The surprisingly undisciplined trick to escaping social media

If you’re looking to wean yourself off social media and replace it with a more productive habit — and who among us isn’t — a lot of the common advice can sound like it’s coming from a drill instructor: Go outside and touch grass. Routine is key. Get your butt in the chair and don’t get up until you’ve done the work. They might as well be telling you to do a hundred pushups while they’re at it.

As valuable as that advice may be when you need a kick in the pants, these imperatives create an uneasy tension between leisure and labor. It’s all well and good to try to turn away from the siren song of your phone, but how likely are you to stick with the alternatives — reading books, drawing, meditating — if they feel like homework? 

It’s a lot more fun, and a lot less arduous, to try to beat social media at its own game instead, and harness your curiosity. 

Social media apps work in part by playing off our natural curiosity. Every time we refresh the endless scroll, they promise to give us new information, capturing the parts of our brains that always wonder what’s about to happen next. But they rarely actually satisfy that curiosity. They just repeat it endlessly: What’s going to happen when I scroll this far? Or this far? Or this far? The answer is almost always: the same thing as last time.

Away from social media, however, the world works differently. If you get curious about a question off the algorithm, it can lead you somewhere new and interesting. 

Even when we begin with a utilitarian goal, curiosity can take us in surprising directions. A few years ago, I got interested in running. At first I would just lace up my shoes, do a few perfunctory stretches, and jog straight out of my front door. But I gradually became curious about the mechanics of what I was trying to do. I began investigating running form, which led me to theories about how you should be doing different kinds of running every week. From there I learned about how strength training was important to support running, and then weight lifting led me to nutrition. I’m still not a particularly fast runner, but I am a data bank on all the ways there are for a person to make themselves just a little bit faster, and I know there’s more for me to keep looking into.

The goal here should be to get away from simple goals (running more, as in my example) to a more open and adventurous experience of what interests and engages us (understanding how I can support my body when I’m running). The experience is simple: Find something that fascinates you, learn a little more about that — whether from your friends, a documentary, or even an old-school internet search — then try to figure out what new questions that opens up and keep asking them. It’s a process that allows us to become our guides, whether we know where we’re headed or not.

In a recent essay, the writer John Paul Brammer explains that that’s exactly how he got himself to read more. 

“Curiosity is a child,” Brammer writes. “When it wants something, when it truly wants something, it’s nearly impossible to keep its hands away.” Brammer found his way to reading by getting curious about David Foster Wallace, which in turn led him to Wallace’s influences: from Donald Barthelme to Thomas Pynchon to Clarice Lispector.

“I read out of strict obedience to curiosity, the desire to know what these words in this sequence might hold,” Brammer writes. “I had to make it fun at first. This was messy. I sipped from this book, then that one. It wasn’t formal or rigorous. I read whenever I felt like it.”

Where habits are mindless and rote, curiosity is something to be indulged: It’s fun, even hedonistic. Embracing curiosity means finding ways to play with art and ideas, as if they’re clay, instead of chipping away at them, as if they’re solid stone.

“The relevant science isn’t something I’m qualified to parse,” Brammer writes in his essay. But when I looked into that very science, I found that his experience aligned with it quite well.  

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest.”

Kou Murayama, University of Tübingen

“People have likened the state of being curious about something to an aversive state,” says Celeste Kidd, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “It’s unpleasant, akin to something like an itch. When you have that aversive state, when you really want some piece of information, it feels very satisfying to scratch it. There’s all sorts of positive feelings that come with satisfying specific curiosity.” 

The endless scroll of our phone apps can function like a hydrocortisone cream, offering a balm for the irritation without really dealing with the cause. It’s not actually scratching the itch. To do that, you have to get curious about a question that can guide you through an idiosyncratic and looping itinerary that is never fully determined in advance. 

Writer and tech designer Celine Nguyen has written about letting her curiosity guide her down rabbit holes in her essay on “Original Post-145011020">research as leisure activity,” a phrase she borrowed from librarian Karly Wildenhaus. Speaking to me, Nguyen describes getting interested in the way the rise of vibe coding is affecting app design. 

“This idea around shifting design processes made me think of this art historian Claire Bishop,” Nguyen says. Bishop’s most recent book deals with the way technology changes our response to contemporary art, and Nguyen says that “after reading that, I was like, ‘I really like reading about contemporary art and performance. What else can I read in this vein?’” 

Nguyen followed her new interest in dance to a fixation on choreographer Pina Bausch, and soon found herself scouring the internet for still images from Bausch dances. 

“It’s sort of like this pleasantly fizzy, almost like ADHD brain thing,” Nguyen says. “It sort of feels like I’m wandering around this massive information landscape and I’m just coming off all these images or all these reference points or quotes that speak to me, and maybe at the end of this process I can sum up what it is I’m interested in.”

The point at which you satisfy your curiosity can be dangerous. Once the itch is gone, the desire to learn can disappear completely — even if you don’t know as much as you think. 

Kidd describes a study in which she tried to motivate people to learn a new fact about something they thought they already completely understood, but were actually wrong about.

“When we paid them to look up the right answer, they weren’t motivated to seek out more information,” she says. “They did it, but it was like they were out to lunch. They were thinking about something else. That information did not go in.” 

According to Kou Murayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, the best way to maintain your momentum is to marshal your ephemeral curiosity into long-term interest by letting the answer to one question prompt a new one, as if you were figuring out where to eat each meal in a new city by asking your waiters where they like to eat. 

“If you link curiosity to the accumulation of knowledge, you can actually self-boost your curiosity over time, with the end result of more continued interest,” Murayama says. “Curiosity is basically short-lived, but if it’s linked to accumulating knowledge, or if you can link it to your self identity or importance, then you can self-booster interest.”

The trick is to, like Brammer and Nguyen, guide your curiosity toward a topic that can keep surprising you over time. What that usually means is to look for a topic that you already know a little bit about that can keep surprising you.

“We’ve done studies with 7-month-old babies, and they’re seeking out particular kinds of things in the world that violate their expectations, just a little bit but not too much,” Kidd says. “It tends to be the case that people want to elaborate on knowledge they already have as opposed to going into other domains. If there’s some way to relate a desired new set of expertise to something that you already have some background in, that’s a thing that you could absolutely do intentionally.”

So if you want to find some creative outlet for your time — or even if you just want to read more — there are straightforward steps to take: Look for something that excites your curiosity. Look for something that you are uncertain about, something so maddeningly unclear that you can’t help but itch at it. 

This mystery doesn’t have to be about science or philosophy. It could be about what happens to a character in a particular thriller, or how to capture a likeness in charcoal, or what a certain part of your city looks like. The point is that it should be the kind of question that you can’t let go of.

Then indulge in finding the answer — and let that question prompt another one. Then another. Then another.