THE WORLD IS SCROLLING ITS TIME AWAY — AND MORE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO TAKE IT BACK

Scrolling begins when purpose disappears

There is a crucial difference between using the internet and merely being on the internet.

You check a train time. You reply to a message. You look up a recipe. You read an article. You work. You ask an AI a question.

There is a purpose.

Mindless scrolling begins when the purpose disappears.

You open Instagram without really knowing why. Then comes a video. Another video. An accident. A dog. A politician. A recipe. Someone renovating a bathroom. Someone discussing a divorce. A war. A holiday. An influencer. A conspiracy. An advertisement. A joke.

Next clip.

Next clip.

Next clip.

Thirty minutes later, you can barely remember what you watched.

That may be one of the strangest features of modern digital consumption: we can absorb enormous quantities of content while retaining almost none of it.

Sweden shows a clear pattern

In the Swedish study, people describe scrolling as a thief of time. They associate it with stress, guilt, procrastination and sleep problems. Many also describe the behaviour as difficult to control.

The most interesting part is not simply that people get stuck.

It is that they know they are stuck.

We have created a behaviour in which people can think:

I do not really want to be doing this.

And then continue anyway.

That mechanism is not uniquely Swedish.

Britain talks about “brain rot”

The British media regulator Ofcom describes a strikingly similar phenomenon.

In Online Nation 2025, British children and teenagers talk about the effects of long periods of scrolling, particularly on TikTok and other short-form video platforms.

One expression appears repeatedly:

brain rot.

It is used both for the type of fast, fragmented and often trivial content being consumed, and for the feeling that follows: overstimulation, irritation and difficulty focusing on slower activities.

One teenager in Ofcom’s qualitative research described how she could scroll TikTok for hours without becoming bored but quickly lost concentration when trying to watch a normal film.

TikTok is not literally rotting the brain.

But the phrase matters because it shows how young people themselves experience the behaviour.

They feel that something is changing.

Children are consuming more than creating

Ofcom’s later research points to another shift. British children are increasingly becoming consumers rather than creators on social media.

Among social-media users aged 8 to 17, 65 per cent say they mainly read, watch, follow or like content. Only around a third describe their main behaviour as posting, sharing or commenting themselves.

That is an interesting reversal.

For years, the internet was celebrated as the great democratisation of creativity.

Everyone could publish.

Everyone could make music.

Everyone could create film.

Everyone could write.

Everyone could build an audience.

Yet much of internet use has become passive consumption.

Watch.

Scroll.

Next.

The scrolling continues after bedtime

The UK data also shows how far digital use extends into the night.

Ofcom reported that between 15 and 24 per cent of the time spent by children aged 8 to 14 on major services such as YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp occurred between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Some of that activity took place after 11 p.m.

The phone follows us into bed.

For many people, the last thing they see before sleeping is a screen.

The first thing they check after waking is the same screen.

The internet has moved from being something we use to becoming a permanent layer on top of everyday life.

The United States shows the same concern

American research asks different questions, so the figures cannot be compared directly with the Swedish study.

But the overall direction is similar.

In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers aged 13 to 17, 45 per cent said they believed they spent too much time on social media.

Forty-four per cent said they had actively tried to reduce their social-media use.

That may be one of the most telling statistics.

Almost half of teenagers are trying to limit something that is simultaneously central to their social lives.

Sleep and productivity are affected

The American research also shows how teenagers themselves perceive the consequences.

Forty-five per cent say social media has a negative effect on their sleep.

Forty per cent say it hurts their productivity.

Nineteen per cent say it has a negative impact on their mental health.

Girls report negative effects more often than boys.

Among American teenage girls, 25 per cent said social media had negatively affected their mental health, compared with 14 per cent of boys. Half of the girls said social media had negatively affected their sleep.

There is a clear parallel here with the Swedish findings, where younger women also stand out as a group that scrolls heavily and reports more negative effects.

But the internet is also socially valuable

It would be too simple to describe social media as purely harmful.

The same American teenagers who report problems also describe real benefits.

Seventy-four per cent say social media makes them feel more connected to their friends’ lives.

Sixty-three per cent see it as a place where they can express creativity.

Ofcom likewise finds that a large majority of British children fundamentally value their lives online.

That is why the issue is not black and white.

The internet is simultaneously:

social connection,

entertainment,

education,

creativity,

work,

information,

and a machine capable of consuming hours of human attention.

Europe lives inside the same system

The European Parliament’s Social Media Survey 2025 covered all 27 EU member states, including Sweden, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

The survey shows how central social media has become to information consumption in Europe and how strongly short formats have gained ground. Among Europeans who use social media for current affairs and public information, 46 per cent said they preferred short text posts and 41 per cent preferred short videos.

That does not automatically mean Europeans are mindlessly scrolling.

But the infrastructure is the same.

The same platforms.

The same algorithms.

The same short-form video.

The same design logic.

The same battle for attention.

Sweden is not a digital island.

Australia went much further

In Australia, the debate moved beyond individual digital detox and into regulation.

Since 10 December 2025, a number of major social-media platforms have been required to take steps to prevent under-16s from holding accounts.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has described part of the rationale as protecting younger people from platform design features that encourage excessive use and from content that can negatively affect health and wellbeing.

