Against the Scrolling of Modern Day Sisyphus

Wake up. Check my phone, scroll for a while. Get up, go to the bathroom, get back to scrolling. Finish my business, start making breakfast, scroll. Clock in, get bored, scroll. Day in, day out. At nearly every opportunity, pick up my phone, cycle through apps until each one gets boring, and do so until I fall asleep.

Here's the thing; I think everyone should live their life according to whatever it is that they want to do. If it makes you happy, so long as you're not harming yourself or others, I couldn't care less about what you choose to do throughout your day. If something brings you happiness, whether I relate to that happiness or not, I think you should fulfill that something to your heart's desire. I dont judge others for enjoying social media for that reason. I have complicated feelings about it of my own, but that's exactly it - those feelings are mine.

In early 2020, when the covid pandemic first started to really sweep through the US, I started to work remotely. For the most part, I've kept it that way, and really enjoy the additional free time I get by cutting out a commute. Almost immediately, as many of us did, I got into the habit of "doomscrolling" during my work day - scrolling through social media incessantly and looking at dismal news updates and articles all along the way. Multiple times over, it wrecked my mental health. It was easy enough to assume it was a covid thing, and that my dissatisfaction stemmed from the darkness in the world at the time. I was just overexposing myself to it and needed to pull back.

Time passes, and halfway through 2022, I start experiencing the same thing. Something is different about it this time around - there's still plenty to doomscroll about, but now every time I pick up my phone I'm just annoyed. Open Twitter? Scroll for a bit, get annoyed, close it. Repeat the cycle with Facebook, and again with Reddit. This goes on for months and further frustrates me. No one else I know gets this obstinate about this, am I just being a bitter old fogey at this point? I used these sites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all of them for years. Why am I so annoyed now?

I decide to give it one last try. One last revamp of my relationship with social media. If I just simplify it down to focusing solely on my artwork, remove most of the personal edge, surely that'll take my interaction with social media down enough that I can focus.

That works, for a little while at least. After a few months of not seeing many results, and fighting with post algorithyms, I feel just as worn down and annoyed as before.

Then Elon Musk buys Twitter. The gears click into place. It starts to make sense.

I watch my friends panic on an almost weekly basis that his idiotic regime will make the site break. A few times, it does. Everyone starts postings links to all the other sites they inhabit, worrying that when this ship sinks they'll lose the place they've held friendships in forever. Having just invested time and effort into posting my artwork online, my resentment and frustration peaks. This kind of relationship with the internet is not what I wanted.

I start to reminisce about the old 'net. I grew up as web 1.0 was just beginning to fade into web 2.0. More than just nostalgia, I remember how excited I was to be online, and how I always had something to do. There was still a routine involved, certain sites I would want to check, but I generally did so with goals and purpose. I'd be reading someones comic, checking fansites for new content, looking at game guides, playing with html on multiple fan projects, playing games, etc. That experience of going to sites with purpose in mind is something I hadnt realized was missing from my relationship with the internet until that moment.

So now, in 2023, more than 15 years later, I make my gentle return to a simplified internet. Where I can be creatively me in any way I want without paying any mind to an algorithm. Where I no longer feel the need to scroll through feeds every moment of my day in the hopes of something, anything to entertain me until I inevitably put my phone down and pick it up again fifteen minutes later to do the same thing.

No more homogenized white and gray feeds. No more struggling for relevance against other artists. I'll post here when I want, for any reason, in any way I want to.

Simplified and free, I put down apps and return to be me.

-Vega