People committed to ‘simple living’ share the 7 things you can do instead of doomscrolling

“Sometimes all we need is some more options.”

By

Mark Wales

Oct 8, 2025

By Mark Wales

October 8, 2025

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Photo credit: via Canva/Photos – One woman scrolls, the other reads.

Our brain loves repetitive patterns of easy, stimulating imagery and sound. The addictive nature is so strong that there’s a term to describe it: doomscrolling. It’s so easy to engage, and considerable research and investment have been made to encourage us to stare mindlessly at our phones. For some of us, it’s a simple distraction. For others, its an addiction is robbing them of a big part of their lives.

Given that the average person spends over four hours a day staring at their phones, imagine what could happen if we used that time for something more positive and productive. Doomscrolling isn’t just bad for our mental health, but it’s a time thief that prevents us from engaging in activities that build us up.

What do you do instead of doomscrolling?

A new Reddit thread on r/simpleliving posed an interesting question: “What do you do instead of doom scrolling?’

Redditors started chiming in with helpful alternatives that have worked for them. These are seven thoughtful solutions related to stopping the highly addictive and unproductive distraction of digital entertainment. It’s a compelling suggestion to consider what we could be doing instead of endlessly scrolling.

1. Check out a book from the public library

library, books, resources, inspirational ideas, readers, library card, book borrowing — People at a public library. Image via Canva – Photo by USA-Reiseblogger

Because of easy access to the internet, many of us have forgotten about this incredible resource. Feeling inspired by the idea was MajorEntertainment65: “I read so much and am absolutely amazed by how few people read! The library is a free resource and depending on your library, they may have access to audiobooks and movies and tv shows, etc.”

As great an adventure as a trip to the public library can be, not everyone has the time to be there. However, that doesn’t have to define your ability to take advantage, said Brayongirl: “Do you have a book reader? With my library card, I can borrow books for my reader from home. Also, all libraries have a book chute. So you can go borrow a bunch of books on your day off and put them in the chute when you are done, even if the library is closed.”

2. Master the art of folding paper

paper, origami, stress reliever, concentration, paper folding, origami crane, technique, crafts — Father and child making origami together. Image via Canva – Photo by Aflo Images

One of the amazing benefits of a practice like folding paper—origami—is it’s an incredible stress reliever. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Pharmacy & BioAllied Sciences found origami therapy to be a simple and effective intervention for reducing anxiety among hospitalized children.

Feeling a bit swaggy about the whole thing was low-fish saying, “Learn to fold an origami crane by memory from any piece of paper.”

3. Invest time into self-care

self-care, showers, baths, quality of life, health, daily practice, love and kindness — Woman takes a bath. Image via Canva – Photo by simonapilolla

“Take a hot mindful shower followed up by a hot cup of chai with my favorite creamer,” suggested Virtual-Magician2384. Finding time to cultivate love and kindness for ourselves is an important practice many of us fail to utilize.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that self-care improved people’s quality of life. Managing one’s physical and mental health gives someone a feeling of control and overall well-being.

4. Get yourself in the kitchen

You can watch this video, with over 2 million views, which teaches you the basics of cooking.

Suggesting some adventure in your own kitchen was Outrageous_Guess_794: “cook something nice, it doesn’t have to be expensive, just cook something new.”

A healthy and more affordable option, said RufousMorph, is to “Make your own foods rather than buying highly processed foods (technically this uses less money).”

5. Go for a walk

There are many health benefits to be gained from a simple walk. A 2023 study in Science Daily found that walking only 4,000 steps a day reduces the risk of death “from any cause.” Seems like a simple and highly beneficial self-care action.

“Hiking is free.99, great for your mental and physical health, and you might see a cool bug, plant, mushroom or animal!” said Pokemon_and_Petrucci with some creative energy.

Getting in a little productive work on the house as a bonus was suggested by dogma202: “Move. Get outside and hike, do yard work.”

6. Puzzles and mind games

puzzles, crosswords, psychological stress, skill builders, games, brain, focus — Older man solving newspaper crossword on a street table. Image via asdf – Photo by Mathias Reding

Puzzles and games are healthy ways to stimulate brain activity. These are creative and cognitive skill builders. A 2022 study in the National Library of Medicine used puzzle-style games to reduce psychological stress, boost sustained attention, and significantly improve focus.

Activating the mind is a good thing, wrote kfbrewer:“Bonus points that puzzle games are good for the brain.”

