Doomscrolling at the end times.

Put your phone away after reading.

Yesterday I went cold turkey, not full cold turkey more a lukewarm turkey. Under a sad hot light at the Buffett waiting for the bacteria to grow kind of temperature. No phone in the morning I told myself. Not that I did not look at it, or read a quick post or news to know if the end had already come or if it would tomorrow, I quite expect there to be a reel or TikTok letting us know that the wave of destruction from some unimaginable but quite predictable end is finally coming on the horizon, followed by some dancing, cute pet video or more probably blood boiling men talking to the phone saying it is all a left wing conspiracy - while the world ending wave can be clearly seen in the background.

What happened, you may ask. Was there some blood curdling screams while a clearly mechanical baby crawled through the ceiling in a room where the doors had been nailed shut? Yeah, no. Quite the opposite, really. Here I am taking the time to write something on my Substack, a thing I was not able to do in a while. Well, it is a know fact that our brains need boredom, or at least not be constantly bombarded by information so it can actually do something and not just react in desperation. We bear the signs of our lowly origins, like the quote goes. We are unequipped biologically to deal with a constant stream of data that is interpreted by our brains as threats. I was going to put here some comparison of an early human dealing with some unseen threat in the woods or tall grasses, something to do with a predator - not the space alien kind, or Presidential - and how our bodies can’t differentiate between one stress and the other. Anyone who ever dealt with anxiety, and the entirety of my generation (go Milenials!) has experience with this. So no, no weird analogy or comparison so that the reader - that is you - feels like the point here is some treatise on the human condition. Because that would be boring, and not very shareable in this day and age. It is not as if I didn’t already choose a dying media to put my thoughts in - please share my stuff, I have one subscriber over the standard carton of eggs -, but I digress.

So, things are going great. My phone is on the other side of the house with the sound on so I can hear it ring, if some telemarketing scheme tries to milk me out of some of my very small savings, or it pings for someone actually trying to communicate with me. I even started reading again, the small pile of books from our local library was starting to get dusty. Thankfully they are very lenient with renewals, if not bye bye savings. There are worse ways to loose money than to a local library. Feeling good, like the purple tentacle after drinking toxic sludge. Now that is a deep cut, google it. But don’t linger on your phone, maybe find a way to download the game, enjoy it.

The most important thing that happened in this exercise is that I remembered the things that I like. The stress and constant hammering of information, doomscrolling’s and distractions numb you to yourself. Everything is external, it is hard to look at yourself when you can’t look past your phone. Too much information is as bad as too little. Moderation is the name of the game, and it looks different for everyone.

So try not to doomscroll at the end times. It is a waste of life. Time is not a renewable resource. When your gas tank of time is empty, time to go back into darkness. Shake it off, put it away, it’s not “being aware” it is just sad. You can’t take action to move away or stop the thing coming to get you if you spend ten hours a day on your phone just reacting to the newest terrible thing, or stupid statement coming from the worse people around. That is time you could be using creating, calling, protesting, writing, whatever, anything is better than passively reacting. Our social media reminds me of another movie, it reminds me of the “treatment” in Clockwork Orange, but instead of being tied down and made to watch all the terrible things we are willingly doing it. I get that the objective there is was to do some weird Pavlovian pain response to violence, I know not a perfect example. Not that many examples of people tied down and made to watch terrible newsreels and war images.

This is the point of this text, maybe, just maybe if enough of us take some time away from the doomscrolling and get behind actually producing something. Anything that isn’t just another iteration of the panic for the sake of panic we find ourselves consuming, then things just might get a hair better. I am pretty sure it can’t get any worse, we have the most incompetent people already making things much worse.

Ok, enough. Put your phone down. No, down. Ta, ta ta…. down. Yeah, good.

Love you all my handful of readers, crazy lovers of a moribund media.