From the Editor’s Desk: Learnscrolling ⭐

Years ago, when we still lived in Dedham with the kids, I went to a small fitness studio to work out with a personal trainer three times a week because I found the local gyms lackluster and I’m not much of a self-starter with this kind of thing. One of my favorite and longer lasting trainers was an attractive young blond woman, and she surprised me over time with an intelligence I really came to appreciate.

One day, I came into the studio ahead of a session and she was sitting at the front desk reading People magazine, or some other People-adjacent nonsense that focused on celebrities and whatever ridiculous advice they have to offer about eating, relationships, and who knows (or cares) what else. This surprised me, and before I could think better of it, I blurted out something like, “you’re better than that.” And regretted it immediately.

But she asked, so I told her that when she has downtime at work, she has choices about how to fill that time. And that I couldn’t think of a less fulfilling activity than reading that magazine, which would just fill her head with useless information. Perhaps she could read something educational, I suggested, noting that when I had worked in banks as a young man I would often read technical books like Petzold’s Programming Windows in my spare time. And that there had been some benefit to this as I later became part of the technology industry, albeit as a writer not a programmer.

She was unimpressed by this argument. She told me she didn’t care about anything in the magazine and that sometimes she just wanted to rest her mind, not keep it busy. This was her free time, in short, and she would spend it the way she wanted to. Today, we would call this being intentional, but we have so many stupid terms today that weren’t common back then. She was just doing her own thing.

Fair enough. She went on to kick my butt that day, as usual, but she also gave me something to think about. And while I’ve never drawn a straight line between these things, my wife and I will specifically–intentionally–watch true crime shows on YouTube or whatever at night because there’s nothing to think about. It’s always immediately obvious who did it, and there’s no pretense otherwise. And we can wind down our brains for a few hours before going to bed. Sometimes we are engaged with a show or movie we really do care about. But oftentimes no.

There are countless areas in which I am unqualified to give anyone advice, and if I were to start a list, it would be long, and it would start with work-life balance. But buried in this mess of a brain, I do purposefully–intentionally–and occasionally get a few things right. And while filling every down moment with learning is perhaps a step too far, trying to learn, whether it’s by reading, watching a video, or whatever else, is obviously the right thing to do sometimes. And I have spent a lifetime learning. It may be the only truly healthy thing I do.

Everyone has heard of doomscrolling and everyone probably understands that this is bad, even if we’re not sure exactly what it means. When I see or hear this term, I imagine someone addicted to social media, swiping on their phone, possibly late at night with a partner sleeping next to them, viewing a feed that transitioned long ago from being about the people we care about to being about whichever companies are advertising, whichever influencers are popular, or whatever some algorithm decides we should see.

But when I looked it up, I was surprised by two things. First, by how recent the term is, as it dates back to 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. And second, that it specifically refers to the psychological damage one can do to themselves by constantly reading nothing but bad news, an all-too-common occurrence in recent years, thanks largely to our broken politics. Of course, the pandemic finally did come to an end, but the doomscrolling continued. And now it means any kind of addictive behavior tied to watching short-form content, often created by non-experts, online.

That, at least, does make sense to me. But when I think about the ways I spend time on my devices or engage with content in general, I can’t recall a lot of actual doomscrolling. I stopped reading newspapers for a couple of years there when things really went south as a way to implicitly protect myself from the terribleness of our world. And I rarely reflexively pop over to a news site (we don’t have traditional TV, so there’s no news program to watch) or whatever.

I do occasionally find myself intrigued by certain content I see in social media feeds. I’m sometimes fascinated by the advertisements because they are often so on point and curiously interesting to me. And there is certain content, ridiculous and far-fetched but entertaining, related to ghosts, UFOs, and whatever else that I find enjoyable. But I can count the number of times I’ve found myself awake at 0 dark 30, as I think of it, scrolling mindlessly on my phone, on one hand. I just don’t do that kind of thing for the most part.

But I can empathize. I am not surprised to know that many people can easily get caught up in this kind of thing. And I can see where it would be problematic, mentally, and can impact our lives more broadly. This is clearly an issue for numerous people.

In keeping with my issues with ridiculous new terms that seem to proliferate more these days than ever before–AI is classic for this–I saw a reference to a “maxxing” word a few months back, something like fitnessmaxxing, looksmaxxing, or whatever, I don’t recall, and asked my wife about this. She has a lot more of what I would call general interests than me, and, sure enough, she understood this sad chapter in the evolution of language and described the various ways it was being used everywhere.

I hate this. Which is either ironic or hypocritical when you consider that one of the things I love about the term enshittification, another recent construct, is that it’s so concise and immediately understandable. Just like these maxxing terms, when you think about it. But I feel like enshittification is with us to stay, while every social media trend will simply come and go as the no-attention-span idiots that make all that content keep moving along to the next big trend.

