Keep Scrolling, We Love You
Before we start a few facts if I may (they’re true, I googled them):
The global average screen time in 2025 is 6 hours and 40 minutes
Gen Z averages around 9 hours a day.
You’ve already seen the guy in the Turnstile t-shirt on Youtube telling you with no trace of irony that the algorithm is ruining your life. You’re very savvy, you know that Tiktok is only free because your attention is the product. You’ve heard enough old timers telling you to put the damn thing down at the dinner table, they didn’t even HAVE mobile phones in their day remember. And hell, y’know what Grandpa, you’re right. So you’ve done it. Huzzah. The evil has been defeated and you’ve gotten rid of the mobile device. You’ve replaced your iPhone with, at the very least:
An alarm clock
Ten friends to tell that you’re not on social media anymore, no not even that one
A camera
A photo album
A laptop for the seventh circle of Gmail (one technological evil at a time, please)
A radio
A CD player
Conservatively, 700 CD’s
500 films (this only applies if you’re one of those people who watches films on your phone, in which case there’s something inside of you that I can’t and won’t contend with, goodnight)
A printer for all those fucking e-tickets
Ten more friends to tell that you’re no longer ‘consuming short form content’ (podcasts are still fine, this isn’t the dark ages)
A calendar
Small bag of coins for the nearest payphone (good luck finding that)
Carrier pigeon perhaps (for more urgent missives)
Or maybe you just cheated and deleted all your apps; regardless, the shackles of the phone bind your hands no more. You’re free! …now what? I’ve noticed over the years of seeing these posts and videos about limiting your exposure to social media and ads for various apps/tiny phone prison boxes to cut down your screen time that there’s never really any mention of what comes next. What idyll hides behind the screen? What great forest can we not see for the virtual trees? I assume you’re not ignoring anything vital, that you don’t have any wives/children/pets you’re shooing away to browse reddit. This is otherwise purely dead time we’re talking about. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only real answer to this is a hobby.
But what even is a hobby? The general consensus seems to be that it is something you do exclusively for pleasure with no tangible reward. I say tangible reward because I assume there’s an implied sort of enrichment based reward. I’d also like to add my own criteria of it having to be something more involved than just purchasing things. This isn’t to say that a hobby has to be cheap or free, there just has to be extra steps. As an example: Warhammer is a hobby, you purchase the thing- the y’know. Okay brief intermission while I ask my boyfriend, I’ll be back in anywhere from 2 minutes to 4 business days. The miniatures! The space marines! You paint the space marines and then you aid them in their quest to subjugate other people’s factions (presumably also of space marines but who knows man). The purchasing of the space marine is in aid of something further. Collecting furry animal keychains is not in aid of anything further and therefore is not a hobby. I collected the Lego Muppets Minifigures. I understand their charms but it still doesn’t count. And if I put on miniature Muppet Shows for myself sometimes that’s my own business. They’re blind bags I got 3 Animals trying to get The Swedish Chef, it’s a very drum heavy show, Collinsian even. Collecting Pokemon cards purely to collect them is also not a hobby (please direct any arguments against this to the owners of this website who by publishing have co-signed this opinion). Assembling binders of cards with all the moneyed fervour of a Victorian hanging oils of pineapples and figs. It’s nothing. It’s a token, a small scale simulacrum of an interest.
Before you think me high and mighty, by own rubric I would class my hobbies as:
Sitting
Reading AITA posts on Reddit
Having 3 beers
Forcing my boyfriend let me hold him like a baby
Maybe reading
I say maybe because I wouldn’t class it as a purely pleasure based pursuit as despite my best efforts I cannot read without being haunted by the spectre of a short man with curly hair reading Joan Didion outside a coffee shop, peeking his little mustachio’d head larvaeish towards the sunshine of my own intellectual aspiration. To further this point when I read Stoner for the first time I was gripped almost dysphorically by the urge to become a middle aged English professor in a loveless marriage. During this period I also averaged 6 hours a day on Apex Legends and talked myself off the ledge of becoming an office shooter every day with a tin of kimchi on my lunch break (and the fear that they wouldn’t let me do the New Yorker crossword in prison). This context should give you all the information you need to form an accurate and reliable estimate of how much you should value my thoughts and opinions.
So you get a hobby. You read books where men have profound revelations about how other people have interior lives and shit, you write Superman x Lex Luthor a/b/o mpreg, you draw pictures of your friends as what animal they would have been if we hadn’t all allegedly evolved from the same one. Then you say hey, it sure would be nice to find other people who also do this, or hey I wonder if I can find any tips on drawing a more realistic cloaca. Whatever it is you’re doing the internet is handily available to show you 3000 people doing it infinitely better than you probably ever could. Social media has given people a schizophrenic sense of self-awareness and performance. Doing things badly feels bad, it just does, then on top of that you’ve against your own will been psychologically entered into a competition with everyone else in the world who has access to the internet and also does it.
Despite this, strangely enough I think the primary intrinsic value of a hobby is to teach people to struggle, and more importantly to teach people to suck at something. Every hobby has people who are good at it, but it also has an entry level where anyone with access to the basic materials is free to be god-awful at it. For every Rembrandt there’s a toddler with a crayon, for every crocheter fucking up a scarf there’s a middle aged woman in Oklahoma recreating the Bayeux tapestry in yarn. Even reading; there’s a difference between being functionally literate and reading Pynchon with any level of understanding. I can’t help but feel that there is something inherently valuable in feeling frustrated and inadequate and painfully bored in a no-stakes environment. Find any video speaking negatively about AI art and I guarantee to you the top comment will be someone complaining about how it is an ableist take because they lost their arms and legs in a sort of Robocop esque incident but their idea for a painting of a woman with a flower on her head was so valuable they had no other choice but to use AI to bring it into existence. Excusing the use of AI because it makes art more ‘accessible’ to people. Call me ableist if you will, they’re wrong and moreover they’re fucking stupid. You can’t create anything without the risk of it being terrible, without the risk of feeling useless and afraid. If you try to you’re a coward, make nothing before you make something hollow.
