Op-Ed: How I Stopped Doomscrolling

Social media didn't leave Meher Ahmad's life; she shoved it into a single armchair. In a New York Times opinion piece, the editor describes her "Summer of Ludd," a low-tech workaround for the endless scroll: she moved TikTok, Instagram, and X onto an old iPhone with no SIM card, then decreed that the device—nicknamed the "Scroll Phone"—can only be used in one place in her apartment, the "Scrolly Chair." The physical tether, she writes, succeeded where grayscale screens, app timers, and periodic deletions had failed: it turned social media back into a bounded activity instead of a constant reflex. She writes: "The Scrolly Chair exists so that I don't end up doing exactly what I did when my Actual Phone was also my Scroll Phone: eating dinner with my Scroll Phone, watching TV with my Scroll Phone, sitting on the toilet with my Scroll Phone."

Ahmad argues that the setup recreates an early-internet feeling, when going online meant sitting down at a computer and then logging off. The result, she says, is sharply reduced FOMO, less urge to perform her life for an audience, and a more relaxed relationship with apps she still basically likes—so long as they're "microdosed." Rather than quitting completely or buying a trendy "dumb phone," she's opted to confine the algorithm to a corner, literally. For the full account of Ahmad's experiment, read her piece in the New York Times.