoms might include panic or worry, especially when it comes to the way we consume news on social media. Scrolling through catastrophe after catastrophe and hot take after hot take leads to a dark rumination of how upsetting the world is. Yes, sometimes positivity makes it to your feed, but we all know that negative and extreme content is what gets clicks.

Once this sets in, you might notice that you struggle with sleeping. So many of us scroll and scroll right before bed, even though we know it's not good for us. We sit slack-jawed, our faces illuminated by the screen a few inches away from our eyes, sinking deeper and deeper into the depths of content. Without us even knowing, this can increase our anxiety at the very exact time we're supposed to be relaxing.

Poor sleep can, in turn, increase stress and other mental health issues, so even if the content itself isn't upsetting you, the mere fact of looking at it before you go to bed can have adverse effects. Not to mention that an endless supply of information presents us with so many conflicting ideas, moods, and advice that we're left uneasy when we do manage to put down our devices.

There are very many opinions in the world, and to try and understand them in bite-sized servings on social media is a recipe for confusion and anxiety. Even as some sites have taken measures to reduce false news posts, it isn't always about whether the information is true or not; it's that there's so much of it that we're forced to sift through a sea of opinions, ideas, facts, lies, and perspectives, and it's impossible to sort out what we actually believe.

If you take a step back from the infinite scroll of information and think about your own values outside of what everyone on the Internet is saying, you probably could come up with a pretty good line of reasoning. But the moment you throw other people's posts into the mix, your independent mind is shut off.

The irony is that we know it's bad for us. We scroll through articles about how we can't stop scrolling. You're watching a video on one now. We don't sit down and think, "I'm going to spend 30 minutes on Instagram right now." We sit down to watch one video or search for one thing, and then we just don't really stop.

The Harvard Business Review conducted a study in 2022 with 6,445 U.S. students and working adults and identified three factors influencing whether people choose to keep looking at content rather than switch to another activity. The first was the amount of media already viewed. Would the rabbit hole grow stronger once people had already viewed a lot of content? In theory, one might think that if you watch a bunch of videos, you'll become bored, but the opposite is true.

In the study, those who watched five videos instead of one were 10% more likely to watch more. Another factor that keeps us hooked is the similarity of the media we view. When presented with the option of watching more videos on the same topic as the ones they'd already watched, participants were 21% more likely to stick with these related videos than those who were told they could watch videos on another topic.

Lastly, a deciding factor in addition to the content consumption is how we view that content. Unsurprisingly, uninterrupted video consumption made users 222% more likely to watch another video than those who had alternated between work tasks and videos. The infinite scroll holds the key to all three of these factors; they all increase with media accessibility and repetition.

When something feels accessible, it becomes easier to process, and we anticipate that we'll enjoy it more. That's dopamine at work. Even if going down that content rabbit hole is at odds with what we actually want to be doing, we just can't help ourselves. The apps we use are in the driver's seat. They're designed to trap users in an infinite supply of content, making it easy to consume several posts and videos in a row, suggesting similar content, and automatically starting the next video without interruption.

They fit all of the criteria to keep us addicted and away from our real lives. There's a lot of discussion in recent years about flow state. A flow state happens when we're immersed in an action that's both rewarding and challenging at the same time. All the while, we feel a sense of flow that keeps us engaged. Usually, the flow is a good thing; it might help us stay fit or creative, or it can be the key to staying on task with work.

However, regarding social media, the flow state is not where we want to live. A 2023 Baylor University study looked at 200 Instagram and TikTok users over the age of 18 and measured their time spent on the apps. They were asked about five aspects of their experience, specifically focused attention, enjoyment, curiosity, telepresence, and time distortion. All of these elements we want to achieve before finding a flow state.

The study found that they also exist when we use social media. If we are so immersed in content that we can't step out of it and redirect our attention, then we're in trouble. The invention and proliferation of the infinite scroll have not only made us addicted to our devices, but they've also swelled into real danger in the world around us.

You can look at the global political landscape. When social media became a major part of political organizing, fundraising, and commentary, we were siloed into echo chambers that reaffirmed our pre-existing views. We also began the app named doom scrolling, obsessively looking for the most enraging, distressing posts that would work us into a frenzy. When the trend hasn't slowed down, endless scrolling makes it impossible to step away from the bad news.

This tendency to continue looking at something that upsets us can have physical and mental effects. At no point in modern history was doom scrolling more pervasive than during the height of COVID. We were confronted with bad news every single day, which dug us deeper into our own echo chambers and turned us against one another from the isolation of our own homes.

