Stop Scrolling
Thank you, I think I will
“Dizang Planting the Fields,” The Book of Serenity, tr. Thomas Cleary
Dizang asked Xiushan, “Where do you come from?”
Xiushan said, “From the South.”
Dizang said, “How is Buddhism in the South these days?”
Xiushan said, “There’s extensive discussion.”
Dizang said, “How can that compare to me here planting the fields and making rice to eat?”
Xiushan said, “What can you do about the world?”
Dizang said, “What do you call the world?”I’ve intended my next post here to be a flood of photos from my recent trip to Nevada and California, but that will have to wait for a brighter day. For now, I just want to offer this:
Throughout the last months of this election season I saw, more and more frequently, the admonition “Stop scrolling!”—sometimes masquerading as a request, “Please stop scrolling!”—inevitably a cry of ever greater campaign distress and a desperate plea for more and more money.
So finally, yes, I will stop scrolling. I’m deleting my several-years-idle X account [gone gone gone beyond] and idling all the Metas—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. I will miss Facebook and Instagram, because these are the places where I most often saw people I actually know and all their beautiful and funny pictures, their cats and dogs, their new publications, their worries in the middle of the night (the next morning), their gardens, even sometimes their meals. So if you are one of these—and I hope those friends have come here to read this little post—please just email me now and then or follow me to Substack, where you can also post a note, just like on those other places, if you want to.
I find it a slower and more thoughtful medium, and it invites me by its very nature not to scroll, but actually to spend some time with someone’s more careful words. If there’s an algorithm, it rests in the background and lets me foreground reading what I actually want to read. No unchecked reposts and amplifications. No capture-your-attention-while-you-go-down-the-rabbithole-of-verification memes and AI images. And no advertising! (except for itself, of course).