Dispatch · 03 / 08 · Edition 01

Locked in or logged on?

on announcing a fresh start instead of making one

By Pahal Sethi · Sep 2026 · 2 min read

“Lock in.” Two words. Infinite promises.

We say it before exams, after bad grades, on Sunday nights, on Monday mornings, and occasionally at 2 a.m. after watching a motivational edit that convinces us our entire life is about to change.

And then we open Instagram. Just for five minutes, obviously.

Twenty-seven reels later, we somehow know how a celebrity met their ex, why a random stranger’s cat has a better morning routine than us, and exactly what everyone else is doing with their lives. Our textbook, meanwhile, has remained open to the same page long enough to qualify as furniture.

The irony is that Gen Z is probably more obsessed with productivity than any generation that has ever owned a smartphone. We have “lock-in” playlists, productivity apps, colour-coded planners, study-with-me videos and enough motivational quotes to wallpaper a bedroom.

Yet somehow, we’re still doomscrolling at midnight. Maybe because doomscrolling isn’t really about wanting to scroll. It’s about not wanting to start.

Starting means concentrating. It means risking the possibility that we won’t understand something, won’t finish on time, or won’t be as productive as the version of ourselves we imagined while making the timetable. Scrolling asks for none of that. It gives us the comforting illusion of doing something while requiring absolutely nothing from us.

So perhaps the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to “lock in.” We’ve just become incredibly good at announcing it. Maybe locking in isn’t a dramatic transformation. No 5 a.m. routine. No perfectly clean desk. No sudden personality change. Sometimes it’s just closing the app before “one more reel” becomes another hour.

Because apparently, the hardest part of productivity isn’t knowing what to do. It’s resisting the urge to see what happens next on your For You page.