While COVID was undoubtedly a dangerous and dark time for the planet, the feelings of dread and living on high alert have lingered. Constant doom scrolling can develop into obsessively checking the news or looking for a post that might trigger our anxieties because we think it will alleviate our emotional distress. But the exact opposite is true.

A constant flow of news and information interferes with other aspects of our lives. A 2022 Texas Tech study assessed people with problematic online consumption levels and found that 74% reported mental health problems and 61% experienced physical problems. The positive side of social media is that it can open our eyes to people and ideas that we wouldn't otherwise know existed, and it shouldn't be discounted.

Our habit of consumption, which has grown over the last decade but really swelled in the last five years, has not been the eye-opening experience that one might hope for. Instead, it has turned us into obsessive consumers who are slaves to an algorithm that very rarely fulfills the promise of introducing us to concepts that don't solidify our previously held beliefs.

We have become detached from actual life, ignorant of our physical neighbors in favor of the people we see 45 minutes deep into a TikTok rabbit hole. We aren't just addicted to scrolling through social media; we're addicted to the ideas and people we find there and the safety of what we think they provide.

While seeking out like-minded individuals on the internet might seem like it would only bolster our self-confidence, we know that's not the case. Self-esteem has plummeted as we find ourselves chasing likes, views, and comments to make us feel good and worthy. Everyone knows that every Instagram post isn't the reality of someone's life, but it is pretty hard to keep that in mind when you are endlessly scrolling through bodies you wish you had or vacations you wish you were on.

Logic just disappears when our impulsive reaction to the content we see takes over. Infinite scrolling rewards us for that reaction. The technology, together with our brain's reward system, sees us engaging with posts and features that ultimately don't make us feel very good and pushes more of it on us.

People aren't always out there trying to make you feel bad, but it is one of the side effects of the mere concept of social media. Everybody's putting their best foot forward, or at least only sharing a snippet of their own reality. As we keep scrolling, we can't help but think, "I wish I had that." Yet again, our attention is the only thing the platform cares about, not our emotional well-being.

Nowhere is the struggle with self-esteem and emotional distress more poignant than when it comes to social media's effect on young people. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General put out an advisory about the effects of social media on youth mental health. He stated that, although there are benefits of social media for younger users, there's not enough evidence that overall these platforms are safe for children.

In fact, there's growing evidence that social media use is a major contributor to the youth mental health crisis in America. The American Psychological Association also issued a health advisory in 2023 on the dangers of social media for adolescents. By 2024, it lamented that no meaningful changes to social media platforms had been adopted and no federal policies had been enacted.

These platforms, it argues, aren't inherently built for youth consumption. Young people require special protection due to their unique developmental vulnerabilities through childhood and continuing into their teenage and late adolescent years. These vulnerabilities are compounded if a young person is already experiencing psychological or physical challenges.

Our brain's development from about the age of 10 until our mid-20s is linked with hypersensitivity to social feedback. We become especially invested in behaviors that will get us personalized feedback, praise, or attention from our peers. We all remember that inexplicable feeling in our formative years of just wanting to fit in, of being so aware of our social surroundings to the point that we're obsessed over it.

But it's not just the playground or the cafeteria that presents these types of social pressures anymore. Social media's algorithms can present content that can be overly influential to young people and very hard to resist. At an early age, it's as if the school bully is waiting around every corner to remind you of your perceived flaws and is constantly screaming in your ear.

Since social media platforms prioritize engagement, young people are destined to see more and more content that drags them down instead of lifts them up. The struggles with self-esteem and social media addiction that adults feel are present in young people in a much stronger, more insidious way. Likes and follower accounts activate regions of the brain that trigger repetitive behavior. This trigger has a greater influence on a younger person's attitudes than an adult's because they are more sensitive to both positive feedback and rejection.

Young people have underdeveloped impulse control, so their ability to understand this trigger and reason their way out of this repetitive behavior is limited. When we're young, our cortical system, which is in charge of functions like reasoning, problem solving, and emotional regulation, is still developing. We are less capable of stopping behavior that leads to a temporary benefit despite negative long-term consequences.

Think about the school-aged individuals in your life. It's pretty obvious they make their decisions on a short-term basis. It's not a bad thing; it's just called being a kid. But infinite scrolling is risky for youth because their ability to monitor and stop engagement on social media is more limited. That difficulty disengaging leads to higher rates of symptoms of dependency.

Young people need boundaries, and the very definition of the infinite scroll is that there are none. Without boundaries and with endless digital clutter barraging them almost every minute of the day, the minds we depend on to keep the world around us on track in the future are being robbed of the skills needed to do just that.

