Doom scrolling
(Pandemic Diary - day 151)
From my journal: 27 July 2020 (Monday)
I’m having a hard time kicking this doom-scrolling habit, this hunger for those highly addictive bits of news that are continuously flowing through my various news feeds in this time of churning.
Some small part of it has a direct impact on our daily lives, but most of it doesn’t. There’s very little difference between most of it and the shows on Netflix. I’m addicted to news about the president’s latest bungling outrage in the same way we get addicted to soap operas or following a sports team. It’s not because of the quality or impact of the story, it’s because of the outrageousness of it. News (and the doom scrolling that goes with it) is a spectator sport, mindless entertainment.
It’s also a choice, and it has an opportunity cost.
“Everything I allow into my life displaces something else”
I can’t spend my morning reading news stories and also reading classics or writing poetry or cleaning up the yard. Everything I allow into my life displaces something else that’s already there (and prevents other possibilities). It makes no difference whether the decision was conscious or not. And if I were to consciously decide, I doubt I could justify the time I’ve been spending.
But breaking that pattern is difficult.
It’s difficult for many reasons, but one of the biggest is that there’s an element of importance to at least some of it, and there might be some direct effects that flow from it. It’s important to be informed and to pay attention to what goes on.
But there are very good ways to accomplish that in a much smaller amount of time.
I’d not suffer sudden ignorance if I were to skip the morning paper and turn off my news feeds and limit my news consumption to The Daily 202 (which would take less than half an hour to read) and NPR on the radio while I make my lunch or cook supper.
What I’m asking myself to do goes against my nature. I want to stay in touch with this addictive narrative that is The News, but only take these small and concentrated bites of it. For a personality like mine, that’s like putting a bag of Snickers on the counter and expecting me to ration them to last the week. That kind of restraint isn’t my default setting, and it takes resolve and significant energy to choose that path.
But I do have resolve and energy, and I use it all the time. It’s a matter of decision, and the decision has to be unambiguous, it can’t be just “I’ll try”.