A Philosopher from the 1960s Knew All About Our Doomscrolling
On salvation through exclusion...
At some point, you’ve probably been accused of doomscrolling. It happens anytime you post anything that salts the vibes.
The word “doomscrolling” started as a joke, but now institutions have latched onto it as a tool to pathologize an otherwise healthy behavior that involves sharing information about threats and trying to understand a rapidly changing world. Even Harvard’s website now mischaracterizes the act of processing negative information on your phone as a toxic habit, and they blame it for a range of health problems while trying to link it to “worse mental well-being and life satisfaction.” One doctor even suggests you should go beyond simply distancing yourself from bad news. Apparently, you should also “tell people who are sharing depressing or violent stories that you’re not interested.” Once you’ve exiled those doomers, she says, “take part in emotionally freeing activities, like dance class or nature walks” so you can “share positive emotional experiences with others.”
A piece in Forbes defines doomscrolling as “a compulsive behavior driven by an insatiable appetite for negative information.” But that’s not how psychologists define it. When you read actual research on doomscrolling, as one article discusses in Applied Research in Quality of Life, you see that it’s more about “the urge to get all the facts to protect ourselves from danger and to have a feeling of control over it,” a desire that “has kept us engaged with scrolling our phones long hours for more information and news, which are primarily negative.”
Let’s repeat that part:
Doomscrolling is about using social media to stay informed and communicate threats in order to protect yourself.
Simply telling someone to stop doomscrolling and to start silencing anyone who shares unpleasant information isn’t a healthy response to the current state of the world. It’s the bedrock of the toxic positivity that stymies solutions to our problems and puts everyone in greater danger.
We’ve been here before.
There’s a book that explores the long history of authoritarian institutions turning undesirable behaviors into mental health problems. That history begins all the way back in the thirteenth century. Maybe you’ve heard of Michel Foucault, another philosopher I took an entire course on in graduate school. Far from another dusty academic, he dealt with the problems of his time. And well, the problems of his time are the problems of our time.
Foucault might have something to say about institutions using words like “doomscrolling” to shame us.
He lived it.