Whatever my rationale (or excuse), this got me thinking about the part of the world I do understand. I knew, for example, that Apple and Google had both spent years on so-called digital wellbeing features for their respective platforms that were designed with the contradictory goal of getting customers to use their products less. Apple, Google, and others didn’t purposefully make their offerings more addictive, they were just trying to make them popular. That they succeeded so much that people literally became addicted to varying degrees is incredible. Not in a good way, but still incredible.

The problem now is that we have AI, and AI, that great MSG-like enhancer for everything we do, is growing more powerful every day and is creating new content at ever faster speeds with ever-increasing efficacy. Those of us with an addictive personality, so to speak, are right to feel that the decks are stacked against them. They’re right. But they also have no idea.

So what can be done here?

I’m a big fan of personal responsibility, tied largely to how often I see it not happening out in the world. Parenting is an excellent example. In the 1990s, parents started blaming heavy metal music for their kids shooting up schools, and not the gun culture and lack of good parenting they brought to the table. More locally, and more frequently, I am routinely amazed by parents in the United States who show up at a restaurant or bar with a small child they position in front of a tablet or phone and then let them sit there, loudly watching whatever videos through the device’s speaker so everyone else there has to deal with their inability to parent as well. It’s maddening.

But you can’t just tell an addict to just stop doing that thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s alcohol, smoking, or social media; personal responsibility isn’t enough. And so we’re starting to see alternatives to doomscrolling emerge, mostly from smaller, third-party app developers who understand the problem and have ideas about how to fix it. I am fascinated by micro-learning apps and other doomscrolling alternatives, things that engage your brain and not just your dopamine center. Things I now think of as learnscrolling, though I’m sure some social media influencer could come up with a catchier name.

No matter. I will die having never found the balance I need, and I suspect I’m not alone in that. All you can do is try, and embrace those moments of clarity whenever they come.

This happened to me over the past few months with Duolingo, the language learning app I’ve been using daily since 2014. Duolingo is famous for applying gamification techniques to learning, which is laudable in the sense that it can make learning both fun and something you’re incented to keep at. But Duolingo is justifiably also infamous for its addictive nature. And for all the commentary above about me never really succumbing to doomscrolling, I did get caught up in a very unhealthy relationship with Duolingo, thanks to it satisfying both my desire to learn and my stupid need to not just compete but win.

In short, I found myself spending an hour on two on Duolingo most days so that I could “win” whatever league of randomly selected people I was pitted against each week. This bothered me for a long time, but then I finally decided to do something about it. Thinking about the way the app is structured, I figured I could simply complete the daily quests each day–these vary, but today, these involve completing three lessons, speaking in 7 exercises, and spending 15 minutes learning–and do so in 15 to 30 minutes max. I was counting on two things. That this would be “enough” from a learning perspective. And that it could keep me moving forward and not backtracking.

I was correct on both counts. It did take me a month or two to let go of the competitive thing, to not always have to finish in first place or the top three. But I got there and for the past few months at least, that’s what I’ve been doing. I feel better walking away from the app so I can do whatever else. And I feel like I’m finally realizing the benefits of this app while I am using it, and without giving in to the addiction, feeding that beast. It feels more positive now.

The other day, I was reading my tech news feed in the morning and some blog mentioned a micro-learning app because it was an advertisement, a money-off deal, something I see more and more each morning scattered between real news. I find that irritating, but I was curious about the app. So I Googled it. This particular app is called Nibble, and it’s one of what I assume are hundreds or even thousands of similar things out in the world these days. And while this isn’t an endorsement or whatever, it’s basically the only app like this I’ve tried, I do find it to be interesting. And a potentially solid alternative to doomscrolling.

Nibble is a bite-sized educational app designed for 10 minutes of use each day. It’s not free, but it’s also not expensive, and it offers content on about 20 topics, many STEM-based, and there is new content added every week. The lessons are short, and they vary between little game-like segments and other formats, and I suppose there are parallels to draw between this app and Duolingo, which now offers math, music, and chess lessons in addition to languages. These are things one could do lying in bed, sitting on a couch, or standing in line waiting to check out at a grocery store or whatever. In other words, something you could do instead of doomscrolling.

Thinking back to my comments to the personal trainer about using time more wisely and the subsequent 20 years or so, I can see how I evolved my time learning along with the technology. Growing up, I read as much as possible, and that was all paper-based back then via books, magazines, and newspapers. These days, it’s all electronic, whether it’s e-books, online courses, YouTube videos, or whatever else. Last weekend, for example, I spent a good chunk of time working on updates to my own book, the Windows 11 Field Guide, but I also spent a lot of time digesting Build 2026 session videos.

Granted, I had more me time than usual because my wife was visiting her family in Massachusetts. Had she been home, I would have had to do other things, which is arguably healthier in general, but it’s nice to focus every once in a while too. Just as it’s nice to zone out, as we often do at night, or even straddle these two extremes as I sometimes do by listening to whatever technical videos, usually on YouTube, while I play a videogame that doesn’t require my full attention.

Ah, balance. Maybe someday. No, not today, I have things to learn. But eventually. After I’ve found more apps like Nibble. You know they’re out there. And I bet some of them are excellent.