Ew, are we post-literate?

Summary

Today, Explained — “Ew, are we post-literate?”
Vox | May 22, 2026 | Hosts: Sean Rameswaram, Noel King
Guests: Eric Levitz (Vox), Adam Clark Estes (Vox)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Today, Explained dives into the shift from a culture centered on reading and writing (literacy) to one dominated by screen time, especially short video clips and spoken or visual communication. The hosts explore the concept of “digital orality”—where speech, images, and virality take precedence over deep, reflective reading—and ask what this means for our minds, politics, and society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Move from Literacy to Orality

• Clips are everywhere: Social media feeds are now dominated by short clips—of podcasts, shows, sports, and more (02:00).
• Less reading, more watching: Americans’ time spent reading is down, while time on screens is at record highs (02:23).

What is Orality?

• Defined: Orality refers to communication in societies before or without widespread literacy—where information is preserved and transmitted primarily through spoken word, repetition, mnemonics, and formulaic sayings (02:44).
  • Example: In Homer’s Iliad, characters are always described with memorable epithets like “swift-footed Achilles” (03:48).
• Walter Ong’s Thesis (from “Orality and Literacy,” 1982):
  • Speech is performative, repetitive, and social; abstract, contextless thought is less common.
  • Oral communication is inherently more combative—a public performance seeking status and affirmation.
  • Literacy enabled abstract thinking, the formation of rules, scientific method, and democracy (04:18–08:13).
• Digital Orality Today: The digital realm parallels oral culture—viral content is easy to repeat, memes and catchphrases abound, even text communication is filled with emojis to add nonverbal nuance (05:44).
  • “We’re entering this age of digital orality…that recalls some of the aspects of the oral condition.” —Eric Levitz (06:09)

2. Deep Reading and Its Decline

• Deep vs. Surface Reading: UCLA’s Marianne Wolf distinguishes deep, immersive reading (engaging long, abstract texts) as crucial for abstract thought (07:05).
• Impact of Reading: Literacy made possible laws, constitutions, science, and modern democracy (08:11).
• Today’s Trend: There is widespread concern that less reading and more screen time is limiting our capacity for complex thinking (09:14).

3. Political and Cultural Effects

• Populism and Communication Style:
  • Critics tie “digital orality” to the rise of right-wing populism—Trump as a “Homeric” speaker using epithets: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary” (09:28–09:55).
  • Orality’s combative style may erode commitment to democratic, abstract principles. However, Levitz notes many anti-democratic thinkers are well-read; literacy is no guarantee against illiberalism (10:46).
  • “Reading…is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal ideas.” —Eric Levitz (10:51)
  • It’s speculative to directly link decline of literacy to political dysfunction (11:43).

4. Is This New? (Or Just New to Us?)

• Historical Anxiety: Cultural anxiety about new media is ancient—Socrates decried writing as a step backward, fearing it would diminish memory and real wisdom (12:08).
  • “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding…” —Eric Levitz, quoting Socrates (12:40)
• AI as the next jump: While there is more reason to worry about AI, the fundamental anxiety about new media’s effect on minds is perennial (13:02–13:27).

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“Little Videos are Cooking Our Brains”

(Segment begins at 17:31)

5. The Ubiquity and Design of “Little Videos”

• Short Video Format Everywhere: TikTok, Instagram Reels, Spotify, LinkedIn, shopping sites—all are overloaded with short, vertically-oriented videos (17:53–18:47).
• Design to Engage: Algorithms prioritize content that surprises and maximizes engagement, not just simple pleasure—mirroring the “slot machine effect” (19:07).
  • “Every time we see something that we like or find a berry…we get a little hit of dopamine.” —Adam Clark Estes (19:44)

6. Effects on the Brain and Attention

• Shrinking Attention Spans:
  • Attention span dropped from 2.5 minutes (2004) to 47 seconds—the average TikTok clip length (20:12).
    • “Our attention spans have shrunk from about two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, which, wow, happens to also be the average length of a TikTok video.” —Adam Clark Estes (20:46)
• Memory Impact:
  • TikTok use impairs “prospective memory”—remembering tasks or keeping track of a train of thought. After a TikTok break, subjects were 40% more likely to forget what they were doing (21:19).
    • “If I…look at my phone and it’s, you know, 10 minutes of TikTok… I’m probably going to have a harder time remembering where my train of thought was.” —Adam Clark Estes (22:20)
• Mental Health: Greater social media use is linked to depression and anxiety, especially among young people (“TikTok brain”: short attention, anxiety, depression) (22:53).

