This is not a call to stop scrolling. It’s a call to notice what scrolling does to you.
You don’t have a concentration problem.
You have a problem with everything trying to steal it.
If you landed here by accident, that already makes you an exception.
We scroll.
We sip coffee.
We move on.
We see a lot. We remember little.
We rarely stop long enough to feel that something is off.
Not because we don’t care.
Because the world moves faster than we do.
Attention has become a commodity.
Every moment has to be filled — with content, sound, stimulation.
Thinking that lasts longer than a few seconds starts to feel uncomfortable.
Most content isn’t created so you understand something —
but so you stay.
And yet, sometimes a moment of clarity appears.
Brief. Quiet.
A moment when the automatic mode loosens its grip.
Nothing spectacular happens.
You just can’t keep pretending that everything is fine.
This is wake up.
The moment you stop operating on autopilot.
Something that “has always been this way” suddenly stops being enough.
This is not a theory or an ideology.
It’s a reaction.
It often comes after exhaustion, after a crisis, or after a long period of ignoring warning signs.
It doesn’t offer answers.
But it makes further avoidance impossible.
This moment is always personal.
It happens to a specific person, in a specific life.
And that is exactly the moment we want to speak to.
We’re not inviting you to another stimulus.
We’re inviting you to a different way of being with what you read.
Slower. More attentive.
With the sense that what you understand might change something —
even one small gesture, one decision, one action.
Distraction is designed.
The system works in a way that keeps you busy but absent.
Informed, but quickly forgetting.
Tired, even though it feels like rest.
Scrolling is not the problem in itself.
The problem begins when it stops being neutral —
when it starts training your attention in ways you didn’t choose.
Not to convince you,
but to warn what happens to attention when it’s given away completely:
Daniel Kahneman showed that fast thinking prefers what is easy —
and that’s exactly why it’s so easy to steer.
Slow thinking requires time and resistance.
Neil Postman warned that we wouldn’t be controlled by force, but by entertainment.
What is pleasant and easy can organize an entire world.
Joseph Murphy wrote that the mind doesn’t distinguish truth from repetition.
If we feed on noise, we start thinking in noise.
The Better Coffee emerged precisely in this place.
Not as another opinion.
Not as content to be consumed.
But as a proposal to pause
and to check whether what you’re participating in still makes sense to you.
It’s not about being “slower” for the sake of it.
It’s about reclaiming the ability to stay in one place long enough
to actually understand something.
You can go back to scrolling.
We all do.
But if you made it this far,
it means this text wasn’t easy to forget — even for a moment.
And that is already a beginning.
If something in this text slowed you down —
click another piece on the Red Ink Coffee blog and stay here for a while;
or sign up for the free The Better Coffee Blueprint.
90 minutes.
About as much time as scrolling takes anyway.
Not to agree.
But to check whether you can still think without rushing.
Support this work
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