I think I found out about the word “doomscrolling” back in the early pandemic days. For those that don’t know its meaning, it’s basically to spend time at a site, usually a social media site with an infinitely scrolling feed, and continue to scroll through all the bad news posted there.
I’ve had my times where I did that. I did it during election times and big, shall we say, “election reactions” from years back. I did it some during the pandemic. I don’t know about others, but as an optimist at heart, I find I often want to reload a news or social media site to see “OK, is the nightmare over? Is there a glimmer of hope somewhere that this will all be over?” With the exception of announcements like the availability of COVID vaccines with a link to book my appointment, this rarely was the case. Usually all that happened was that I would feel awful at the new things I saw. Often, this resulted in turning a neutral or moderately good mood into a bad one.
But now I’m finding a new phenomenon is at play and that’s what I’m calling “non-consensual doomscrolling”. For me that’s when you go to a social media site whose purpose in my life is escapism and entertainment and instead are ambushed by terrible news. And I get it, a communication medium is not the same thing for everyone. Social media is used by some to be informed, and by others to organize and inspire resistance. I use other sites for that and those sites are on a “pull” not a “push” – meaning I check them regularly but not when I’m feeling like I need distraction and escape – the prime time I feel moved to go to social media.
I’ve eliminated most of the social media. I have no Instagram or Facebook account. I’ve done a reasonably good job of curating my TikTok feed into something mostly entertaining through judicious blocking, filtering and showing clear preference for cycling and comedy videos. But I also have two more accounts I use regularly which I want to compare:
The first is Bluesky. This is very similar to Twitter, and I go there because there are loads of writers (including Sage) there, as well as cyclists and fans of reading. Sadly, those groups also have a lot of overlap with those who want to use social media in the other ways I mentioned – to share upsetting news to hopefully get people active. I unfollowed a ton of people, muted others, subscribed to block lists for most trolls but still, it’s not enough so I added a really long filtered words list. This sounds good at first – if you’re trying to avoid fried foods you can add “samosa” to a filter list and you won’t see the posts. Problem solved?
Well not exactly. Some people share photos of samosas, screenshots of reviews of food stalls, and even screenshots of twitter posts about samosas. All of which bypass the filters. But even if the filters *do* catch something, it’s not the best situation. Here’s what you’ll see then.
Username: <This post filtered from the “Todd likes Samosas too much list” – click to see the post>. It’s about as helpful as putting a sign on a cupboard that says “Cookies in here, you shouldn’t eat them.”
After yesterday’s awful news (which I can do nothing directly to help with but feel sad and helpless and maybe send a little money to good organizations), I blocked that site entirely on my computer. There was just too much. Not even just one article to inform but dozens plus reactions and opinions and arguments and so on. All of which I will find later when I go searching for what’s happening in the world.
Now let’s look over at Mastodon – this site is not even one site but a “federation” of servers talking to one another – more like email. They talk to one another but there’s no John Mastodon who hopes someday to make millions from ad revenue there. As a result there’s no algorithm. There are also two things I find really helpful:
- Content Warnings: There’s a strong culture of content warnings. These do the same thing the filters do on Bluesky but they are done by the person posting. Some people are weirdly disturbed by photos of people looking right at the camera so others put a CW on that that hides the post and photo saying that there’s someone looking right at the camera for example. People use this for all sorts of posts but also for things not everyone might be interested in like Wordle results.
- MUCH better filters. Right now I have over 50 words that are filtered out that seem to be associated with upsetting posts. Some are names of ideologies, some are people’s names and some are just words people often use with negative posts like the f-bomb. And thanks to one of the settings I can apply, I can ensure that not only are the posts filtered, they don’t even appear in the feed at all. No warning no post. That means a whole different feed.
But in times like this, that alone can’t help. First and foremost, when we feel powerless and unable to help, something that can help is doing what you can where you can. When I was feeling particularly down, Sage reminded me of this (as I reminded her years before – we take turns, I guess!). After our last very chaotic move that took me too far away from my existing volunteer work, I completely stopped volunteering. Reminded of this, I got in touch with an adult literacy centre I’d worked with before and am currently being matched with someone to help with reading, writing and/or math. Even just having started the process I felt better having actually started moving forward.