Australia has therefore become a global experiment.

Authorities are following thousands of children and families over several years to study both the intended and unintended consequences.

This shows how far the debate has evolved.

From:

Children should spend less time on their phones.

to:

Do the platforms themselves have responsibility for how these systems are designed?

Is the problem the user — or the design?

For years, responsibility has been placed almost entirely on the individual.

You should have more discipline.

You should put your phone away.

You should stop using TikTok.

You should control yourself.

At the same time, some of the world’s most sophisticated technology companies are optimising for the opposite outcome:

keeping you there.

Autoplay.

Infinite scroll.

Push notifications.

Personalised recommendations.

Likes.

Streaks.

Shorts.

Reels.

For You feeds.

Success is often measured through engagement.

How long did you stay?

What did you click?

What brought you back?

It becomes difficult to place all responsibility on the individual.

It is like building a casino using advanced behavioural psychology and then telling the customer to simply gamble less.

The algorithm does not need to make you happy

There is also a basic misunderstanding about recommendation systems.

We often say that the algorithm shows us what we like.

More precisely, it often shows us what keeps us engaged.

That is not the same thing.

Anger works.

Fear works.

Conflict works.

Sex works.

Status works.

Envy works.

Shock works.

Extreme opinions work.

Curiosity works.

And above all, one promise works:

maybe the next clip will be even more interesting.

That is the same psychological logic that makes a slot machine effective.

Maybe next time.

The real cost is not screen time

One hour of scrolling does not merely cost one hour.

It costs what that hour could have become.

The book you did not read.

The walk you did not take.

The person you did not call.

The project you did not begin.

The music you did not properly listen to.

The thought you did not allow to develop.

The workout that never happened.

The sleep that became one hour shorter.

That opportunity cost makes the issue far bigger than a discussion about screen time.

Human beings still have only 24 hours in a day.

That is why digital detox is growing

This is where the Swedish study becomes particularly interesting.

Around half of Swedes are attracted to some form of digital detox.

Roughly three in ten have already tried it.

Most do not want to abandon the internet completely. They want to reduce specific parts of their digital lives: pause social media, disable notifications, introduce time limits or leave the phone at home.

Britain shows the same tendency among young people.

In Ofcom’s 2025–2026 research, 65 per cent of British 13-to-17-year-olds said they had taken at least one deliberate step during the previous year to manage their time online.

Twenty-nine per cent had disabled notifications or used Do Not Disturb.

Twenty-eight per cent had deliberately scheduled offline time.

Twenty-one per cent had taken a planned break from social media.

Twenty-one per cent had stopped taking devices to bed.

The United States shows the same thing.

Forty-four per cent of American teenagers say they have tried to reduce their social-media use.

It is becoming difficult to describe this as a Swedish trend.

It looks more like the beginning of an international counterreaction.

Maybe we need to make the phone slightly worse

Many of the solutions involve deliberately reintroducing something the technology industry has spent twenty years removing:

friction.

Log out.

Remove social apps from the home screen.

Disable notifications.

Charge the phone outside the bedroom.

Decide when social media is allowed.

Leave the phone at home occasionally.

Each small obstacle creates a moment in which the brain can ask:

What was I actually trying to do?

Information is no longer the scarce resource

For most of human history, information was difficult to access.

That problem has largely been solved.

Now we have the opposite problem.

Information is effectively unlimited.

As AI makes text, images, music and video dramatically cheaper to produce, the amount of content competing for human attention will grow even further.

Information is no longer the main scarce resource.

Attention is.

And attention is finite.

No human being receives more than 24 hours a day.

The most important digital skill may be knowing when to switch off

For decades, societies have taught digital competence.

How to use computers.

How to search.

How to use apps.

How to communicate online.

How to work digitally.

How to use AI.

The next stage may require the opposite skill.

Knowing when to leave technology.

Being able to concentrate.

Being able to read something long.

Being able to watch an entire film without opening another app.

Being able to eat dinner without a phone on the table.

Being able to walk without consuming content.

Being able to be bored.

Being able to let a thought reach its conclusion.

This is no longer just about Sweden

Sweden gives us unusually clear numbers.

Britain gives us young people talking about “brain rot”.

The United States gives us teenagers who themselves believe they spend too much time on social media.

The EU shows an entire continent increasingly consuming information through social feeds and short formats.

Australia has gone so far as to introduce regulation aimed specifically at children and social-media access.

These studies do not measure exactly the same things and their percentages should not be placed side by side as if they came from one global survey.

But the direction is difficult to miss.

We are looking at an international problem involving our relationship with the digital attention economy.

The most interesting question is therefore no longer:

How much do we use the internet?

It is:

Who decides what we do once we are there?

The internet will not disappear.

AI will not disappear.

Social media will not disappear.

Algorithms certainly will not disappear.

Future freedom will therefore not be about choosing between a digital life and an analogue one.

It will be about something much harder.

Living in both.

And deciding for ourselves when to leave one and return to the other.

We created the internet to bring the world within reach.

Now we may have to learn to put the phone down occasionally in order to still see it.