By Rihaab Mowlana

There’s a point in the evening, usually somewhere between finishing dinner and pretending we’ll go to bed early, where the phone magically appears in our hand. We open one app, then another. Scroll, swipe, like, laugh, repeat. Twenty minutes pass. Then forty. Then we’re somehow deep in a video of a duck making pancakes or watching someone silently clean their apartment in Tokyo while lofi beats play in the background. It’s oddly soothing. It’s oddly… comforting. And just like that, we’ve escaped.

Social media started out as a way to connect, but these days, it’s more like a refuge. A curated dreamland of distractions. Whether you’re dodging the weight of the news cycle, the silence of a lonely night, or just the existential crisis of being alive in 2025, the scroll has become our unofficial coping mechanism.

It’s not hard to see why. Where else can you toggle between a cooking video, a therapy meme, and a video essay about why frogs are the new it-girls, all in under a minute? It’s emotional fast food. Little doses of serotonin delivered straight to the brain with no effort required. And in a world where burnout is the norm and real life feels increasingly unpredictable, that kind of ease is irresistible.

But here’s the thing no one likes to admit: most of us aren’t just scrolling for fun. We’re scrolling to feel something we’re not feeling elsewhere. Safety. Stillness. Control. Even meaning. Watching a stranger fold their laundry for the fifth time this week might sound pointless, but it brings structure to our own chaos. Laughing at a cat who “founded a startup” is absurd, but it's a reprieve from the heaviness of everything else.

It’s escapism, plain and simple, but wrapped in cute filters and punchy captions.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe we need pockets of absurdity. Maybe it’s fine that we’re emotionally invested in a frog with a tiny hat. Because real life is overwhelming. Relationships are complex. Work is draining. The world is on fire, sometimes literally. So if a silly little video buys us three minutes of peace, who are we to judge?

That said, it’s worth checking in with ourselves now and then. Is the scroll a soft place to land, or a way to completely disconnect from the parts of life that still need showing up for? There’s a difference between escape and avoidance, and social media is very good at blurring the line.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, there are worse things than getting emotionally attached to a raccoon who bakes. If social media is our generation’s version of lying in a field and watching clouds, then maybe the point isn’t to resist the scroll, but to be more mindful of why we’re scrolling in the first place.

Because sometimes, the distraction is exactly what we need. And sometimes, it’s just a sign we’re long overdue for a real break.