Your scrolling will not protect you
Overcoming the compulsion to doom scroll
Photo by Heber Vazquez on Pexels
Here’s the thing: I’m not talking to the part of you that already knows that.
I’m talking to the thrum in your gut, whirring like a jammed gas pedal. The 3 a.m. waking, no matter how late you turned in.
The part that keeps going back. Just one more post and then we’ll stop. Gathering stories like eggs in a basket.
Why do we call it doom scrolling?
Doom: death, destruction, or any very bad situation that cannot be avoided (Cambridge Dictionary)
If the destructive situation cannot be avoided, why do we keep checking? Why share information, if the outcome is already determined?
Maybe it’s the scrolling, rather than the content, that’s the source of the doom? We’re just passing by, out for a stroll. But the path is strewn with corpses.
4 reasons we come back to (the) feed.
One.
We believe knowing will make us safe.
Two.
We’re in a distal relationship to the tyrant. If he was in the house with us, we’d be tracking the tension in his jaw. Listening for the tone shift in his voice. But we can’t see. The stories are like paper airplanes, thrown over the wall.
Run. We want to know when to run.
Three.
We want to make sure you’re ok. But the you who’s being targeted keeps shifting. Our heads swivel like an owl’s. How can we find you? What do you need? Do I have it?
Four.
We’re looking for instructions: this is how to make it stop. Better: the post that says it has already stopped.
I like the term doom scrolling because it’s a welding together of a feeling and an action. Embedded in the phrase is a cautionary tale: the longer you stay in, the worse it gets.
In the Underworld myths, the hero goes through the gates of hell to visit the land of the dead. He is stripped naked. She has to give up her amulet. One by one, the protective talismans are removed. It’s the self that’s confronted, in its most tawdry, vulnerable, pitiable state. Everything that is feared and reviled, everything that is “not me” and has been thrust into the shadow—now it’s all here.
Only when the self is no longer split; the loathed and violent aspects of its being no longer displaced onto an “Other” who can be scapegoated, pursued, and killed off; only then, in facing and integrating its shadow, does the self come into maturity. Once whole, the self is capable of doing the hardest things.
Perhaps the doom isn’t out there, in the body of the tyrant. Perhaps it's a reflection of our collective shadow, and we keep sidling up to it, then running away. In that sense, the term doom scrolling is a diminutive; a cute-ifying of horror.
How much longer will we avoid the reckoning? How many reels do we have to watch, before we look in the mirror?
Once I’ve been scrolling for a bit, I start to feel like I’m in a trance state. I’ve noticed there’s a war going on. My drive to keep reading, to “know,” pushes me forward. But as the emotional impact of what I’m learning registers, I feel a distancing, a pulling up and out, into dissociation.
The trance state, accompanied by a kind of queasiness, puts me in a soul-slump. I think that’s when I start scrolling faster, skimming, no longer sending myself important articles to read later. At that point I’m staying in because I’m afraid of how I’ll feel when I stop. I’ll have to ask myself if I’m ok with knowing how bad it’s gotten. Then I’ll check my schedule to see what’s next. I’ll continue using my brain to override my gut.
Is turning away from the doom and returning to the day’s tasks itself a practice? Is Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil something that’s now collectively practiced, perhaps more hours a day than we exercise, or engage in spiritual reflection, or spend in person with people we love? Or (perhaps and?) are we becoming more compassionate, because we can see so much more, learn so much about what people need, and how we can help? If we are being given tools, and reading about others successfully making a difference, will we be emboldened to join in? I can see evidence of each of these effects.
Western culture generally lauds rationality and is suspicious of emotion. We often think that impulsive action is driven by emotion, like a crime of passion. But I think there’s a second kind of impulsivity—the action said to be a consequence of reasoned decision making, divorced altogether from feeling. The decider is disconnected, numb. He has convinced himself he is rational, because he feels nothing.
The frenetic pace of destruction that is happening right now is terrifying not only in itself, but also because it’s being represented as if it’s dispassionate, objective, rational, divorced from feeling. As if “feeling” the impacts of the decisions would undermine the correctness of the logic that drove them. (Perhaps it would.)
To witness destruction become bureaucratic, machine-like, unstoppable; this can make a person question their perceptions. Am I the only one who sees how bad this is? Am I crazy? Is there a wolf pack that can gather around me, lick my fur, let me rest while they keep watch?
How beautiful that there’s a chorus of voices who can tell us we’re not alone. How wrenching that we aren’t with them, holding them, bringing them nourishment, laughing and making a fire. We put the phone down and the refrigerator is buzzing loudly in the silence. We look out the window at the street, empty of people. The chasm within feels bottomless. Our fingers graze the glass, then curl around the phone’s edges. Will we pick it up again?
The virtual world asks us to think, and to feel, but not to touch. One way to pull out of its trace, its lure, its perpetual catastrophe, is to bring back touch. To stand up and move towards something tangible. It may be putting your hands in the dirt. It may be picking up your guitar and writing a song. It may be going into the garage and gathering things other people could use. It might be sitting with someone in a facility who doesn’t get many visitors. Or picking up a card and writing by hand to that person you think about all the time but haven’t spoken to recently because they’re far away. It may be walking, or wheeling, or running, hard, to feel your breath and find a focal point that’s far off in the distance, bringing your perspective to a wider frame. It may be as simple as running your hands across your thighs and feeling your own solidity, right here, right now. It’s ok to feel your loneliness. It won’t break you. It may be your pathway out.
"Is Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil something that’s now collectively practiced", oof, that hit hard!