The majority of your YouTube recommended feed is ‘how to reduce your screen time’ content.
How I cut my screen time by 80%. How to cure brainrot. How to make each day so fun you don’t have time to scroll. Our no-phone road trip. 10 ways to stop ruining your life. The ideas we lose by morning. A notebook to cure the infinite scroll.
All real, great videos. And all videos you would watch, absorb, reflect on and think: actionable advice. And you’d put your phone down, pick up a journal or a novel, and unplug from the internet for a while. An hour, perhaps two if you’re really feeling it, would pass, and you’d think; I’m cured. I’m detoxing.
I’m fixing things. You’d begin to shift the consumption / production scale back towards the centre. You might write something, record a song or paint a fresco.
And then the last dregs of the dopamine you’d been gifted by the algorithm you so quickly dropped would fade. You return to baseline and now you think: I’m bored. I have nothing to do. All the movies on your watchlist look uninteresting. The book doesn’t hold your attention, and it’s too dark to read anyway, so you might as well not bother. The light switch is all the way over there.
But you can read a phone screen in the dark. And it’s right next to you, and you’ve been so good the last couple of hours, so you might as well. So, you go straight back to the algorithm. Instagram, TikTok, whatever else you can find novelty in scrolling through. And then you hit a real problem.
The scroll becomes boring as well. In retrospect, this is a sign for you to log off, put the phone out of reach, and go to sleep. But, in your half-awake, dopamine-chasing state, you won’t take boredom or silence for an answer. The app store beckons, the promise of a new, original source of stimulation looming. Now you’re scrolling for things to scroll on. Games. Habit-tracking apps and photo editors. Financial helpers and navigation tools and calorie counters. A catalogue of exciting, untested sign-up pages and in-app purchases.
You download two or three. Test them out, get to grips with the basics. Beat a couple levels of a game you won’t remember the name of in the morning. Pay
12.99 for a year’s subscription to a flexibility and stretching app because it was 75% off and that’s a great deal. That’s too good to pass up on. Never mind that you’re in bed already and it would be silly now to get up and start doing yoga on your floor, so you promise yourself that in the morning you’ll make use of your newest subscription.
And then the crash comes. The ‘what am I doing with my life’ auto-immune response to the login confirmation email which pushes you over the edge. Then comes the promise to take yourself seriously tomorrow, to commit yourself again to the dopamine detox – an exciting, novel idea you saw somebody talk about in a reel a while back. You delete the apps, forgetting to cancel that 12.99 subscription. In a year’s time, you’ll see the renewal, curse yourself for not cancelling, and commit yourself to at least putting it to good use – you’ll stretch in the morning.
Now you’re in productivity no-mans land. Committed to improving, but shamefully carrying the lethargy and staleness of last night’s scroll. You boot up youtube – the first step is to watch some long-form content. Test the attention span. You watch the first ‘reducing screen-time’ video essay you can find. And the cycle repeats itself.
This is a perfect example of belief-discordant behaviour. Also known as the belief-behaviour mismatch, this phenomenon describes a subject who behaves in a different way than she consciously asserts that she believes. If you relate to the experience described above, you’ve exhibited belief-discordant behaviour as well. Always having the desire to change and improve, and always choosing the path of least resistance, constantly making the wrong choice. Riding the wave of motivation, and when that inevitably fades, falling back into inertia and waiting for it to return.
This is why those video essays listed above, great as they are, fundamentally don’t work. It’s just too easy to listen to them attentively, take their advice, implement the protocols, delete the apps and install the blockers and whatever else. And to just not follow through. If you’ve installed the blocker, you can remove it as well. And we do. Time and time again.
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