Ten years ago, in a small hotel room in Helsinki, Finland, a young tech entrepreneur sat down with a pen and paper and calculated that one of his inventions was responsible for wasting the equivalent of more than a million human lifetimes every day. The realization made him feel sick. That entrepreneur’s name is Aza Raskin, and he’s the inventor of the “infinite scroll,” the feature on our phone that keeps us endlessly scrolling through content with the simple swipe of a finger.

Back in 2006, Raskin was trying to solve the clunky experience of the next-page button that internet users continually had to click. Ironically, his goal was to stop disruptions to a user's train of thought. “My intention was to create something that could focus our attention and control our tempo when on websites and apps,” Raskin explained to me in a recent interview for my podcast, Rethink Moments. The infinite scroll fixed the problem by making new content load automatically, no click required.

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