What to do instead of scrolling this summer

The good light only lasts a couple of hours in the evening, and it’s already half gone by the time you look up from your phone. The whole summer works like that. It’s short, it’s warm, and most of it can disappear into a screen without you deciding it should.

You don’t need a digital detox. You don’t need rules. You need a few things that are easy enough to choose over the scroll, especially when it’s hot and you’re tired and the feed is right there.

Here are ten of them.

1. Sit outside with no agenda

No book, no podcast, no “should.” A chair, some shade, a drink that sweats in your hand. Stay until you stop reaching for your pocket. The boredom you feel in the first ten minutes is the interesting part, and we’ll come back to it.

2. Swim

Cold water resets something. You can’t hold a phone in a lake, which is most of the point. A pool, the sea, a river, a freezing pond at 7am: pick the one that’s closest and go get in it.

3. Read a real book in the sun

Paper doesn’t ping. It doesn’t autoplay the next thing or open a tab to somewhere worse. One printed book, one patch of sun, one long uninterrupted hour. If you’ve forgotten how that feels, summer is the easiest time to remember.

4. Take a walk with nothing in your ears

Leave the earbuds. No podcast, no playlist, no call. Just the actual sounds of wherever you are: traffic, birds, a sprinkler, your own footsteps. A walk without audio feels strange for about four minutes and then it feels like a different kind of rest.

5. Watch the sunset without filming it

You already have a hundred sunset photos you’ve never looked at again. Skip the hundred and first. Watch the colors change in real time, with your hands empty, while it’s happening. That counts as doing something, even though it looks like doing nothing.

6. Eat a meal outside

Take dinner to the steps, the balcony, the grass, the hood of the car. Food tastes different outdoors. Conversation goes longer when there’s no TV in the corner and no phone face-up on the table. Put it in another room and see how the meal stretches.

7. Call someone instead of texting

Not a text. Not a voice note. A call, where two people talk at the same time and laugh at the same things. Pick the person you keep meaning to catch up with and ring them while you’re walking. Ten minutes of a real voice beats a week of half-finished threads.

8. Start an analog hobby

A film camera. A cheap sketchbook. A disposable from the corner shop. The whole analog revival runs on friction and presence, on doing a slow thing with your hands and waiting to see how it turns out. Buy 36 shots. Make them count. The waiting is half the pleasure.

9. Do nothing, on purpose

This sounds like a joke until you try it. Lie on the grass and watch clouds. Sit on the porch as it gets dark. When you stop filling every gap, your brain’s default mode network switches on, the quiet system behind creativity, memory, and reflection. Scrolling keeps that system offline. A bored brain is a brain that finally gets to wander.

10. Notice three small things

Before bed, name three small good things from the day. The smell of cut grass. The first cold sip. A stranger who let you go first. These tiny flashes of ease have a name, glimmers, and the more you look for them the more your nervous system learns to find them. Summer is full of them if you’re not looking down.

Why the scroll wins by default

None of this is hard. So why does the phone still win most evenings?

Because it’s engineered to. The average attention span on a screen before we switch to something else is down to about 47 seconds, according to research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine.¹ That’s a measured average across people, not a hard limit on any one of us. The feed is built to refill the second you reach the bottom. Next to a lake or a sketchbook or a quiet porch, the scroll is faster, closer, and asks nothing of you.

That’s the trap. The easy thing and the empty thing are the same thing.

So the fix isn’t willpower. It’s distance. Leave the book on the chair where you’ll sit. Put the film camera by the door. Charge the phone in another room at dinner. Make the better option the closer one, and you’ll choose it more than you’d expect.

A phone-free summer doesn’t mean a phoneless one

You still need maps. You still need to coordinate the beach day and split the bill and check the weather. Going fully offline for three months isn’t the goal, and pretending it is just sets you up to fail by July.

The goal is smaller and more doable. A few protected windows. The first hour outside before you check anything. Meals with the phone in another room. The sunset watched, not filmed. If summer scrolling has crept into every gap, our guide on how to stop doomscrolling walks through the rest.

The summer is already moving. The light’s going down a little earlier each week. Pick one thing off this list, leave the phone where you can’t reach it, and go be outside for the part you’ll actually remember.

That’s the whole idea behind Dear Wander: a gentle nudge to use your phone on purpose, so the season doesn’t slip past the glass. If a slower summer sounds good, come see what we’re building.

Footnotes

1. Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press. ↩