Finding Stillness in the Age of the Scroll
By Susan Rosser
Without telling you how old I am, I am about to tell you how old I am. I grew up without the internet. In fact, the internet didn’t even exist for a good part of my early career. I never watched much online video content until 2020. That year, a double whammy—a series of biopsies and a worldwide pandemic—left me in an altered state to which I was unaccustomed. I found myself unable to concentrate for long stretches. Negative thoughts of the “what if” variety squirmed into the shadowy quadrants of my brain and always managed to surface, hijacking any effort at focus and diverting my mind to thoughts of complete dread.
And that’s when I found TikTok. My rattled brain could manage to digest tiny bits of streamed content. It was like a charcuterie board for my tattered mind – just a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And for a while, I won’t lie, it was a saving grace. Watching short dance videos or quick snippets of everyday life seemed to be all I could intellectually digest. I was grateful that such a medium existed to get me through all the worry.
Luckily, things turned out OK. I don’t even like writing that sentence, because I am supremely superstitious and feel like saying things are OK is a sure way to tempt fate. But here we are.
If I’m being honest, I do think all the short-form video content available at the swipe of a thumb started to rewire me a bit. I’ve always enjoyed reading fiction, but I found myself reading a few pages—by which I mean single digits—and then feeling the pull of my phone, ready to scroll myself into a fugue state. Listen, sometimes a fugue state is beneficial. But the ability to concentrate on complex thoughts, or follow the arc of a story across hundreds of pages, is a human skill worth protecting. And practicing.
This is not a scientific study. It’s just my brain talking about my brain. Still, I’m fairly certain it operates on a simple principle: use it or lose it
And summer, oddly enough, is when this becomes most apparent. If you have kids, the structure of school disappears. Even if you don’t, many of us take vacations or find other ways to relax when the heat and humidity turn everything into an all-encompassing slog. The days get pulled into something like slow motion. It can feel like moving through a hot, thick bisque, where everything takes more effort than it should. But in that sluggishness, there’s also a small but real opportunity to reset some of our wiring.
A book will not flash notifications or compete for your attention with anything else. It just waits. And if you give it enough uninterrupted time, it does something increasingly rare: it holds you.
So maybe this summer, between travel, camps and beach days and the endless choreography of work, laundry and other chores, there’s a quiet invitation worth accepting. Pick up a book. Not as a virtue exercise, not as a break from screens in some dramatic way, but simply as a return to something your mind already knows how to do.
When we stop paying attention, we suddenly find ourselves unable to pay attention.
Sleeve
Susan Rosser is the editor of South Florida Family Life. The last three books she read are “The Correspondent,” “The Husbands,” and “The God of the Woods.” She recommends all three. She is in the middle of “The Nickel Boys” and so far, so good.