A game that requires two people was suggested by mick_au: “Chess!!”

7. Enjoy some childhood activities from your past

Finding a meditative and relaxed state of joy was Purple-Spray-709: “I’ve been really enjoying doing some cute colouring books with my special alcohol based markers. I tried the adult colouring trend before and never liked it but having a cute/cozy book with thicker lines and using the right markers I’ve really been really enjoying it as a simple pleasure”

A 2020 study in the National Library of Medicine found that structured coloring, like a mandala, lowered anxiety and showed noticeable mood improvement.

bikes, bike ride, happiness, outdoors, exercise, stretching, letters, mood, parents — Happy seniors ride bikes. Image via sdf – Photo by Syda Productions

Engaging in more positive actions that break the cycle brings better moods and an overall happier life. Some other quick solutions for a reset: ride a bike, stretch, write a handwritten letter to a friend, call your parents, meditate, and send positive thoughts to someone you know who’s experiencing a difficult moment.

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Culture, Internet

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

“I blinked and I missed it”

Mark Wales

4/29/2026

At first glance, this probably looks like a camera trick. Ken Lee, an Italian content creator, has built a massive online following by doing something that doesn’t quite feel real. Viewers refer to him as the “human cheetah” because it appears he has near-instant reflexes.

Grabbing objects out of the air with uncanny precision, flicking clothespins and lighters, and throwing a blur of punches and kicks at impossible speeds, it is easy to call him unbelievable. Half the audience thinks his viral speed videos are fake. The other half is just as convinced they are watching something incredibly rare.

Hands so fast they blur time

In the video above, a timer runs to confirm its authenticity. In what looks like half a second, he reaches out and snags the lighter from the table. To prove it is real, he does it twice.

Having amassed millions of followers on his TikTok page, the identity behind the mysterious influencer remains largely unknown. Active since around 2022, with almost 100 million accumulated likes, Lee has cultivated a fandom around his self-proclaimed “Superhero per Hobby!”

Do you believe it is real? Is this person the fastest human alive? Many followers cannot wait for the next video to be posted. Plenty of his fervent fans are Italian, so sifting through the remarks takes a bit of hunting. Here are some comments that sum up how much people enjoy the fun and the spectacle:

“Ken lee the fastest and the best”

“Most dangerous human”

“Is this what the lighter sees before my homie steals it”

“It was sped up during he grabbed the lighter, if u count up with the timer u would be off by like 0,5 seconds whenever he grabs the lighter.”

“If the flash were human”

“How is it possible to get such powers ?”

“I blinked and I missed it”

People love good entertainment

The awe of peak performance attracts people to watch elite athletes, musicians, or even dancers. There is something that deeply satisfies all of us when a human appears to push a skill to its limit. Whether it is real or fake seems to matter less than the opportunity to chime in on some good entertainment.

How far could any of us go by practicing and repeating a particular motion over and over until it is mastered? Beneath the flashy nickname and his viral speed videos, Lee’s content has a way of drawing people in. This is not a superpower. Just repetition. Focus. Obsession. And maybe some digital wizardry.

Testing the science of speed

If you wish to question the validity of Lee’s performances, maybe some basic science can help. Human reaction time is not just a reflex. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time. Practice can make movements appear almost automatic.

It has been well established in research that the gap between seeing something and responding has a limit. A 2025 study concluded that the most elite extremes allow for reaction times of 100 milliseconds. At that speed, the human brain can barely process that something has happened.

Science explains Lee is not necessarily moving as fast as we might perceive him to be. And therein lies all the fun of it. We cannot prove it is real, nor can we actually prove that it is fake.

Maybe Lee is the “fastest man alive” or the so-called “human cheetah.” Or maybe he is just a remarkable entertainer. Either way, he has clearly tapped into something strange and fascinating: a blend of human ability and fantasy that people do not want to miss.

To give context to Lee’s videos, watch this performance on Tú Sí Que Vales:

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Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.

Culture, Media

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Why “bad” English is nothing new.

Good Partner

4/22/2026

Valerie M. Fridland

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Culture, Media

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The premise was simple but high stakes.

Adam Albright Hanna

GOOD Staff

4/19/2026

It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

The Setup

While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.

The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.

The Boys: Instant Chaos

In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.

They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.

The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.

“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”

Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.

The Girls: Organized Society

The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.

The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.

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