Hi! I’m Samarjeet Nayak. You can call me Samar. I’m 33, born and raised in Mumbai and I currently live in Pune, where I run a 4,000+ member in-person book club and art community focused on meaning, mindfulness and real-life connection.
I’ve been on both sides of the digital equation, from leading its ways to now strongly criticizing it. After graduating as a Computer Science engineer in 2012, I spent well over a decade working inside the attention economy, first as a SEO specialist and later running my own digital marketing agency.
Around 2012 was also when many new platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Discord, Twitch, Tinder, etc. launched or gained traction. WhatsApp saw mass adoption, YouTube shifted its recommendation system to drive watch-time, and reel style short-form content with infinite scroll became the norm once TikTok arrived.
I was able to see up close working inside this ecosystem how modern digital systems became a race to capture human attention. In order to keep users engaged longer and spending more, every manipulative psychological and design tactic was used without hesitation.
On a personal level, being averse to addictive habits and priding myself on restraint, it did not sit well with me that even I found screens difficult to disengage from. It felt like getting high on one’s own supply because I was aware of all the tricks being used and yet when I tried to step away, the resistance felt extremely strong.
I’ve always been deeply interested in society, culture, history, anthropology, psychology, technology, addiction and human life, and how they intersect. Seeing through that lens, and experiencing the effects of screens personally and across society, pushed me deeper into understanding digital addiction.
NoScroll is born out of years of my obsessive inquiry into every facet of screen use and its effects on the human self, along with my resolve to reduce my own usage to the bare minimum required (currently half an hour to an hour a day). It evolved by breaking the problem down to an atomic level, closely examining its parts, trying different approaches, and putting it all back together into a system others can use to fix their screen use while adapting it to their own habits and circumstances.
NoScroll is my attempt to restore hope and calm in a culture steadily losing its sanity under the weight of modern life and technology.
You can read about the services offered here, and get in touch with me here.