7. Why Are Platforms Doing This?

• The Profit Motive: The objective for TikTok, Meta, etc. is to keep people watching, sell ads, and maximize engagement, even at the cost of sleep (23:05–23:35).
  • “It’s safe to say that the end goal is maximizing profits, selling ads, keeping people engaged. So, yeah, having people looking at these little videos for the greatest number of minutes possible…” —Adam Clark Estes (23:05)

8. Can We Do Anything About It?

• We’re Not Doomed Yet: The piece is titled “Little Videos are Cooking Our Brains”—not “have cooked.” There’s still agency (23:35).
• Advice for Listeners:
  • Take breaks from the endless scroll; it helps reclaim time and refocus attention (23:58).
    • “If you find yourself spending a lot of time looking at TikTok…take a break and…you’ll be able to reclaim your time and get yourself out of that loop.” —Adam Clark Estes (23:58)
  • Be intentional about device use; recognize boredom vs. procrastination triggers (24:20).
  • Envision your day’s goals: Ask yourself if hours of TikTok feature in your ideal day (24:42).
  • Make your phone boring: Set screens to grayscale to reduce the allure (24:42).
• Books as a Refuge: Books offer immersive, ad-free experiences—“one of my favorite things about books” (25:25).
  • “You can read from like page one to like page 436 and not encounter a single ad anywhere in the text.” —Sean Rameswaram (25:15)
  • “Whatever you like in a, in a story, you can find it in a book.” —Adam Clark Estes (25:25)
• Find Alternatives: Don’t restrict “deep work” to just reading—gardening, time outdoors, or play are all valid (25:54).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [02:44] Eric Levitz: “In an oral world, information needs to be verbally repeated in order to survive. So you need to speak in a way that is going to be enjoyable and easy to repeat…and this leads to the heavy use of repetition in speech, the heavy use of formulaic lines, mnemonic devices, and epithets.”

• [09:55] Sean Rameswaram: “He’s Lying Ted and crooked Hillary and sleepy Joe Biden.”

• [10:51] Eric Levitz: “Reading, you know, is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal ideas.”

• [12:40] Eric Levitz (quoting Socrates): “You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding. You provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.”

• [19:44] Adam Clark Estes: “Every time we see something that we like or find a berry in that forest, we get a little hit of dopamine. This has also been described as kind of the slot machine effect…”

• [20:46] Adam Clark Estes: “Our attention spans have shrunk from about two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, which, wow, happens to also be the average length of a TikTok video.”

• [23:05] Adam Clark Estes: “If you’re Meta or TikTok or, or Google…I think it’s safe to say that the end goal is maximizing profits, selling ads, keeping people engaged.”

• [25:15] Sean Rameswaram: “And a cool thing about books is like, you can read from like page one to like page 436 and not encounter a single ad anywhere in the text.”

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Important Timestamps

• 02:23: Decline of reading, rise in screen time
• 02:44–04:18: Orality explained, mnemonic speech, historical examples
• 06:09: Digital orality parallels with oral societies
• 07:05: The loss of “deep reading”
• 09:28: Political consequences, orality and populism
• 12:08: Historical media anxieties (Socrates & writing)
• 17:31: Begin discussion on the prevalence of short-form video (“little videos”)
• 19:44: The slot machine/dopamine effect of social media design
• 20:46: The shrinking of attention spans corresponds to TikTok’s format
• 21:19: TikTok and impaired prospective memory
• 22:53: Social media, “TikTok brain,” and mental health
• 23:58: Practical advice for resisting infinite scroll
• 25:15: The non-commercial serenity of books

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Conclusion

Today, Explained’s “Ew, are we post-literate?” is a thought-provoking journey into the consequences of our digital consumption shifting from the written word to clips, sounds, and ephemeral digital orality. Through theory, research, and practical advice, the episode balances historical perspective, modern anxieties, and actionable steps, reminding us that while our media environment is changing, we still have choices in how we engage with it—and with each other.

Transcript

[Sean Rames]

Did you hear Wednesday's episode of Today Explained from Vox? We called it Everything is Clips now because when you open up your social media and start scrolling, you probably noticed that everything is clips. Clips of podcasts, clips of TV shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Our guest called it the TL doctorfication of the entire Internet because it kind

[Promotional Voice]

of truncates everything we make. And it all goes down to we need a way for people to discover our content. And right now the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it no matter what it is.

