Doom scrolling and distraction

I caught myself yesterday mindlessly scrolling my iphone, reading comments on stories about the end of capitalism. Then a story about the inability of developing countries to remove their dependency on fossil fuels, and the accompanying inevitability of the planet’s ecological destruction. Depressing numbers on climbing COVID-19 cases and a looming possibility of 200K more deaths. Political gridlock. Rampant graft and hypocrisy. On and on. Depressing, in a time when the cold weather has arrived and we’re driven inside, and there’s no escape. Winter is coming and it’s not looking good, folks.

Or is it?

This is all part of a larger issue that I think has been conflated and labelled as “fake news.” I would not call all of the aforementioned problems fake, but the feeling of impending doom these types of stories engender is a symptom of being constantly in the news, and people’s Twitter opinions. In short, of this phenomenon called doom scrolling, 24-7. You get to hate it all, you come to hate new media and tech companies for spawning this new world of inattention and distraction and doom scrolling, and so it all becomes fake news. It doesn’t feel real anymore, and it feels like the only ones who are winning are companies like Facebook who are selling my data in increasingly troubling targeted ads (I was talking to my wife about wine yesterday, and sure enough an ad for a wine subscription service came up in my social media feed. And yes, I have Alexa, and it’s probably listening to everything we say at the counter).

So, what do we do about it? What do I do about it?

I’m coming to loathe Facebook, even though it has SOME tangible value. I like seeing what beers are hitting my local liquor stores (I follow a couple liquor store pages), or when a water main breaks in town (I follow Merrimac news), or when someone posts something sword-and-sorcery related (I follow Pulp Sword-and-Sorcery, and a few other groups). I like seeing when people who I’m friends with, post something genuine. That happens too, albeit infrequently.

I could do without all the rest. Either I start mercilessly cutting shit out, and unfollowing, or I limit the amount of usage, maybe to a couple windows of time each day. And get back to living in the real world of my own life, of my job, my private work, my family, my circle of friends. Reality, and not this consumption of digital 1s and 0s that tells me the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the only way out is to surf the cutting edge by consuming more information and reading the next snarky comment or the next platitude left by some celebrity I vaguely like.