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+ in-person book and art community focused on meaning, depth and mindfulness.
I spend a large part of my time reading on society, culture, history, anthropology, psychology, tech, addiction and human life. The intersections of these areas are of the deepest interest to me.
I’ve been on both sides of the digital equation, from propagating its ways to now critically condemning it. After completing my Bachelor’s in Engineering in 2012, I spent more than a decade working inside the digital economy, first as a SEO specialist and later running my own digital marketing agency.
Around 2012 was also when many attention-platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Discord, Twitch, Tinder 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.
Working inside this ecosystem during a formative decade of rapid transformation revealed how modern digital systems turned into a race to the bottom to capture human attention. In optimizing for clicks and time-on-site, every manipulative tactic laid out in a psychology journal was used without hesitation to keep the user engaged for a little longer and spend more.
On a personal level, having always been averse to addictive habits and priding myself on restraint, it did not sit well with me that digital technology felt difficult for me to easily disengage from. It felt like getting high on one’s own supply because I was aware of all the psychological tricks used and yet when I tried to step away, the resistance felt extremely strong.
The convergence of understanding how these platforms worked, experiencing their effects personally, and across society, pushed me deeper into studying digital addiction.
NoScroll is born out of years of my obsessive inquiry into effects of digital tech on the human mind and my resolve to get my own usage down to the bare minimum required (currently under half-hour a day). It evolved by distilling the problem down to an atomic level, closely inspecting its components, trying various approaches and putting it all back together to build a system others can use to reclaim their attention too while adapting it to their own habits, peculiarities and constraints.
It 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, or get in touch with me here.