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Your mother thinks you went trekking with the local mountaineering group last Sunday. But in reality, your daily screen time totalled 15 hours, spent switching between Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. Forget the Bake Off. This is the real competition.
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As a testament to your commitment, you’ve developed dark circles under your eyes. While your eyes may not be as green as Count Dracula’s, your skin is certainly paler – thanks to the dozens of sunset pictures you didn’t capture in real life.
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Let’s go on a journey of self-reflection regarding our personal binge-scrolling habits (all in good fun). You’re probably an archetype your mum is proud of.
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Binge-Scrolling and Its Relatable Struggles
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Do you ever find yourself time-travelling and realise you’ve lost an hour when you meant to spent just five minutes on your phone? This is called binge-scrolling, an act of absorbing short-form videos in an infinite loop.
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Be it quick reels or endless movies and shows on television and streaming platforms, these videos are designed to induce limitless pleasure when bored. In fact, we sat through the pandemic watching them like selfless warriors, relieving the government of the necessity to stress about its citizens.
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Also, we know from history class that warriors come in all shapes and sizes. Below, we’ll introduce the curious habits of some truly infamous minute-wasting experts of our time.
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Uppity Chappies
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These happy-go-lucky blokes have concerning but cheerful double-tapping tendencies. They are inspired by anything and everything. Your son graduated today? Liked. A little cuckoo is singing at your window? Liked.
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Their thumbs have an involuntary, Pavlovian response to pictures, even those with barely visible and blurred backgrounds. Their eyes can distinguish whether a post deserves their grace faster than Anna Wintour selects clothes from a rack for the Paris Fashion Week display.
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Bargain Hunters
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These scrollers are more persistent than a squirrel sniffing the forest for snacks. You will find them nose-deep in the coupon section of a food-delivery app. Their photo libraries are filled with screenshots of discount offers and voucher codes.
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Only the Lord knows how many overflowing wish-list carts they have abandoned. These eternal optimists are always looking for quick wins and promos like ‘free cash when you sign up’.
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If only four or five of their friends took the bait and used their referral schemes, they could finally save up and justify their next impulsive purchase.
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Nation’s Anxious Aunties
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Since Brexit, coupled with the horrors of the pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of a fresh breed of scrollers. They open the BBC as if it were the Bible.
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A fun evening usually involves each notification sending a new tremble through their hands. They are so commonly widespread that they have their own special title: ‘the doomscrollers’.
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The doomscrollers believe themselves to be Twitter’s white knights. Their fingers are always busy typing out another paragraph to defend a political ideology, and their minds are engaged in connecting the dots between any negative news stories that can shake the nation.
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Armchair Travellers
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Our resident wanderlust enthusiasts with negative account balances can be extremely resourceful. They know it takes around £100-£300 to buy a ticket to experience the rainy streets of Edinburgh. Why do that when you can open an international student’s Instagram profile and scroll through hundreds of influencer videos on ‘Life in the City’?
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Their Pinterest boards are assorted with floor and kitchen plans from around the world. This interest isn’t about saving posts of fun places to travel in the future; rather, it is a form of vicarious escape via the lives of virtual strangers. In a way, they can also be called the dodgers of real life.
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Silent Lurkers
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Each one of us occasionally embraces our trait of quiet observation to watch the world. However, the ones who do it without breaking the script daily will go up in the silent hall of fame.
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They are the digital wallflowers who spend time reading the entire comment section but never raise their voice to express opinions, digitally or IRL.
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Their ‘seen’ status on messages, without any response, could even make the most emotionless soldier break a sweat. Their thoughts remain locked in the fortresses of their mind. Are they judging your emoji usage? Are they formulating a plan to assassinate you? Nobody will ever know.
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The Zombies
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Finally, we must talk about the scrollers who are simply existing in the void of social media. No, they are not self-aware like the silent lurkers. Instead, with a glazed-over expression, their consumption mindlessly accepts the dirt the algorithm chucks their way.
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Up at 3 A.M., with a little drool coming out of their mouth, they have their favourite cocktail of boredom in one hand and a mind map of an Illuminati-spouting YouTubers’ gibberish in another.
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The zombies remain undead and vamp on their phones come rain or shine. They wouldn’t notice you if you were standing stark naked with a pistol at their bedroom window.
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We’re All a Bit Bonkers
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The curated feeds of self-conscious individuals – our curated reality now – have become a part of the British identity as much as complaining about London weather. It is a tradition to be drowning in the digital soup. On a serious note, we are a nation addicted to the scroll.
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And if Tamal from The Great British Bake Off saw our manners, he’d give a stiff upper lip and quip, ‘Decisions, decisions, all of them wrong’.
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