[Sean Rames]

One of the things we're not doing when we're watching all those clips is reading. We made a show about that too, but we also also also made a show about what not reading is doing to our brains, our politics, and our potential to connect with each other now and in the future. And we're gonna bring you that show once again today.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Promotional Voice]

Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders, that perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.

[Eric Levitz]

Take a look.

[Sean Rames]

It's in a book. Today Explained Today Explained from Vox. Here with Eric Levitz from Vox to talk about what we're doing instead of reading.

[Eric Levitz]

Yeah, well, so at the same time that reading is going down, the amount of time that Americans are spending on screens is going steadily up to record highs. This raises questions about how this really massive change is affecting the way that we think and the way that our culture and politics operate.

[Sean Rames]

And your piece focuses on something called orality. Help us understand what that is.

[Eric Levitz]

So some analysts who have tried to answer this question of what is all this doing to us have looked back to how the advent of literacy and the rise of book reading changed human consciousness and culture, and what human consciousness and culture were like before literacy and before reading. A lot of this analysis is really rooted in this 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, by the philosopher Walter Ong. In that book, Ong argues that there are a few defining traits of communication in oral societies. One is that in an oral world, information needs to be verbally repeated in order to survive. So you need to speak in a way that is going to be enjoyable and easy to repeat. And this leads to the heavy use of repetition in speech, the heavy use of formulaic lines, mnemonic devices and epithets.

[Sean Rames]

The law of the harvest is to reap more then you sow.

[Eric Levitz]

Red sky at night, sailor's delight, early

[Sean Rames]

bird gets the worm. Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great,

[Eric Levitz]

for example, in the Iliad, the Greek poet Homer, this is an oral epic, always refers to Achilles as swift footed Achilles, a phrase that helps the listener simultaneously have an easier time remembering who Achilles is and also his sort of defining trait.

[Sean Rames]

So when they had assembled and were gathered together, swift footed Achilles rose and

[Eric Levitz]

spoke among them separately. In an oral society, communication always happens face to face or within, and often within earshot. And to Ong, this imbues discourse with a combative spirit, as every sort of spoken statement kind of doubles as a bid for status or social affirmation because people are watching and you're looking someone else in the face. All this makes orality less accommodating of abstract thought. You know, people can't isolate ideas from their social context or subjective experience, and that makes it difficult to formulate general rules or abstract categories or rules of logic. And this book was written in 1982, long before we had Facebook or social media or anything. But some people look at this and say, hey, this kind of sounds familiar. In our age of social media, there is a real emphasis on making your speech easy and enjoyable to repeat, in the sense of whatever goes viral is kind of what is going to reach people's consciousness.

[Sean Rames]

Very demure, very mindful.

[Eric Levitz]

It's about to be a white boy summer.

[Sean Rames]

What the hell? What the helly?

[Eric Levitz]

It's not clocking to you that I'm

[Sean Rames]

standing on business, is it?

[Eric Levitz]

Yeah. People are now communicating through the spoken word, through podcasts like this one.

[Sean Rames]

It's today explained.

[Eric Levitz]

I'm Noel King through YouTube videos. Hi, I'm Noel King. And as we celebrate People are communicating through speech and facial expressions. And even in our textual exchanges with emojis, we're now re approximating the nonverbal aspects of communication. Waving emoji. It's Noel King, crown emoji. Put all this together and some people argue that we have this. We're entering this age of digital orality. We're entering this new cultural moment that is distinctive but recalls some of the aspects of the oral condition.

[Sean Rames]

There's a lot to take in here orally. But you're not talking about humanity or American culture regressing back to, like the cavemen. You're talking about regressing back to an era where ideas, concepts, characters were chiefly communicated and conveyed through speech. Can you tell us what changed when reading and writing came along? How did that impact our capacity for thought? I believe on our reading episode we did last year, I'm gonna say our guest, UCLA professor Marianne Wolf, called reading the closest thing to telepathy humans ever get.

[Eric Levitz]

Yeah, and so all of this that I've been speaking about is kind of premised on a certain account of what writing and reading does to human consciousness and culture. And Marian Wolf actually supplies a really important concept here, which is that there's a distinction between reading as in just processing written text, and reading as in deeply engaging with a long form piece of writing. And it's that kind of reading specifically that is in decline. So that that form of reading, that deep reading, there's this belief that the advent of it really enabled abstract thought and in fact, inherently inspired it. Text conjures this voice that speaks inside your head rather than through your ears. You encounter these ideas that are stripped from any immediate social circumstance. And you're encountering it just evaluating it in the privacy of your own head. Abstract thought allows us to formulate rules of physics.

