Scrolling Without a Phone
I recently went to a shopping center with my daughter and saw something so strange that I immediately thought:
there is an essay in this.
In the middle of the mall stood huge metal cages filled with unopened return packages. According the shop assistant, they were from Amazon.
A yellow sign explained the concept: you buy the packages by weight without knowing what is inside.
That was the entire business model.
People were digging through the parcels almost feverishly.
My daughter wanted me to buy one.
Usually I am not overly strict about small things like this, but this time I immediately drew the line.
I told her: “If you want one, you are welcome to buy it with your own saved money. But I’m not paying for this.”
That changed the atmosphere instantly.
The moment real cost entered the situation, the excitement weakened.
And then I became curious.
Not about the packages.
About the people.
Most of the people there were women, younger women and middle-aged women. So I started approaching them and asking questions.
At first many of them seemed to assume I was flirting with them.
Which, socially speaking, probably made more sense than what I was actually doing.
A man casually talking to women in a shopping center near piles of mystery boxes is still a recognizable social script.
But then they realized I was not flirting.
I genuinely wanted to understand what they were doing there.
And that seemed to puzzle them much more.
I asked: “What exactly is this?” “What are you hoping to find?” “What do you do if the thing inside is useless?” “Why is this exciting?” “What are you actually buying here?”
And almost immediately the answers became vague.
“You never know.” “Maybe there is something good.” “It’s just fun.” “Maybe I find something useful.”
Nobody really wanted to go further than that.
And that was the interesting part.
Not the packages.
The resistance to reflection itself.
The moment you calmly stop the process and ask: “What exactly are we doing here?” the atmosphere changes.
Not aggressively. Not morally.
Almost phenomenologically.
And people become strangely uncomfortable.
Because once the activity is described directly, the spell weakens.
“We are paying money for random discarded objects from a gigantic logistics overflow system because uncertainty itself feels exciting.”
Said out loud like that, the whole thing suddenly sounds bizarre.
So people instinctively avoid looking at it too directly.
And the longer I stood there, the stranger the whole scene became.
Some people looked almost hypnotized.
You could feel the dopamine architecture operating in real time.
Digging. Searching. Anticipating. Maybe the next one contains treasure. Maybe excitement. Maybe disappointment.
It felt much closer to scrolling online than to traditional shopping.
The object itself had almost become secondary.
The real product was anticipation.
The maybe.
I even spoke to one man who had bought a fairly large package.
I asked him: “Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged and said: “I just want to see what’s inside.”
So I asked: “Okay. But what if it’s useless to you?”
He looked at the package for a moment and simply said: “Then I guess I throw it away.”
And somehow that sentence captured the entire thing perfectly.
The usefulness of the object no longer mattered very much.
The emotional event mattered.
The stimulation. The anticipation. The tiny dopamine pulse before reality arrives.
And of course one can immediately turn this into a critique of capitalism.
Late-stage capitalism. Consumer society. Algorithmic stimulation. Overproduction. Waste loops.
Fine.
That part is relatively easy.
But standing there, I slowly realized that what disturbed me was actually something deeper.
People no longer seemed fully conscious of what they were doing.
Or perhaps they did not want to become conscious of it.
And that frightened me more than the shopping itself.
Because the scene began feeling less like consumer behavior and more like collective trance.
Almost sleepwalking.
Not evil. Not stupid.
Just absorbed.
And then another thought appeared.
What frightened me was not merely the return-package stand itself.
It was the realization that the psychological structure of online behavior had started spilling into physical reality.
Years ago, the internet still felt compartmentalized.
You went online. Then you returned to ordinary life.
But now the architecture of the feed increasingly escapes the screen and reorganizes reality itself.
The people around me were physically standing in a shopping center, but psychologically they were behaving exactly like users online: scrolling, searching, chasing intermittent reward, moving from maybe to maybe, continuing without reflection.
The packages had become physical posts in a feed.
A real-world scroll.
And perhaps that was the most unsettling part of all.
The online world no longer remains online.
Its logic slowly migrates outward into shopping, conversation, attention, identity, and everyday consciousness itself.
People begin scrolling through physical life exactly as they once scrolled through screens.
And the truly strange thing is this:
the moment somebody interrupts the flow and calmly asks, “What exactly are we doing here?” the interruption itself begins feeling socially abnormal.
As if reflection has become the disturbance.
That was the feeling I carried home afterward.
Not that people were buying random packages.
But that more and more human activity now seems organized around participation without reflection.
Systems optimized not for understanding, but for continuation.
And standing there under the bright mall lights, watching people dig through piles of anonymous return packages from Amazon, I suddenly had the strange feeling that I was not looking at a shop anymore.
I was looking at the future.
People scrolling without a phone.