The Horror of Infinite Scroll in a World Without Endings

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29 May 2025

You didn’t plan to stay. You only opened your phone to check something a message, a notification, the weather. Then you started scrolling. Minutes passed, then hours. You weren’t reading with purpose; you were simply consuming. That’s the genius and the tragedy of infinite scroll.

Once hailed as a breakthrough in user experience design, infinite scroll is now being reconsidered as one of the most quietly damaging inventions in the digital age. We live in a world where content no longer ends. Platforms are designed to never let you stop not because you need more, but because they need your attention.

This article explores the psychological, societal, and existential horror of a mechanism built not for closure, but for endlessness.

The Architecture of No Escape

What Is Infinite Scroll?

Infinite scroll is a user interface design that loads new content continuously as a user scrolls down a page, eliminating the need for pagination. Originally introduced to streamline navigation, it was popularized by platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The intent was efficiency. The outcome? Entrapment.

Unlike traditional books or articles that offer a beginning, middle, and end, infinite scroll provides no logical breakpoint. You don’t finish you surrender. And when there’s no end, there’s no signal to stop.

Engineered Addiction

The Dopamine Loop

Infinite scroll leverages a behavioral design principle known as intermittent variable rewards the same mechanism that drives slot machines. Every swipe may bring something funny, shocking, moving, or useless. You never know. That uncertainty is addictive.

Social media apps combine this mechanic with personalized algorithms that adapt to your interests. The result is a custom-built maze, created to keep you inside. Every scroll is a gamble, and every win (a like, a video, a tweet) reinforces the behavior. This loop is devastating for attention spans and profoundly disorienting for the human sense of time.
Dopamine and Tech Addiction

Infinite Scroll and the Loss of Narrative

The Erosion of Closure

Human beings are hardwired to seek narrative structure. From ancient myths to modern novels, our psychology depends on beginnings and endings. Stories help us process meaning and assign value. Infinite scroll, by contrast, is anti-narrative. It refuses to conclude.

This has cognitive and emotional consequences. Without resolution, there's no reflection. Without reflection, there’s no growth. Social media timelines blur events, mix the trivial with the profound, and place novelty over continuity. Important events become fleeting, and minor distractions are given disproportionate attention.
In a world without narrative, coherence collapses.

The Temporal Crisis: Living Without Time

The Death of “Done”

Infinite scroll does not just extend time it obliterates it. You no longer read the news and finish. You no longer watch content and walk away. You live in a loop where the only marker of time is the battery life on your phone.

This constant stimulation creates a flattened sense of time, where everything becomes part of a continuous now. Urgency and rest blur. The future becomes irrelevant. And without a sense of past, present, or future, identity itself begins to fragment.

Societal Consequences: The Fragmentation of Attention

A Culture of the Perpetually Distracted

The macro result of infinite scroll is not individual dysfunction alone it's a distracted culture. Education, politics, and even intimate relationships are disrupted by a populace conditioned to micro-attention. The modern citizen is less a thinker, more a swiper.

Algorithms amplify echo chambers, surface polarizing content, and reward emotional extremity. Discourse loses its shape because the medium itself is shapeless. Where ideas once competed in debate, they now jostle in an endless queue for attention, stripped of context, reduced to memes and outbursts.

The Illusion of Control

Who’s Driving Whom?

One of the most dangerous aspects of infinite scroll is its illusion of autonomy. Users believe they are in control, curating their feeds, choosing their content. In reality, they are being trained. Platforms observe, predict, and adapt faster than we do.

This is not a neutral environment. Attention is being extracted. Time is being harvested. The interface may appear friendly, even delightful, but it is anything but passive. It is a profit-driven machine, calibrated to exploit every second of your cognitive bandwidth.
See: Jaron Lanier on Social Media Manipulation

Psychological and Emotional Fallout

The Toll of Never Stopping

Prolonged exposure to infinite scroll leads to what some psychologists call digital burnout a mix of anxiety, numbness, and cognitive fatigue. Users report feeling “mentally cluttered,” emotionally drained, yet unable to disconnect.

There’s also a growing link between social media overuse and rising rates of depression, particularly among adolescents. The constant stream of curated perfection, outrage, and viral disasters contributes to a toxic feedback loop of inadequacy and overstimulation.

Toward a New Digital Ethic

Designing for Endings

To address the psychological damage of infinite scroll, we must rethink design ethics. Some apps are beginning to implement soft barriers “You’ve been scrolling for a while” messages, optional pagination, or dark mode reminders. But more radical interventions may be necessary.

Imagine content platforms that encourage stopping. Interfaces that promote intentionality. Digital spaces that respect attention as a finite resource, not a renewable commodity. This isn’t a nostalgic plea for the past it’s a call to restore meaning in digital engagement.
Explore: The Center for Humane Technology

Finding Ends in a World Built for Never

We cannot escape technology, nor should we. But we must confront the horror of infinite scroll not just as a design flaw, but as a cultural sickness. In the pursuit of endless engagement, we’ve sacrificed the power of endings the part of the story where we make sense of what came before.

Infinite scroll asks nothing of us except that we keep going. But meaning doesn’t reside in motion. It lives in arrival. It thrives in conclusion. And unless we reclaim the right to stop to finish we risk becoming a civilization lost in a digital labyrinth, endlessly scrolling, never arriving.