[Sean Rames]

E equals MC squared.

[Eric Levitz]

It allows us to formulate constitutions, the people of the United States, monotheistic religions, I, the Lord thy God. So it helps to scale up human societies in terms of their cooperation economically and politically. And it makes the defining sort of rational enlightenment aspects of our culture possible. Science and liberal democracy. This, anyway, is the argument among proponents of this orality versus literacy kind of thesis. And a lot of people have looked to this concept of orality as a way of understanding where our culture might be going. So we had this pre literate age before people had ever encountered books and read text. Then we had this literate age where books were really central to the culture. Now we're in this era where we're potentially leaving the age of literacy behind

[Sean Rames]

it just feels like we have to bring up politics here and talk about what impact orality is having on the way our world's being run right now.

[Eric Levitz]

Critics of digital orality have attributed it as the driver of the rise of right wing populism. You know, Donald Trump arguably is the most successful communicator of our social media age. And kind of like Homer, he references persons very often with an epithet. So instead of swift footed Achilles or wily Odysseus, Trump talks about lying Ted.

[Sean Rames]

He's Lying Ted and crooked Hillary and sleepy Joe Biden.

[Eric Levitz]

Come on, man. His communication style obviously is also very combative, very performative, always sort of a bid for dominance or status, etc. And so, you know, more more broadly, these theorists argue that orality erodes commitment to these abstract principles of liberal democracy. Now, it could be that that's true, but in the piece, I raise a couple of, you know, complicating factors here. You know, I think that it's just not the case that the people who are most hostile to liberal democracy in our day and age are all universally poorly read people. You know, there's Peter Thiel, Antichrist or Armageddon, Curtis Yarvin.

[Adam Clark Estes]

The absolute normal form of government is monarchy.

[Eric Levitz]

J.D.

[Sean Rames]

vance, have you said thank you once?

[Eric Levitz]

Whatever else you think about them, they read a lot of books. They talk about books. You know, I think that a lot of the most prominent authoritarian leftists or Stalinists generally weren't especially unacquainted with libraries. Often they were intellectuals. And so reading, you know, is no vaccine against having authoritarian, illiberal ideas. It's reasonable to worry that the mental habits instilled by TikTok and ChatGPT won't be as conducive to liberal democracy as the written word. That said, I think that this is really speculative and I think that there's a lot of reasons to doubt that this change in human consciousness or culture, this return to an oral mode, is what's driving political dysfunction in the United States, as some of them suggest.

[Sean Rames]

Okay, but one thing on which there is no ambiguity is that we are trending in one direction, which is reading less and watching more. And where is this heading? I mean, with what? The advent of AI and the fast creep of AI into every aspect of our lives, are we only to expect more orality, less literacy?

[Eric Levitz]

You know, the one bit of caution that I put in the piece about this is just that there's always anxiety about new technologies and how they're going to change the way that humans think and communicate. So more than 2,000 years ago, Socrates was really worked up about the novel media technology of his day writing, and he kind of decried it in much the same terms that people decry AI today. You know, addressing himself to the inventor of writing, the hypothetical inventor of writing, he said, you have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding you. Provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. So you know, he thought that being able to write things down, people won't have to memorize poems anymore. They're going to get dumber. I think there's more reason to be worried about AI than there was about writing in ancient Greece. But you know, something worth keeping in mind?

[Sean Rames]

Eric Levitz wrote about orality for Vox.com when we return on Today Explained, we're going to talk about what got us here, those pesky little videos. Foreign. Comes from Vanta if you're a business owner, you may have noticed a shift recently. Risk and regulation are increasing, but before they sign anything, customers now expect clear proof of security. Building that trust is essential to closing deals. And that's what we're all about, closing deals. But it's also complex, expensive and time consuming. Vanta says they can automate that process to bring compliance, risk and customer Trust together on one AI powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SoC2 and who isn't, or running an enterprise GRC program, I know a lot of you are. Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. This helps companies get compliant fast and remain compliant in the future, opening doors to huge growth opportunities and freeing up your valuable time. You can get [e-mail] explained. That is V-A-N T A.com explained Vanta.com explained. Support for the show comes from Chime. Banking can sometimes feel like you're playing a game of dodgeball. Love dodgeball. Doing everything in your power to not get hit with overdraft fees, minimum balance requirements and monthly fees. Don't love that Chime wants to help. They say that they're approaching things differently and changing the way people bank. Chime says they are offering you the most rewarding fee. Free banking banking built for you. Why pay to get your own money? They're not looking to charge you overdraft and or monthly fees and they have thousands of fee free ATMs for you to use built for you, not the 1%. Take that 1%. Chime members can even benefit from up to $1,150 in annual rewards plus fee free plus direct deposit unlocks the Most Rewarding Way to Bank at Chime, Chime says they're not just smarter banking, they're the most rewarding way to bank. You can join the millions who are already banking free free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.comexplained. that's chime.comexplained.

