CLEVELAND — Local man Johnathan Maxwell was enjoying an unseasonably beautiful day in Lincoln Park before he decided to completely ruin a rare moment of peace by taking out his phone and scrolling X, confirmed sources who tried to warn him but to no avail.
“I can’t explain why I decided to do it, but I guess self-sabotage is no joke,” said Maxwell, whose mood went from jovial to downtrodden in seconds after watching a video of Nazi’s marching through a quinceañera. “I had one free moment of peace, uninterrupted by work or life’s obligations, and I felt somehow drawn to open up my phone and look at some of the most racist and sexist shit anyone could ever see. It’s like my brain craved online trolls and there was nothing I could do to counteract it. This isn’t the first time Groypers ruined my mental health and it probably won’t be the last.”
Julia Arnold was also seen in the park, reading a novel peacefully on a blanket handmade by her grandmother in the 1950s, when she also decided to open her phone and ruin a perfectly fine afternoon.
“It was Instagram for me,” said Arnold. “I was in the middle of ‘Stoner,’ an incredible novel by John Williams when I decided to check a text message. Next thing I knew I was scrolling AI slop stories for 47 uninterrupted minutes and getting uncontrollably irritated. I knew I had to get back to reality when I got sucked into a rabbit hole of arguments about whether or not Michelle Obama was male or female.”
Dr. Jonah Berger, an expert on viral content and social influence at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, explained why we feel so compelled to check our phones and ruin a perfectly fine moment of peace and solitude.
“Medically speaking, our brains are absolutely fucked,” Dr. Berger began. “They’re fucked rotten. These bricks in our pockets have completely ruined us from being able to sit with ourselves for one fucking moment and take in one fucking second of peace and fucking quiet. We have to take our phones and scroll aimlessly, or we will die. At least, that’s what our stupid brains have been trained to believe.”
At press time, a group of parents was seen scrolling through TikTok and secret dating apps while their children played a soccer game on a beautiful day, and one father missed his daughter’s first goal because he was arguing on Reddit about a golf tournament in Saudi Arabia.