There have been lawsuits filed across the United States against companies like Google, the owner of YouTube; Snap Incorporated, which owns Snapchat; and Meta, which calls the shots for Facebook, arguing that social media isn't safe for the youth in attempting to hold these companies accountable. But with nonstop access available no matter where you are, it's very hard for any of these lawsuits to do anything at all.

We can assume that the companies behind the platforms don't really want to do anything about it either. The Googles and the metas of the world that benefit from the addictive nature of infinite scrolling are designed for profit. They are businesses. They are there to capitalize on our attention, and the attention of young people has proven very valuable.

In 2023, social media companies made over 11 billion in ad revenue just from marketing to minors. A 2023 study from Harvard's School of Public Health cited the need for government regulation of social media companies, since they stand to make so much money from children and are clearly unable to self-regulate.

The study argues that regulations and additional transparency could alleviate some of the harm to youth mental health. Of course, these companies aren't the first to advertise to children, but online ads are especially insidious for kids because they have a harder time telling the difference between an ad and organic content. Now, whether it's kids, their teachers, their grandparents, or their siblings, everyone is the product.

The transaction in our use of social media isn't us receiving enjoyment from the platform; it's that the media company is renting our attention to advertisers. This is obvious in television, but much more veiled as we scroll endlessly from a table at a coffee shop or waiting in line at the bank.

The more we scroll, the more ads we see, and most importantly, the more information the platform can gather about what we like and what we don't like. This allows the algorithm to feed us the ads we're most likely to engage with. This propels companies and businesses to buy more ads based on the platforms because of the sheer targeted data these platforms can offer. This cycle is happening, and we are a part of it, and we are being used.

The ancient Egyptians who created the first scrolls would probably look at the evolution of their creation with confusion and possibly judgment. Ancient scrolls were the first kind of editable media and were also a staple of Asian culture for centuries. They're still used as a medium by fine artists today.

In traditional Chinese art, there were two types of scrolls: a hanging scroll and a hand scroll. A hanging scroll was displayed on the wall for long periods of time, like we might see now in a museum, but a hand scroll was kept rolled up until the time of viewing, when the owner would get it out of its ornate storage box and ceremoniously unfurl it.

These Chinese scrolls share some interesting similarities to modern-day social media. An individual would experience the unfurling like a panorama, seeing different pieces of the painting as it was revealed, like a tracking shot in a film. The social dynamics of these hand scrolls were reflected in the papers included on either end, where owners and viewers would write clever commentary about the content.

This was an opportunity to improve the painting, and occasionally, intellectuals within the literary class would joke that they felt pressured to write something good. This concept made the artwork a continued collaboration across time; a social experience.

However, we shouldn't romanticize our use of social media too much because the dimensions of the ancient scrolls were finite. The social context around them was intimate, and the consumption of them was very intentional. They cultivated a sustained curiosity from their audience. The current idea of scrolling gives the appearance of constant abundance, so much so that we don't even recognize or digest most of what we swipe past.

Yet for some reason, the infinite amount of knowledge and ideas that makes us feel like we know everything just because we scroll past it. You know, we could learn a thing or two from these ancient hand scrolls that preach deference to what we do not know.

So the question is, can we fix it? Has the infinite scroll really ruined us forever? The Center for Humane Technology, an institution based in San Francisco and co-founded by a former Google employee named Tristan Harris, has tried to warn the world that the digital revolution has made us addicted to likes, retweets, and online validation.

In turn, we've become more depressed and distracted than ever. It also suggests that if the infinite scroll went away, we would be able to incentivize living and embrace fewer online interactions. We'd have time for more contemplation and context with limited amounts of content available, and we could support smaller online and real-life communities instead of seemingly having the entire world at our fingertips.

Recent calls like these for comp technology support devices that don't capitalize on our dopamine response. They push ideas like the cozy web—the mass space of social media abandoned and replaced with smaller invitation-only chats and forums. The problem, proponents of these ideas say, is not the user but capitalism. Decentralized and community-owned platforms could be a path forward and channel some of the ideas we saw centuries ago around ancient hand scrolls with their consumption and collaboration.

It's not a totally outlandish idea, as we see more and more people walking away from social media. Some who have abandoned it don't even crave an alternative, proving that the addiction isn't really to the product but to our own neurological responses to it.

The most mindful type of scrolling simply isn't scrolling. The infinite scroll might still become the simplest gesture in the history of humankind to bring Society to its knees. Take it from his creator AAR Rasin, who said, "This is a profound moment in our species. We are losing control of the tools we made." [Music]