Doomscrolling Quotes

Let us break the deadlock and stop doom-scrolling into the narrative of a fluctuating landscape of dispiriting thoughts...but, instead, invite the flowers of compassion to blossom in our hearts and our minds and overwhelm us with a spray of vibrant petals of well-being. ("Absence of Desire" )

And then my breathing quickens, and my head swims, and I know I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack, so I double back to my apartment and curl up on my bed and whip out my phone for another hour of doom-scrolling, because that is paradoxically the only thing that calms things down.

... and being part of Stan 'Twitter is much more fun than logging on just to frown at politicians or congratulate acquaintances on their new jobs. When I'm doom-scrolling through a timeline full of terrible news and inane bickering, it's a treat to come across all-caps excitement or an ultra-niche joke. Or to wake up and find that there is a conversation going on and that I understand it, and that people are excited about something and I am too. This is the type of thing that can buoy a person for an hour or so at a time. In the same way that holidays give shape to formless years, album promotion and single releases give color to the days that line up one after another. There is a reason to stay up late. There is a reason to wake up early. There is something to do at lunch when you feel like you'd like to cry and take a nap. There are people who swear they hacked into an airport security camera, and aren't you interested to see what they saw, even if you find that totally weird and ultimately quite scary? I like Stan Twitter because it is so peculiar, even as millions of people participate in it and it should have become generic.

My C-word diagnosis was, in many ways, crushing for me, but limiting who I called and avoiding doom-scrolling on the internet helped me manage the immediate mental chaos.

Doomscrolling is nothing new, people used to do the same with tv remote, switching channel after channel, rarely settling on any one program. And heads buried in social media news feed is nothing new either - before smartphone and internet heads used to be buried in actual physical newspapers. Only the means have changed, not the habit. This is not advancement, it's recurring derangement. I'll call it progress when you put down your phone or remote and actually listen to another person. Sure, phones can be a supplement to organic conversation, but never a replacement.

The sad truth is that most of what we’re preoccupied with doesn’t even matter. We give the jerk at the office free space in our head. We choose to go on Twitter and doomscroll. We don’t need to check our email as much as we do. Worrying about money never solves our money problems. We have to push all that stuff away. So we can be present. So we can be patient. So we can be parents.

But the whole idea of reading as a pastime has somehow dropped off my life menu, and the time I used to spend in fictional worlds is now spent incessantly refreshing the news. I sometimes still try to kid myself into believing that this pointless consuming of current affair is important for my understanding of reality and even for my survival. But deep inside, I know that the momentous piece of news—the one that will supposedly pull me and the entire Middle East out of the deep pit we’ve fallen into—will never come, and all my endless refreshing and scrolling is just another stage in outsourcing my emotional world. After all, it’s a lot easier to wait for updates from a dismaying reality than to listen, feel, and submit to someone else’s imagination and hopes.

If you scroll long enough, your phone will become your grave. In the name of telecommunication, algorithms generate the new stoneage.

tips for not being triggered when I shouldn’t give a flying fuck: 1. I ask myself, “Over the course of my lifetime, how important is this?” 2. I spend less time on social media and refuse to “doom-scroll.” 3. I’ve stopped seeking a “permission slip” to do something I care about. 4. I feel comfortable saying no to more of the things that have historically felt obligatory.

(On doom-scrolling) the problem of it all is, it's simply much easier to sit on your phone and scroll through/down as the world worsens, then actually doing anything to fix that world, because the problems of the world, even when they interfere directly with us, seem bigger than us, and somehow removed from us...when they are immediately impacting us.

The capacity to set the heart's attention on God - so basic to following Jesus - is the very commodity we are losing to the "attention economy," trading looking for liking and gazing for doomscrolling. But if we can't pay attention, we can't pray.

Every time we tap our phones to open Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, we inch closer to the giant rolling pin that will splatter our gray matter everywhere. In 2020, Merriam-Webster released a new entry to its Words We’re Watching blog: doomscrolling.2

I do try a digital purge...But it doesn't feel like a cleanse; it feels like sticking my head in the sand while everything is falling down around me. I can't ignore the damage. I have to track the exact trajectory of the hurricane, because knowing the precise moment it'll hit and where will make things hurt less. At least, my brain is convinced this is so...the world outside feels so insubstantial, irrelevant, like a video game environment that's still buffering. Sometimes I do manage to forget it all for a moment, but then my focus slips...And then my breathing quickens, and my head swims...whip out my phone for another hour of doom-scrolling, because that is paradoxically the only thing that calms things down. I can't eat...I can't sleep.

Index There is no index, people. So, you have to read the whole book all the way through to see if you’re in it. I’ll be honest—most of you are not. Still, read it all, even though it’s hundreds of pages. Think of it like doom-scrolling Twitter—