There’s a value to everything. A cost to consume.

Scrolling screens doesn’t ask for your money upfront, but it does take your time, distract your focus, and reconstitute your sense of self. It’s like a toll booth you barely notice, charging you second by second, swipe by swipe.

There’s always noise, always ads. Always reminders that you should be doing more, buying more, being better. We’re so used to hearing messages about needing more to be better, they don’t even have to be subtle anymore. They’re just everywhere.

Commercials are basically mean girls in disguise. not-so-subtle whispers that who you are isn’t quite enough yet. They spend their money trying to get you to spend yours, all while convincing you that robbing your attention is worth the time you gave them to do it.

But if your thoughts weren’t up for sale? If you attention was out of reach to the highest bidder? What if the algorithm didn’t tell you what to think about next? Turns out, your brain doesn’t need assistance from something it created to do something it was always, always meant to do.

No cognitive hand-holding for the faint of thought. No shortcuts for shallow minds. No atrophied intellect.

If being alone with your thoughts didn’t feel uncomfortable, or like failure?
If silence didn’t feel suspicious?
What if we welcomed our thoughts like a familiar friend, allowing them to develop and grow with us?
What would it look like to stop confusing distraction with rest?

Misled through connectivity that’s everywhere, when connection is rare.
We’re wired into worlds that would rather keep us consuming than contemplating.

The internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet of self-identity. Overloaded with options, none of them particularly nourishing. Take what you want, pile it high, mix it all together. A little more of this, a little less of that.
It’s tempting, it’s endless, and it’s surface. These identities are built to break to one compelling distraction after another.

The Greek word for puppet is νευρόσπαστος (nevróspastos) — literally, “drawn by strings.”
And that’s what the scroll can do: pull, tug, direct, distract.
I hate strings. The quiet tug of the algorithm. The smooth, sneaky way it decides what you see before you even know what you need. Woof.

What if your next move wasn’t another post, another scroll, another string?
What if it was a pause?

Just one breath of awareness.
One moment of worthy worry.
One act of soul-tending instead of soul-selling.

It’s hard to keep a space from filling up with stuff . The bigger the space, the more stuff to fill it with. The internet will never be full. There will always be something to see.

But it’s still possible to clear room for stillness.
To listen. To notice. To take note.

So let the scroll toll.
Like a steady, familiar, easy to ignore bell in the distance reminding us that time isn’t something we can make more of. We only get to choose what we do with it.
We can let the minutes slip by in a blur of content we won’t remember, or we can choose to be present, to create moments that matter. Scrolling feels like filling space or wasting time, but mostly it’s just letting time slip away. We weren’t made to consume endlessly, we were made to notice and create moments that matter.

The scroll tolls because it costs us something every time
It’s the price we pay for checking out

Like Netflix asking “Are you still watching?”
Because somehow we need a computer to remind us we’re still here.