Scrolling Alone
From Homer to TikTok: how we swapped eternal stories for the smartphone lobotomy.
A version of this essay was first published in Alata Magazine.
Recently, a non-descript young man sat next to me on the Tube. Within moments, amidst the clatter and chatter, arrived peals of implacable orgiastic moaning.
Reader, I am politely nosey. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a fellow commuter by the cover of their book. Anyway, I glanced to my side. On the young man’s iPhone screen was a cartoonish nubile vixen—inflated lips, inflated breasts, inflated behind—straddling her disposable lover. The hypnotised audience of one thumbed through a menagerie of flesh, as if reading The Spectator.
In fairness to the amorous chap, he turned down the volume a notch or two, as modern etiquette demands.
We Londoners have an acronym for this kind of thing: NFL—‘Normal for London.’ Later that evening, another gentleman encrusted in grime and brick dust, kicked off his work boots and splayed across the carriage seats. No problem. Then he opened TikTok. A cyclone of gabbing and mewling renewed itself every five seconds or so.
What’s so strange about that, you wonder? The gentleman then placed his phone on his chest and closed his eyes for a well-earned snooze, his phone emitting digital lullabies.
Saunter through this city and the same scene plays on loop. Like a modern Sisyphus, they scroll, scroll, and scroll. But what does this endless scrolling tell us about our culture—and what have we lost in the process?
This Tube scene is emblematic of something larger—a culture losing itself to hollow distractions and forgetting the deeper myths and stories that once guided us. Addled by technological fantasy, we’ve replaced these guiding signposts with trivial, hollow imitations.
No wonder that reading amongst the youth is dying out. No wonder that adults routinely confess they haven’t the concentration span to read a book or even a long article. Who or what can compete with that dopamine crack pipe psychically stitched to your palm?
At risk of sounding utterly reactionary, I’ll offer a thesis: Smartphones are the modern lobotomy. They pillage our ability for deep thought and connection. They plunder our ability to reflect, replacing it with compulsive novelty-seeking. Once tools for connection, they now fracture our attention and isolate us from meaning. In a decade or two, social historians will charge these devilish devices with infantilising culture, stoking mindless tribalism, and degrading us into hypnotised dopamine junkies.
But first, a confession. One year ago, I downloaded an app to wean my junkie-self off the modern opium of the masses. Like all addicts, I swore that my little love affair was hardly a problem.
Wrong. That app revealed the extent of my addiction: I drained an average six hours and forty-six minutes each day scrolling through the mutterings and mewlings of my fellow addicts. That figure is typical: the average Brit or American spends six hours on their phone each day chasing that dopamine dragon.
At this rate, the future for reading and thoughtful culture looks bleak. Myths and literature offer not just entertainment but guidance—signposts for how to live, what to strive for, and how to endure the struggles inherent in existence. Without them, we drift in a sea of meaningless novelty, tethered to algorithms but untethered from purpose.
Not so long ago, newspapers and magazines with millions of readers splashed expensively wrought words on what many now consider ‘elitist’ culture—serious novels, theatre, classical music, and film.
But what we now consider ‘high’ culture was once just culture. From Aristophanes to Arthur Miller, serious enquiry into the human condition was once the preserve of the many and not just the few.
The steady screen-based erosion of this thoughtful, mature culture has all but dissolved our sense of collective identity. Literature and the arts once provided us with a window into the human condition. A guide to our very existence.
The breakdown of these shared norms is what Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie’—a state of alienation and social chaos. For Durkheim, anomie arises when society loses its shared norms and guiding myths.
In the algorithmic age, mindless novelty has replaced our collective rites of passage—always seeking, never finding.
We designed those algorithms that way. Some of our brightest minds now expend their intellectual energies on making apps more addictive. Our smartphones are quite literally designed to keep sucking away our attention. They rewire your brain to seek novelty. What results is a lurid sea of ‘content’ consumed and forgotten the moment one swipes the screen.
And what is the result of this culture of condiments and no food? An infantilised people hypnotised by twee slogans, mindless therapy-speak and childish myths. On the Tube, Paddington Bear and his syrupy ilk infantilise us, reflecting a culture that flees from complexity and nuance. These myths replace the rites of passage and profound struggles that once defined adulthood.
Everywhere one looks, billboards and advertisements dispense sugary platitudes. You cannot open your ears without hearing these prefabbed slogans pressed into sentence shapes. In London, most conversations sound as if recorded years ago and played back on loop.
Back in the early twentieth century, the Oxford literary don, F.R. Leavis, earned the mantle of mad, literary reactionary. Leavis’s warnings about the hypnotic allure of screens were prescient, even in his day. He feared a world where shallow entertainment replaced serious engagement—a world that, judging by my daily Tube commute, seems to have arrived.
In his timeless essay, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Leavis warns of the coming lobotomization of our culture. For Leavis, American film surrendered to “the cheapest emotional appeals” all the more poisonous because such films offered a “compellingly vivid allusion of actual life.” Leavis feared the power of ‘hypnotic receptivity,’ inherent in the screen. I wonder what he’d make of my daily ride into Holborn.
Unlike the mad old English don, I don’t despair. Nor am I shacked up in a log cabin in the Montana wilderness, ticking off a kill-list of tech titans and Silicon Valley gurus. The end, dear reader, is not quite so nigh.
After all, we are hardwired for myth and story. Not so long ago, a director smuggled ‘high’ culture into one of the most acclaimed TV shows ever.
David Simon’s The Wire owes its wild success to the ancient Greeks. The Wire is a Greek tragedy set in modern-day Baltimore. The show’s antagonists are, like Medea, Achilles and Antigone, strapped to their fates. Unfettered capitalism, unbreakable bureaucracy, and the unforgiving drug trade are the unbendable Olympian gods smiting their doomed puppets at will. Thousands of years on from ancient Greece, and the formula still works: The Wire is compulsive viewing.
The wild success of The Wire shows that our hunger for meaning has not disappeared. Beneath the noise of algorithms, the ancient structures of myth and tragedy still resonate, even if it’s buried under a landfill of disposable content.
For Tennessee Williams, the essence of life is conflict. Our modern malaise stems from what Williams called, ‘the vacuity of a life without struggle.’
In his masterful essay, The Catastrophe of Success, Tennessee reflects on the runaway success of his play, The Glass Menagerie. Fearful of the phoniness that follows fame, he warns against excessive comfort and distraction: “The heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict.” For Tennessee, that conflict is stitched in the ‘very struggle of creation.’ Without conflict, ‘man is a sword cutting daisies.’
The last sentence of that essay warns us that time is short and is slipping away whilst I write this and whilst you read it. Without conflict, without creation, we are swords cutting daisies. The struggle to reclaim our minds—and our myths—is a conflict worth fighting.
So, reader, consider putting that phone away. Better yet, drown it in holy water and throw it out of the window.
Spot on. At the risk of sounding like the cranky neighbor telling the kids to get off the lawn, we should ban TikTok and its ilk before it's too late. Or maybe it is too late. But this latest offering provides some nourishment to this reader starving for something more fulfilling than a few Doritos. (Although a Dorito now and then aint so bad either!) I just bought you a pint!
Sharing this article with my family. My daughter teaches reading and writing to middle schoolers (13 yo). The prevalence of functional illiteracy in current society is frightening. No one reads books anymore. This fact alone portends the end of our civilization.