The alternative is that you try something and find out that you’re good at it, then comes the inevitable pressure to turn it into something profitable. If you make something, anything, when was the last time someone told you you should sell it? Or offered to grossly underpay you to make one for your aunt so and so? You can’t even post anything online without someone in the comments offering you below minimum wage for it. Even if you’re not selling the actual physical product of your hobby you’re selling a 30 second clip of you doing it. The attention market goes both ways, you can buy and sell, and watching someone else doing something is feeling more and more like a substitute for doing it yourself. Reading seems to have fallen especially victim to readers going semi-pro. Doing weekly book hauls and making everyone who doesn’t read 30 books a week feel like a casual. Where are we supposed to fit this much reading in? We’re already infested with grindset/productivity/hustle/5-9 after my 9-5 influencers showing us how much they can physically do in a day. Here’s how I use my lunch break at work productively, here’s why you’re not utilising the hours between 3-5am productively (for example you could listen to the Diary of a CEO episode about the importance of sleep), here’s my spreadsheet where I work out how much time I waste every day shitting and how I fixed that by having my daily cry at the same time.
Anything encouraging people to read rocks in my book (pun intended) but if I wrote one and it was included in one of those silent review videos I would vlog me blowing my brains out like Ricardo Lopez. Monetising the activity inherently perverts it, whether it’s something you’d be doing anyway or not. There’s something deeply harrowing about someone with 5 views and a block of hashtags longer than your thumb begging for engagement on their video about which edition of the new RF Kuang book they like best. Please like. Please comment. Please watch to the end of the video. Please make me real.
It’s not even necessarily just external pressure to monetise, you’ll do it to yourself if you’re not careful. This is the worst eventuality, you start doing something, discover you’re good at it and then become one of those schmucks trying to write the next great American novel or something. This is less of a peril for activities other than writing which is a shame because the idea of a crocheter whining that no one gets them or sees their genius is unbearably charming. It must also be a problem in other demographics but being friends with writers is akin to how I would imagine living in an area with a particularly eager Jehovah’s Witness community.
“Sorry, I’m busy”
“No, I don’t want a pamphlet”
“Yes, I know it’s called a zine”
“No, that’s not your idea, Don Delillo definitely already wrote that”
The point is this. Based on the life expectancy in the UK, optimistically and assuming a standard of health that I do not subscribe to, I will live for a maximum of another 56 years. The day I just had, its petty frustration and its miniature cathedrals for those with eyes to see, I will have another 21,170 of those. (Based on this same UK life expectancy, assuming that he never retires and, like the other great behemoth of entertainment and knowledge Tommy Cooper, dies on ((albeit the aural)) stage; there are only 5,004 episodes of the Diary of a CEO podcast left in Steven Bartlett’s life and thus my own life expectancy calculations must be done with the implied caveat that I may kill myself at this point in the future- or that the extreme distress of the event will take a few years off me) Either way, and then I will die and maybe I’ll be buried or maybe I won’t and maybe worms will eat me or maybe they won’t. Or maybe I’ll get hit by a bus tomorrow or have a massive coronary event in 10 years. Maybe I’ll die satisfied or maybe I’ll feel alone and be afraid. I don’t know how many more years you have, historically a lot more than any generation of humans before you has. But until then you’re here and whether you like it or not your mind is manufacturing meaning out of something. You’re paying attention to something. Maybe your life’s great and you’re just kind of embryonically floating in joy and meaning with your 8 hobbies that you love. Or your life is normal and you’re kinda bored and your brain is manufacturing meaning out of how your coworkers a fucking cunt and your headphones are doing that thing where you have to twist the wire again and then you’re wondering why you’re fucking miserable. I don’t mean friends and connecting with other people and saving the world and all of that bullshit. I mean when it’s you and the walls, what are you paying attention to? Do you want to choose something for yourself or do you want a world that doesn’t really think of you at all to foist something upon you? Or do you want someone else’s idea of what a worthwhile use of your however many thousand days is? ‘Read this book, watch this film, go to this exhibition, learn/expand your mind/yadda yadda’ for what? Maybe you just wanna look at planes in the sky, or keep your lawn obsessively neat, or sit on your settee watching dumb tiktok videos for an hour. It’s your time, if you wanna die knowing who Akira Kurosawa is cool, if you wanna die knowing what a perfect lawn looks like that’s cool too. This isn’t an anti-intellectual argument. This is a defense of your inalienable right to your own attention and your sacred duty to yourself to find something that you can make some meaning out of and hold it in your head like one of those little agitator beads in a bottle of paint to knock the infinite tiny and less tiny inconveniences of being alive out.
So you try the hobbies, you feel the suck, you sell the painting for 5 pounds on Etsy, you read the 30 books, and you find out that you feel no better or worse for doing any of it. (Not listening to the Diary of a CEO podcast, you feel great after that actually wow) You find out that there’s an awful sort of nihilistic apathy inside you and you don’t want to write, or draw, or build model planes inside bottles as a fun alternative to ships. You simply do not care, and you were having more fun on the phone anyway. Like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree for extra-curricular interests except each fruit has tiny teeth marks in the rind where you didn’t have enough patience, will or care to break through to the sweet part.
Kicking the phone habit risks breaking out of the dopamine cage to find that there isn’t much out there at all. Or worse that all that’s out there is someone else’s idea of how to waste a few hours. Even without the apps and the social media and so on and so forth, you’re still just you, and maybe you’re kinda boring, and maybe that’s fine. So keep scrolling. We love you.