mini-cure for doomscrolling

death drives, addiction, and reality

Fire in the field (2012), by Palestinian painter Sliman Mansour

I’ve had some terrible things happen over the past few months. Sadness, for me, appears as different colors—this one a saran-wrapped bright red, leaving me isolated with half my vision intact.

I turned to my phone. More specifically, social media. When I wasn’t working or with friends, I found myself “doomscrolling” (at one point, I felt like I could actually understand the enormity of the network’s superstructure, of the 3.24 billion people interacting with just Meta products each day).

I’ve kept “doomscrolling” in quotes because it is a fairly new term, meant to define an addiction to scrolling, often through news. It became popular during the pandemic, when Twitter, Instagram, TikTok saw their usage balloon and stick, partly because of their architecture; infinite scroll, autoplay, bursts of unexpected, short, easy-to-consume content.

Other theories resurfaced alongside the invention of the term doomscrolling. Freud’s death drive made a renewed appearance. After the threshold of pleasure-seeking had been passed, were we not scrolling to seek pain, self-destruction, and death? A 1970s theory known as the mean world syndrome began to be stretched to fit our times. It purported that people perceived the world to be more dangerous when they watched a lot of television, which “cultivated” how they viewed reality. Can any of us deny scrolling ourselves into thinking the world outside is gray, then felt our intuition completely wrong when we leave our doors?

Four years later, the idea of doomscrolling has become tender and more urgent. Recently, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a book that names the worries that many people have had for a long time. Children have lost the “play-based” childhood that they once enjoyed; “phone-based” childhoods rewire whole brains, and are creating inhumane environments that we must change. Haidt’s views have earned him a large share of supporters and detractors, with some in the latter camp arguing that the relationship between poor mental health and social media use isn’t quite as clear as he’s made it out to be.

Whether or not Haidt’s analysis is correct, I’ve found it hard to deny that there is something off with social media, and that something has to change. When I was sad, I used the feeds to replay my grief endlessly. The narratives I encountered in aggregate had no plot, contained no closure, created a scattered chaos that left me unsettled and feeling that the world outside was on the brink of collapse (it wasn’t—a social media feed just never offers resolution, because then you’d leave). I imagined that if we were able to get high enough, we might see ourselves circling these platforms as death, like the spiraling ant mills that go around and around until they die of exhaustion.

Last summer, I visited the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time. An eight-hour hike in, my legs started aching. I sat on a rock and watched a creek glisten past my feet; the mountains were less blue from the inside, dotted with small, craggy, shocks of purple and yellow wildflowers. All at once, a murder of prehistorically-large ravens streaked black against the sky and landed a few feet away from me. I left the container of my body. All that remained was a rustling fear of the mountain around me, and the thought of what would happen if I were to lose myself here.

Here is my mini-theory of doomscrolling. For me, it is an attempt to access something vast, unexpected, sublime, the sort of thing that can shake me out of my body and replace the tesseracting, constellating, refracting, recurring nature of grief.

But a mountain and a social media feed are two different things. The latter is plastic, but it acts as if it is lifelike. A feed is large, but it is not infinite in dimension. Anything older than 24 hours is rarely revealed; history is resurfaced only occasionally; increasingly, it gets harder to go off-path from the main feed on your own.

Most importantly, a mountain’s currency is physical labor. I need to hike a lot to get to the vast part. Social media’s currency is time. I don’t need to do much to get there.

The solution has been to make it harder to doomscroll. I was recently gifted a phone lockbox. I put my phone away for 6-8 hours at a time, at least once a day. Suddenly, my phone shrinks back down from infinitude to a dozen grubby inches of metal and glass. I also use an app to block the offending sites on my laptop. By the time my break is up, I’ve stopped associating my phone with doom. Lately, I’ve been feeling grateful again that the internet has granted us access to so much that would have previously been hidden.

Highly effective as my lockbox may be, it’s an individual answer for an issue that I believe affects many people. For children, Haidt recommends flip phones before sixteen and a ban on phones at school. Regulation is something I’ve wondered about for adults, too, although I’ve struggled to imagine the specifics of how it would work, and have wondered if they’ll cause more harm than good.

Try this thought experiment with me. We have experienced what it feels like to have massive social networks lit up arcade-style at our finger tips. What would it look like if it were different? Who would implement those differences? How would you like to feel while using social media?

Until the next (happier, hopefully) newsletter —