Notes, April 11, 2026

I do not even know how long it has been since I last wrote anything. Too much has happened lately. Looking back over these four years, though, there really has been a main thread running through them: growth happened inside chaos, and that same chaos could easily have pushed me in a completely different direction.

At some point I really did want to throw myself into the world. In freshman year I honestly wanted to join clubs, meet people, and actively participate in things. I was not especially resistant to all those activities. If something came up, I would usually go. Academically I even had a kind of youthful enthusiasm. I still spent a lot of time on my phone, but it felt different then. I still scroll now, yet somehow I no longer have the same ability to sink fully into it. Sometimes I wonder why my younger self could be so pure about it. That constant scrolling occupied a huge part of freshman year, but if you do not consciously revisit it, it almost disappears from memory. If things had stayed that way forever, maybe I would have stopped believing in growth altogether. Human beings are far too good at making the wrong causal explanations. The only way not to casually deny yourself is to understand what kind of person you actually are.

The rest of the story is much easier to tell. I kept saying I had made up my mind to study seriously, and then I kept scrolling anyway. I could barely finish listening to an entire lecture. I still want to blame that on a lack of meaning, but the truth is probably more about habit. Getting distracted is normal. The problem is that distraction turns into scrolling, and once the scrolling starts, the whole class is over.

Sometimes I think about what information actually gives us. If we clearly knew what we were doing, and clearly knew what “meaning” was, in a broad sense, would we choose differently? After all, even killing time is a kind of meaning. Many major courses, maybe even many university courses in general, get labeled as meaningless. If someone you absolutely trusted told you that directly, would you act the same way as you would after seeing some random version of that claim elsewhere? And what if that person also told you what was meaningful? In that sense, phone-scrolling is also a problem of trust in information, and of informational blockage. At bottom, it is a choice about benefits.

Take a very simple example. Suppose someone asks you to do something else. You know you are capable of doing it. The reward is something you genuinely want. And you trust the person telling you to do it. Then of course you will go do it. Phone-scrolling satisfies something close to that structure. You know it will make you feel good immediately. You know how to do it. The reward is clear. So why would you choose a class whose meaning feels unstable and unconvincing?

Of course, that is not the whole story. A phone is also a machine for instant visual and sensory stimulation, and that is very different from long-term decision making. Distant, uncertain goals are exactly what gets bullied by that kind of immediate reward. Nobody can guarantee that your effort will pay off, but the phone can guarantee excitement right now. Reliability, validity, time horizon, reward certainty. Maybe that is why I could never study psychology properly. Trying to model human behavior like an engineering system makes my head hurt. The framework is still there, though. It is probably something close to a drift-diffusion model. “Self-control” is such a vague word. If ordinary people really want to change, they probably need to reflect on deeper layers than that, maybe even deceive themselves a little in useful ways. I do not say that to deny the people who stay immersed in screens all day. I could not honestly deny them anyway.

Writing this feels completely different from thinking privately. Even if nobody cares, this is still a public space. In ordinary life I really do hide many things by reflex. I close myself off by reflex. I cannot fully control that. So here, in this gray zone that belongs to me, I am trying to say things anyway. I want to step over the walls I built for myself. Maybe nobody wants to read this. Maybe nobody likes reading this kind of thing. But the meaning of it still exists for me.