A note on doomscrolling

By Isabelle Abraham

Alright, I’ll come out and say it. I spent a majority of my summer doomscrolling. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t even voluntary. 

Every morning I opened my phone and the apps were right there. Tiktok, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, heck, even Snapchat has a reels feature now. I was tired and not quite ready to start my day. Besides, it’s not like I had any urgent plans to force me out of bed.

So, I scrolled. “Just 15 minutes,” I thought. 15 minutes turned into half an hour. Half an hour turned into four. Then the whole day was gone in the blink of an eye. It was too easy. 

It’s not like I was watching garbage either. My algorithm was perfectly curated for me. These apps have my data. They know my hobbies. They know my interests. They know exactly what will make me stop, and they know exactly what will keep me there. 

It’s great, really. Dopamine rushes through your body without you having to do any hard work. Sometimes, it even feels productive. 

It isn’t until you try to stop the cycle that you realize just how challenging it can be. After you delete the app, you’re left with an endless abyss of time ahead of you. Your only thought is, “What do I even do?” 

You try to read, but you can’t focus long enough for more than one page. You turn to the TV, but now you’re too impatient to sit through a movie or show. You try to spend some time on your hobby, but where ideas were once overflowing, you now have to pry them out like a boot stuck in mud.

The worst part is, you didn’t even know it was happening. You were just filling the time, relieving your boredom. A compliant fly in an insidious trap. 

You might read this and think, “is it really that bad?” Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m exaggerating. But, I’ll say one thing: prove me wrong. Delete the app.

After all, we can quit whenever we want. Right?