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[Sean Rames]

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[Eric Levitz]

Scrolling, scrolling scrolling.

[Sean Rames]

Today Explained is back with Adam Clark Estes, a senior technology correspondent here at Vox. Adam, in the first half of the show we talked about this idea of orality that our colleague Eric wrote about, which has a lot to do, it turns out, with little videos. Are you a little video guy?

[Adam Clark Estes]

I don't think of myself as a little video guy. I'm not a big TikTok user. I enjoy them when they come across my screen. But what I've noticed over the course of the last months and years is that I actually can't escape the little videos. It's not just on TikTok, they're just little videos everywhere. It's a vertically oriented video. It's usually a short one, but if you're watching them on Spotify, it's maybe like a little music video. Hi, it's Charli xcx.

[Eric Levitz]

Hey, y'. All, this is Monaskin.

[Adam Clark Estes]

If you're watching on LinkedIn, it's maybe like a little motivational speech.

[Sean Rames]

Welcome to a day in the life

[Adam Clark Estes]

of a work from home entrepreneur, fractional

[Eric Levitz]

exec and parent of two.

[Adam Clark Estes]

For a little, like, mini thing about work culture, I, I saw one where I learned the, the phrase peanut buttering.

[Sean Rames]

The idea that you apply the same

[Promotional Voice]

tactics to all areas of a business.

[Adam Clark Estes]

On shopping sites.

[Promotional Voice]

This right here is going to be

[Sean Rames]

my go to base makeup in five

[Chime Disclaimer Voice]

minutes with five products.

[Adam Clark Estes]

But then on TikTok, it's, it's an entertainment platform, right? Like people go to TikTok to, to have fun and to, to zone out and, and some people do it too much.

[Sean Rames]

Why can't we look away from these things? Why are we so inclined to watch the next video and the next video after that?

[Adam Clark Estes]

There are a couple answers to your question, Sean. One is the really simple one, which is that these products are designed to keep you engaged. TikTok is powered by an algorithm that is really good at not just giving you things that you will like, but giving you things that will surprise you. The other thing happening here is, you know, because of the way our brains work, you know, if you look back to the primitive versions of ourselves, we used to be hunter gatherers and our brains were designed to, to look for things. You can imagine a TikTok feed being sort of like a forest floor full of junk with like, little berries sprinkled in between.

[Promotional Voice]

Ooh, yummy.

[Adam Clark Estes]

Every time we see something that we like or find a berry in that forest, we get a little hit of dopamine. This has also been described as kind of the slot machine effect where we keep wanting to pull the lever to see if we're going to win the next time.

[Sean Rames]

And what is this doing to our brains? Because every time we pull the lever, some sounds go off, some, some, some pictures happen and there's like an endorphin rush. Right?

[Adam Clark Estes]

Well, it's reinforcing that behavior. But if you're looking at kind of the, the longer term, what it does to our attention span, researchers have found that our attention spans are shrinking. One of the sources I talked to for my story, Gloria Mark, she's a psychologist who literally wrote the book on attention span. The book is called Attention Span. She found, she's been studying this for, for a couple decades and she's found that since 2004, kind of like the length of time we've had the social Internet, our attention spans have shrunk from about two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, which, wow, happens to also be the average length of a tick tock video.

[Sean Rames]

And how much time are we spending watching these 47 second videos?

[Adam Clark Estes]

One study I looked at showed that on average, TikTok users spend 108 minutes on TikTok. That's about double what Instagram users spend on Instagram.

[Sean Rames]

So these videos are killing our attention spans slowly but surely, if not quickly but surely, what's it doing for the rest of our health? Did, did you talk to anyone about that?

