In Greek myth, Nyx (night) bears a great number of negative aspects. When it comes to death and the death-like there is an interesting order to her labors through various accounts. Firstborn of all, demonstrating its primacy as a force on the human race, is the personification of inevitable, constantly approaching death, Moros—Doom.
Google indexes almost 2 million entries for the word doomscroll alone and over 500,000 entries with the addition of words like advice, stop, or help. According to Google Trends doom finds peaks in late March 2020 and early January 2021, while doomscrolling peaks heavily in late 2020, yet, after its lowest in June 2021, has been slowly and steadily rising ever since with peaks in March 2022 and February 2024.
As many articles and studies have shown, as a concept, the idea of purposefully consuming and being unable to look away from disturbing, distressful, or otherwise upsetting information is nothing new. The differences and unique aspects of the current issue which necessitates the origination of this new term are accessibility and time.1
The source from the BBC narrates the same results from other studies, that the doomscrolling phenomenon is related to watching the news late at night just before bed. The latter of which was found to have a relaxing or calming effect on the viewer when they went off to bed. It gets summed up as a sort of wow that’s horrible, but my position is not that bad so I can sleep well.
This was during the time when the news turned off at night. You either saw it when it happened or didn’t. Now, the news is 24 hours; you can watch it whenever. The same story “breaks” over and over again about every thirty minutes. (And this only covers traditional television media.) Social media and the internet compound this as now any number of perspectives and biases can be added onto every single news story from every part of the globe. The statistics of the matter become mind boggling in trying to figure the number of horrors that could be found. Add to this the design of apps which seek to keep the user on for as long as possible (to serve the greatest number of ads), and any person today could see in one afternoon more atrocities than a premillennial person might see in a lifetime.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Alongside the number of sources which distinguish how we came to doomscroll, there are the same number that state simple and clear solutions. The most common occurrences are getting a drink of water, stretching or simply going to bed on time.2
One way of seeing this helpful yet often trite advice is under the label of toxic positivity—the, usually corporate, pressure to display only positive emotions, reactions, and experiences. This claim follows from the pathological framework of depression, apathy, and ennui. Under this framework, nonpositive emotional experiences are seen as analogous to disease and in need of the same treatments or excisions. The unspoken assumption of such a framework splits the world into a false dichotomy, that of the original “clean” state and the afflicted “diseased” state. Fortunately, the world does not exist in such a dichotomy.
This same framework positions doomscrolling as a disease of the person, and subsequently that the world is not meant to harbor such levels of horror. This is false on both accounts. Instead, the world is not beholden to any such level of troubles and traumas, but rather subject to the wills and systems of humanity. Each disaster displayed on the screen is portrayed under the pathological frame as if it were some set piece upon which an action inherent in the world were playing. A more accurate frame is a humanistic one that centers the reality of the actions and systemic human issues.
The act of doomscrolling on the other hand has been flipped as well. By framing the action as the misconduct of the person it creates blame where really none is needed. (That isn’t to say that now that we know the effects of apps designed to maximize watch time we should do nothing.) Instead, by shifting the perspective to one of systems—seeing how the maximum watch time, accessibility, and obligation interact to create a destructive system, it is much clearer to think of solutions to the problem that go beyond the trite toxic positivity of just do some meditation.