I’ve talked a bunch about how important exercise is to my mental state in the winter. Recently having overdone it trying to keep up with some fast folks on Zwift two days in a row my hamstrings and back were hurting. I definitely felt the absence of exercise. However, what I hadn’t thought of was going outside. In the past I tried to quantify the effect daylight had on my state of mind and couldn’t find a correlation. However, looking at two data points (yeah, not really statistically significant!) I did see a huge difference between how poorly I felt two weeks ago versus last week. One big difference was that though I wasn’t pushing myself on the bike, I was getting outside and riding to and from work. One cool thing that happened is that Daegan gave me his Apple Watch and that actually senses daylight and quantifies how much time I spent in it. While it can’t make a huge difference in terms of Vitamin D, fresh air and nature no doubt help. Here’s how much of a difference my choice of transport made.
More regular time outdoors, and almost triple the time spent outdoors on average. I think also challenge matters. In summer that means pushing myself in terms of effort and distance. This time of year it can make the challenges more technical – navigating snowy roads while staying upright takes a bit of effort and the snow does provide extra drag. On Wednesday it snowed throughout the day while I was at work. While many main roads were a bit clearer, the quiet side streets I take looked more like this:
If it’s icy I don’t do too badly as long as I’m careful to not move or turn suddenly as the metal studs in my tires grip reasonably well even on ice. But on a road like that, I sink in a bit and the snow pulls some. Keeping moving at a good pace helps plow through but it takes extra effort. Fortunately one day later the roads looked much better like this stretch of the bikes-only Finch Hydro Corridor I take to work.
I know one thing is reasonably certain. There will be no overnight solution to all the wrongs happening in the world. So while we ride out this particularly difficult stretch I keep coming back to a quote I’ve shared many times here and on social media:
During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. – Dan Savage
Take care of yourself, do the things that protect your hope and spirit, and use that energy, the same energy you might’ve used to argue with strangers on the Internet to help reduce suffering wherever you can be it the world or your neighbourhood.
To paraphrase another good quote I saw on social media a while ago. “Every day wake up and be kind. They can’t vote against that.”
As a person who has the same disposition I feel you, which is why I make sure I use CWs when I post political stuff. I think I may have missed one or two, however. Sorry! But that shows you how emotionally affected I was that I forgot.
Malaysia also went through something like this. However I have the admit what do the same scale as what’s happening in the United States.
Here’s how I coped with those years: I refuse to read about it. Any friends and family wants to talk about it I usually cut it short. It’s not that I don’t want to be supportive and I want to remain ignorant. It’s just that I can’t really do anything about it and it leaves me with a sense of helplessness and also despair about the future.
But here’s what I think. The pundits are extremely convincing. Some may even be extremely accurate. However they can never predict what will happen. I look at what happened in my country and never in a million years thought that after a financial scandal that robbed my country of billions and a political coup, we are now with a prime minister that knows how to steer the country economically. I did my part by voting for his government. Did I need to read every single piece of news during those terrible years to make it happen? Nope!
So what’s the point of reading those news anyway? It’s not really a moral obligation, you know. I get that people are frustrated. However they need to turn to something more private like a journal. It’s not healthy for everyone to be exposed to everyone’s angst or anger daily. That’s what I see on social media. People just screaming their anger hatred despair into the digital world without a care of how it impacts other people I know how it may look at them.
As unfair as it is we are judged by how we present ourselves online. And even if you do it anonymously, we need to have a care on inflicting our rage on an unsuspecting public. Some of us are just built to absorb this emotions and it is not healthy for us.
Although it feels a bit unreal do post about happy things when the world seems to be melting it also teaches you resilience when you do that. You are telling the world the digital world that is that despite things being bad they are still things that are wonderful and beautiful. It’s a good habit to cultivate. You don’t need to post your anger about something just to show that you care. You can always show okay in other ways besides sharing your fury.
Hope you’re doing well despite these crazy times.
PS I am transcribing this comment via voice so there would probably be grammatical mistakes.
That’s where I’m at as well when it comes to reading. Sometimes curiosity (or ironically, hope) gets to me and I just want to read but lately I’ve been trying to take into account whether or not something actionable will come out of reading it. If not, then it’s only detrimental to me and I have no need for it. Thus it’s filtered. On the other hand, if it is a call to action and I can do something, it’s absolutely worth my time. That is what I save up my “doom stamina” for.
Yes I can’t resist either. But the after effects are so bad, the temptation is getting less by the day. Keep on doing what you are doing and you will notice yourself getting calmer! So many beautiful things in your life!