Elizafox

I made a post recently about some good things in the world.

I researched most of it, though didn't cite my sources.

And of course I got a ton of responses about how wrong I was. Because obviously things have to be terrible.

It got me to thinking about doomscrolling, and how the rise of it has profoundly reshaped society in ways that we have yet to reckon with.

Things have not gotten worse

I realise that is provocative to say this, but it's true: things have not gotten worse.

The difference is now news is not what is curated by cable news or media, but instead a stream of the most awful things happening everywhere in the world at all times.

Yet people often don't see many of the awful things still. People have largely forgotten what is happening to the Uyghurs. People ignore the ongoing Rohingya genocide. A lot of people don't even know there's a genocide once again in Darfur. They instead focus on the Palestinian genocide.

These are all horrible things. But I posit this:

It is still not worse than any point in history.

Things have always been terrible. Need I remind people of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the 2000's? There was a European genocide in Kosovo in the 1990s. The US illegally invaded Grenada in the 1980s. The Vietnam War was a terrible disaster. The entire Cold War was diverting grotesque amounts of money to weapons. Wikipedia has an entire page of genocides from 1946 to 1999. And that's just from the later half of the 20th century. You can look back and see all sorts of horrible things. Hell, even the climate crisis, which is not new, and has been an ongoing issue for 200 years.

Homelessness is not new either. Believe it or not, millions of Americans actually lived in slums until the 70s, little to no different than Brazilian favelas in many cases, and those who couldn't, often lived on the street. Homelessness is an ongoing crisis, but it is not a new crisis.

So what has changed?

I believe what has changed is how these events are perceived. Modern social and mass media (these days joined at the hip) have chosen to report the worst things in the world, and continuously expose people to it.

Doomscrolling is a product of modern social media, with traditional media getting in on the act. It plays off the instincts of humans to seek out threats and scan for them.

Modern society, despite narratives being pushed, is safer than it generally has been at any point, at least in terms of physical safety. This of course varies from individual to individual; someone trapped in an abusive situation is just as unsafe now as they would have been 30 years ago, but this is also far from a new problem, also. I believe that the relative safety of most people has led to people scanning for external threats via the news.

But why would the media do this?

I believe the goal is twofold:

1. Actively make people feel powerless, so they do not fight back.
2. Get people to view more ads.

I believe the premise of getting people to view more ads is self-evident, so I will focus more on the first one.

Preventing threats to power

I believe that the mainstrean and social media are attempting to make people feel as if they can change nothing. It reduces engagement in society by the most empathetic and active, by preying on their empathy to the point that it burns out their ability to do anything.

People too paralysed by their own empathy, because they experience this pain, are effectively neutralised as threats to power.

Ultimately, doomscrolling and shoving depressing doomer content in front of people is exploitation of the masses and their psychology. It gives a sense of inevitability: why fight to change anything, when the elites are making things terrible, and nothing can improve?

It doesn't have to be like this

There are plenty of things we can do to stop the misery, at least in our corner.

We can't eliminate all human suffering. There will always be suffering. What we can do is try to improve our corners of it.

Stop doomscrolling. Delete your news app. Unfollow and block accounts disturbing your peace.

I do not advocate becoming willfully ignorant of the world; I instead advocate being smarter about it. Be mindful of when and where you absorb negative content. Let it mobilise you to action and not paralyse you. If you feel you have become paralysed, you are allowing yourself to become too absorbed.

I am not saying that everyone must exceed their capacity to do anything. But I believe that we should all act within our capacity to make things better. Start volunteering, even if it's occasionally, even if it's online. Bring a bit of joy to the world. Make a weird shitpost. Make something new (and I don't mean with AI slop). Get creative. Engage with your community. Talk to your local homeless (I do that, and it's very rewarding). Little things that can make your corner of the world better.

You can't fix Gaza. You can't fix climate change. These are things that require collective efforts and nation-state level pressure (so long as nation-states continue to exist). Just focus on what you can change, which is probably a lot more than you think.

These sorts of things reinforce a reward loop, which helps improve our perception of the world.

I am aware not everyone can do these things, but at the very least, consuming less depressing content is a start. Anyone saying that doomscrolling is somehow intrinsically rewarding or a highlight of someone's day either has something miswired in their brain or is lying.

We don't need to be miserable as a society.