Oh, no! Am I a “Doomscroller?” Have I succumbed to this affliction? A pandemic within a pandemic? I fear I have. All the signs point to my transformation into one of these poor, wretched, ravenous beasts.
Did you even know this was a thing? Doomscrollers? That people could become one?
I didn’t either. Not until the other day when … well … I was doomscrolling on my phone, looking for the next breaking news article about how mankind was about to end. That’s when I came across this story from the Web site Wired: “Doomscrolling is slowly eroding your mental health.”
Oh, NO!
So, I doomscrolled through it and realized: Yep, that’s me. I’m a Doomscroller, all right.
The subheadline on the story read: “Checking your phone for an extra two hours every night won’t stop the apocalypse — but it could stop you from being psychologically prepared for it.”
Yikes. Punching a guy in his psychological gut. Not to mention I had already noticed funny neck pains. I thought at first they were headaches, but when I realized my neck was permanently pitched forward at a 90-degree angle, it got me wondering if the chronic reading of news sites on my phone was the culprit. Oh, and I think several vertebrae had popped out, too.
What am I looking for when I doomscroll? Anything! Coronavirus news. Hurricane news. News of the coronavirus battling a hurricane, like some kind of horrible Godzilla movie. Election news. News on polls. News about coronavirus going to the polls, and whether it can swing the election with a write-in candidate for chicken pox or salmonella. Locust invasion (It could happen!) When the “Mandalorian” will be back on Disney+. How Baby Yoda is doing. The stock market. The latest in mask fashion-gone-wrong. Latest TikTok dances I might actually master.
Pretty much anything and everything, but usually it has to be about … DOOM!
I guess it stems from the fear that if I’m not doomscrolling all the time, I might miss really important articles … like this one: “Finally, here is what all the sides of your box grater are for.”
Yeah … it’s a real article. And I mean, come on: Did you know you could zest citrus with a cheese grater! I didn’t even realize it shredded cheese. I thought it was just a poorly designed pasta strainer. Thank you doomscrolling for teaching me about kitchen utensils I never use.
But it’s all because I have to know. I need to know. I’m convinced I might be missing something important. You know, like doom is happening in the world and I’m the only idiot who hasn’t heard. Nobody wants to be the last to know about doom. It’s embarrassing.
“Hey man, did you realize we’re all doomed?”
“NOOO! Are you serious? My stupid phone battery died again! I miss everything. So, which is it: speeding meteor with botulism or all the lobsters and crabs finally teaming up against us? I never trusted those lobsters.”
No, I can’t miss that. I have to find more evidence of doom. I must keep scrolling!
It got so bad, the other night I found myself doomscrolling while brushing my teeth. It was a fiasco. Big globs of toothpaste dripped all over my screen, and I nearly chipped a tooth thanks to my tense, anxious and violent scrubbing.
I decided it had gone too far. It WAS affecting me psychologically, and not to mention my poor bicuspids. It was time to nip my doomscrolling habit. So, the other night I tried out putting the phone down before dinner and not touching it until morning, no matter how badly it called to me. (Which is kind of funny because it’s a phone, and ironically, it NEVER actually calls me.)
I steered clear of it. I resisted the urge to flip and scroll. I told myself I didn’t need it. And when I went upstairs to bed, I didn’t take it with me. Didn’t even brush my teeth that night. Didn’t need to! Earlier in the day, I read an article that said teeth brushing was all Fake News.
I slept better that night. I didn’t wake up the next morning with a neck that felt like a pretzel. Even more importantly, I didn’t miss the doom. Not a bit. It was refreshing. Invigorating. And I felt great.
Turns out, doom just makes you feel like crud. Plus, it will wait for you. It has plenty of time. It’ll still be there in the morning. The botulism-encrusted meteor or the army of angry crabs will fill you in once you’ve had your coffee and savored the fact that you no longer need to pop your vertebrae back in. (A trick luckily I learned thanks to doomscrolling. Maybe I should just go take a peek …)