I doomscroll to rest, but it makes me tired
The conundrum that is doomscrolling
Some reflections on the way we talk about doomscrolling (i.e. things I’ve been pondering about from conversations I’ve had):
Number one. There is this slippery slope language we tend to use. As in, we often tell the story that we are not exactly aware we’re doing it until it becomes a problem for us. It creeps up almost unnoticeably, and then BOO! It’s two in the morning. (The intended bedtime was a few hours earlier.) This thing, this mild, harmless thing that is supposed to be of no consequence whatsoever, has morphed into a time suck. It’s not supposed to be this way. We don’t intend for it to be this way. We don’t intend for it to be anything, really. Which brings me to my next point.
Number two. There’s no higher purpose to the activity. Or at least, we don’t frame it as such. Our lack of clarity on why we do it suggests we’re not really looking for anything in particular. This lack of intentionality is most apparent when we compare it to other habits we’re allocating our time of day for. To read is to be more informed, to exercise is to get fitter. Doomscrolling exists as an end in itself. It gets a bad rep for being a mindless activity, but what if that’s the point? That it allows us to be mindless beings? To exist in a zone where we are of no consequence to the world. (Note: this is a working hypothesis.)
Number three. It’s overwhelmingly talked about as a mental thing. As in, it’s discussed as a form of stimulation that gets our brain fired up, only to leave it fried and ruin our chances for a healthy functioning of our neurotransmitters. People use the term “brain rot”. If you think about it, the imagery of a brain slowly decomposing before meeting its impending doom on an otherwise functioning body is quite grotesque. We’ve normalised this idea. But what I’ve found interesting in the way we’ve rallied against the harms of doomscrolling via this widely recognised term is how we’ve skipped discussing the more immediate effects altogether. We’ve somehow failed to recognise the way doomscrolling registers on us physically and emotionally. The fact that we refer to the activity as “scrolling down our feeds” as opposed to “flicking our thumbs against our screens” is probably telling. For the most part, we’ve yet to consider the ways our bodies respond to doomscrolling. More on this shortly.
All this is to say is that doomscrolling is a conundrum. We are only beginning to map its riddles.
Jona* was recalling what happened two days before our call.
“It was half past eleven. I swear I was going to sleep. I shut down my laptop, I prepped my bed. I was already feeling tired after my bath. I laid down on my sofa because I wanted to watch TV. But then I picked up my phone and scrolled, scrolled, and scrolled. I ended up sleeping half past one.”
“There was another time I thought was quite acute. I came back from an evening out. I arrived at the apartment around 1 AM. I was hungry, so I made Indomie (Indonesian instant noodles). I knew I should’ve slept right after. But while I was eating, I looked up news on Twitter, then I watched YouTube. I ended up sleeping half past three. I felt tired. I was so tired, I wanted to sleep. It sucked when this happened.”
Jona told me he felt like a fool when he found himself in such a scenario. He knew he was going to speak with me about doomscrolling, which made what happened the other night even worse because he wasn’t planning to add a new example to his story.
“You expressed several emotions. One of them is regret. Can you list other emotions you would associate with doomscrolling?” I asked.
“Mostly exhaustion. Feeling super regretful. When it’s really bad, it’s anger,” Jona replied.
This might sound contradictory, but Jona sees doomscrolling as a kind of rest. It helps him unwind. He started noticing that doomscrolling had become a part of his daily routine a few months ago—a relatively new awareness. He had figured it was probably an extension of his bedtime ritual formed during childhood. When he was a kid, he would always watch TV before bed. Now, it’s his phone and social media.
On most days, the habit doesn’t present itself as an issue in urgent need of resolving. If anything, it helps him create a boundary between his work and personal life. By the time he’d be in bed and doomscrolling, he would cease any engagements with work communications. It’s his time to laze around and relax, he said. The emphasis of this time slot being something he owns for himself, and thus, is his to waste, I found to be quite interesting. I made a mental note that this was something I could explore further.
“What do you get out of it?” I asked Jona about his doomscrolling habit.
“Hm, that’s a difficult question,” he responded. He was considering a few reasons and said, “I think kids these days would call it decluttering.”
Interesting word choice. Decluttering. I wonder what he meant by that. Is it that doomscrolling helps him filter out unnecessary mental load from work during his rest time? I guess the more stressful the work, the more one requires a mechanism to distract oneself from the stressors.
So, I asked: “On a scale of one to ten, how stressful would you say your job is?”
“The funny thing is that I don’t think the work I’m doing is very stressful. Maybe five or six.” In other words, if there were any work stressors, they were pretty manageable.
I’m beginning to wonder whether mapping out the reasons as to why we doomscroll is an impossible task. There are so many mixed, conflicting signals. Am I asking the wrong questions? Or have I been unnecessarily burdened by an undeclared goal of arriving at a Grand Answer where there is none? Maybe people just have wildly different reasons, and the work of documenting them is interesting enough. Maybe I just need to focus on capturing these different stories and try to connect the dots much later in my inquiry. Or, maybe I shouldn’t be focusing too much on the way we doomscroll. Maybe I should take my own direction seriously and start asking more questions about the lives being lived around doomscrolling as opposed to trying to understand this compulsion in isolation.
That’s for the next edition.
Until then.
*Note: The name is pseudonymised.
This edition is part of a series called “An Algorithmic Becoming”. I’m exploring how our lives have become deeply entangled with algorithms and algorithmic technologies. Follow along to see where it leads.
Read the previous editions here:
Bedbound, in pain, doomscrolling life away
It was late at night on a Tuesday in January 2024 when Bumi Himara* checked herself into a hospital. It was not the first time she had experienced this type of pain in her body. But it had never gotten as bad as it did that night.
Why do I doomscroll?
On 14 January, I reached out to my network—posted a story on Instagram—to ask people about their doomscrolling habits. “How often do you doomscroll?” I asked. Thirteen people responded.