Don’t be a Doomscroller
In the wonderful world of interconnected 21st Century technology, the effects of that technology on society’s mental health have become a hot topic. A topic that most of us passively understand, and yet either accept, underestimate, or straight up forget about when it comes to our own selves.
So pervasive has social media addiction become, we tend to make memes about how sad it makes us rather than taking steps towards changing the reality of it. Despite the success of movements such as Delete Facebook, many still hum and haw about tapping the ‘uninstall’ prompt.
Even when a person does take that step, deleting a single social media app seldom has results. A lack of the Facebook icon sends you towards Instagram’s, Twitter’s, or Reddit’s instead, with the same amount of time ending up wasted. Even when reduced to just one option, most people will unconsciously fill up the feed of that option until it contains enough content to satisfy the urges they’ve become used to.
In short, we struggle deeply to give up internet and social media addiction. And it’s not just down to our own weakness and reluctance to change; there are valid reasons why giving up all social media access is just a step too far for many.
That reason would be news. Some years ago people began pointing out the fact that more and more people were getting their information from social networks, which had at the time not really gotten past their image of being a place for personal connections rather than content hubs from which people would launch themselves into the internet at large. Those who mentioned this fact either decried the death of traditional news sources or rubbed their hands at the possibility of the death of the old order — depending on their philosophical bent.
At some point, this reality came to pass with nary a whisper and has since been accepted by most. Here’s the new order, looks a lot like the old order. Old news media has survived through an act of complete migration, and the establishment is quickly cracking down to ensure that these old behemoths are given as much spotlight as possible to colonise the avenues people now get their information from. Goodbye, goofy YouTube channel that had some good info but sometimes strayed down the paranoid path a little much. Hello, corporate news and late night anchors, to your entirely undeserved spot in the algorithmic rankings.
But we’re getting beyond the point, and possibly straying down that paranoid path to boot. To get back on track, let’s surmise with the argument that many people struggle to give up social media not just because they’re addicted, but because they fear that such a decision will leave them sadly uninformed and bereft of up-to-the-minute information. With fewer sensible avenues to get news from, our social apps have filled with this content instead.
The world’s events come at us from rectangles of woe we can barely manage to leave behind when we move between rooms, in a destructive loop I illustrate as follows:
1. Our social media accounts have addicted us to them.
2. The news has migrated onto those networks.
3. The news is relentlessly geared towards ‘bad’.
4. The difficulty of consuming news any other way leaves us not wanting to be uninformed.
5. Our desire and our addiction converge to ensure we stay glued in on the apparent hellscape the world lurches towards one catastrophic headline after another.
6. Phone time morphs into doomscrolling.
We’re all familiar with the experience of being on our phones continuously scrolling. The minutes ticking away almost trancelike as each five-second engagement piece after five-second engagement piece passes by and disappears. Reddit got really good at engendering this, as not only were there an endless number of subreddits to scroll past, each one of those subreddits had a bottomless well of content that could turn that little page scroll indicator next to your thumb microscopic.
The trend towards bottomless content is obvious on all apps. Facebook began to fill newsfeeds with more sponsored content and newsfeeds began to progressively bleed more and more into one another. Instagram recently introduced a feature wherein once a user reaches the end of the new images from accounts they actually follow, they are immediately redirected to a ‘sponsored pages’ feed rather than the older content as used to appear, lest you get bored and exit the app. Instagram now has a bottomless cache of content as default. This subtle change in design will have a monumental effect on the amount of time people spend on Instagram, especially those that follow fewer pages.
This widely known tendency by social media companies to do whatever it takes to get you to spend that extra minute or ten on their app has been an important aspect to the evolution of doomscrolling, as the doom never ends.
What is this combination of addiction and discouragement doing to us? It’s a more important question than one to laugh off with, “oh yeah, I’m totally addicted to my phone, oh well”. It’s possible to get addicted to a lot of things, some more harmful than others. It’s becoming increasingly clear that being addicted to something that injects antagonism and inflammation directly into our eyeballs is one of the most damaging things we could be doing.
An entire generation is growing up and coming of age in a zeitgeist that is relentlessly negative. They are being brought up to take for granted that things are so shitty that there really is no possibility of a turnaround.
Our mental models help to collate our own version of reality. Evidence shows that what we think directly affects how we feel and how we evaluate our experiences. At the very least, thought itself is incredibly powerful. At the most, it could very well be the vehicle which causes ‘destiny’ to collapse into reality in front of us.
This should give us some pause when we acknowledge the power of thought and the devastating consequences algorithmically curated newsfeeds are having on our minds. Being bombarded with negativity instils a sense of negativity within us which evolves into a negative way of thinking which evolves into a negative way of living and being. Amplified by millions of people, we end up with a negative society.
The ‘solution’ of giving up social media entirely has been offered a thousand times before, however for reasons already expressed it’s not a particularly useful one. But escaping the doomscroller’s trap is easier than that, and requires us only to think carefully about how we tend to and curate our own feeds. While not useful for internet addiction in general, by simply choosing to disengage with information sources responsible for the most egregious negativity we can at least remove some of the toxicity.
To do so, we simply need to get over the fear of being left uninformed. Being informed at the level we are is overrated. To be ignorant is one thing, but to purposefully turn your head away from things that are quite literally designed to amplify your survival emotions is a form of wisdom. We should also recognise the truth of moderation. Very few things in life are zero sum, and content consumption is no different. There’s no need to remove every news source from your feed, but an awareness of balance and a careful curation that works to stabilise the number and types of emotions that are elicited as we scroll is highly beneficial.
Don’t be a doomscroller. Passively obsessing about the way things are is a good way to get depressed, and a bad way to change anything. No person can ignore the fact that shitty things are being done on a day to day basis in the wider world, but the impotence that comes from being aware and yet unable to do anything meaningful is far from helpful. Indeed, it helps to create whole groups of people who have lost faith, become apathetic, and do very little with their ‘information’ other than make themselves miserable and infinitely less useful to themselves and others.
Free yourself of the 24 hour news cycle and see if it doesn’t have a measurable effect on your mental health. Stop obsessing over the disasters you feel must inevitably come to pass and see if a more positive outlook invites a more positive future. Go for a walk through your neighborhood, a park, or up a fucking mountain, and realise that the world is much much more than bad news, and can still be enjoyed for its own sake.