[Adam Clark Estes]

I talked to a researcher who led a team in Germany that looked at memory. In a study that they did, they found that TikTok is especially good at impairing your brain prospective memory. This is the to do list in your head. The the part of your brain that helps you remember to remember something. So they had them do a task and they interrupted them in the middle of the task. And the researchers would let the subjects of the study look at TikTok or scroll Twitter, watch YouTube videos or do nothing. And they found that those that looked at TikTok videos were 40% more likely to struggle with that initial task. So if you kind of like put this in a real world scenario, if I am sitting down trying to write an article for Vox and I get a little tired and I look at my phone and it's, you know, 10 minutes of TikTok.

[Eric Levitz]

Ooh, yummy.

[Adam Clark Estes]

And then I go back to what I was doing. I'm probably going to have a harder time remembering where my train of thought was or what point I was trying to make. And there's another thing too. An increased social media use has been linked to depression and anxiety, especially in young people. It was a study along these lines where we got the term TikTok brain, which is, describes a brain that is not just having a hard time paying attention, but that is also actually anxious and prone to depression and just feeling bad.

[Sean Rames]

What's the end goal here, Adam? Did you figure that out while writing this piece? Is it to just have us watching little videos for maximum amount of time in a given day with no clear purpose in mind?

[Adam Clark Estes]

If you're Meta or TikTok or, or Google, I think it's safe to Say that the end goal is maximizing profits, selling ads, keeping people engaged. So, yeah, having people looking at these little videos for the greatest number of minutes possible, even if that starts eating into the time that they sleep. And I think saw some research on this too, where actually some of these platforms are running up against that. People have to sleep. So how do they fight against that urge to sleep?

[Sean Rames]

But of course, your piece is titled Little Videos are Cooking Our Brains. Importantly, your piece is not titled Little Videos have Cooked Our Brains. We are cooked. There is no going back. If I'm recalling correctly, you have some advice for people who are maybe trying to fight the urge to just watch little videos all day.

[Adam Clark Estes]

The psychologist Gloria Mark, who wrote the book on attention span, she told me that the number one thing is to take breaks. If you find yourself spending a lot of time looking at TikTok or scrolling through Reddit or Twitter or whatever, take a break and, and usually when you do, you'll be able to kind of reclaim your time and get yourself out of that loop.

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It's a way to reflect on our actions and by reflection we can understand why we're doing things. For me, it's usually because I am bored or I'm procrastinating. And when we're more intentional in our actions, we can form a plan.

[Adam Clark Estes]

Another thing that she told me, picture yourself at the end of the day where you want to be, what you want to get done. It is probably very likely that 108 minutes of TikTok watching is not part of that plan that you might have for your day. When you wake up in the morning. An easy trick that people may have heard of is also just to make your phone more boring. That's what I have done and it's been somewhat effective. You can set your screen to grayscale. So as our technology has become more compelling and engaging, we have to become a little bit more proactive about pulling ourselves away from it.

[Sean Rames]

And a cool thing about books is like, you can read from like page one to like page 436 and not encounter a single ad anywhere in the text.

[Adam Clark Estes]

That is one of my favorite things about books, whether it's learning about the history of the Roman Empire. Or reading a novel that helps me escape into a world of sci fi. You know, whatever you like in a, in a story, you can find it in a book. I think that's from the Reading Rainbow song.

[Sean Rames]

But it doesn't have to be books.

[Adam Clark Estes]

It can be anything. It can be gardening, it could be going outside, it could be playing with your kids. A lot of us do want to keep our phones with us all the time, and by making those devices more boring, we're less tempted by the little videos that are everywhere.

[Promotional Voice]

Take a scroll, it's a TikTok hole

[Sponsor Voice]

it's another, another another another another little.

[Sean Rames]

Peter Balin on Rosen made this show some time ago. Back then he was edited by Jolie Myers and Aminah Al Saadi. We were fact checked by Denise Guerra and the show was mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdotter. Haven't said that in a while. These days the team includes Abishai Artsy, Kelly Wessinger, Heidi Miwagi, Danielle Hewitt, Miles Bryan, Ariana Spuru, David Tadashore, Miranda Kennedy, Dust, Justin De Soto, Gabriel Donatov and Noel King. We use music by Brickmaster Cylinder and on this one a little music by Dean Antonio. I'm Sean Ramis from Today Explained is distributed by wnyc. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast network. For more information about that network go to podcasts.voxmedia.com or Google it. You can listen ad free by signing [e-mail] me members.