“Doomscrolling” originally specifically meant scrolling through bad news and only later was generalized to all compulsive scrolling, all kinds of scrolling where you afterwards, when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, summon up remembrance of things past and wonder why the heck you spent your precious hours on the dreck you just waded through.
I do think this generalization of the word has merit, that it was driven by a growing realization that it’s not just sad and overwhelming news that make us feel this bad after scrolling. Partly because compulsive behavior almost always feel so much worse than intentional behavior but mostly because what’s out there really is depressing even if it’s the umpteenth cat video or true crimes thread.
But that’s not to completely discount the doomery origins of the word. I feel guilty for how I contribute to that with my own posts since intermixed with all my charming li’l semantics and library components I want to raise awareness of urgent political issues and I often do so in a sublimated exasperation or sad rage. (Because of the “slot machine effect”, the mix of glad&sad might be worse than if it was all doom all day.)
I’m in a bit of a bind since I also believe that people—especially those in power—are more underinformed about the problems than they are overinformed. Both are problems and lead to apathy in their own way, one through not knowing about the problem and the other by being overwhelmed by and scared of the problem, but talking to people and listening to politicians I more often get the impression that they completely underestimate the issues.
It’s like if a friend needs to get going with packing up by moving day. On the one hand it’s really good to be gentle and break things down and say things like “just do one box today”. On the other hand it’s not good if they believe moving day is the twentieth of May when it’s really the twentieth of March.
The whole reason why I keep going writing these texts, why this blog still exists (it started as a place to post my paintings and some Unix advice) is because I care about these political issues.
But I question that often, when I think about the doomerism in doom scrolling, especially since I live my own life so filteredly, only exposing myself very few very short headlines once or twice a day and the occasional rarer deepdive into specific topics.
In my local circle of friends I can’t be the one who quits reading news. In some constellations I’m the one most on top of things, in others we need to help each other keep our gullibility in check. Widening the network to more faraway friends I do have a friend in Malmö who does a good job at looking out when I need to take a break from news for a few weeks.
But applying that mentality to the wider word is hubris. I’m never gonna do a better job than something like Skeptical Science.