“It feels productive and like we’re exercising our agency during a period where we can’t do much and so much choice and variety has been taken away, even though it’s often neither of those things,” she tells me. She still, however, understands the desire to doomscroll. Within a few months, she’d gained 20,000 new followers thanks to her daily doomscrolling reminders (some of her followers have even sent her gifts and money on Venmo). By April, when she started a new full-time job, she knew she needed to fix her habit of staying up until the wee hours of the morning looking at the news, and she began tweeting, mostly to herself, that she should start winding down. Karen saw the term on Twitter for the first time in March and realized she’d been guilty of the practice since at least 2015. While staying up late can feel like an act of agency, how about directing it towards taking care of yourself and going to sleep?- Doomscrolling Reminder Lady November 3, 2020 The rest of this week is going to be pretty intense and the election requires a lot of additional energy to manage. It’s worth trying to conserve your mental and physical energy by not staying up too late, limiting your time on this website, and prepping a few meals in advance.” “This week is going to be pretty tough for a lot of people. “Hey, are you still doomscrolling?” reads a typical post. Ho has been a big part of that surge thanks to her nightly reminders on Twitter to step away from your screen. Though the term has been around since at least 2018, it surged in popularity this March when Americans were stuck inside due to the coronavirus pandemic and desperate for updates on the latest case counts and advisories. There is no rush to be the first to hear the news, and yet today, we are all doomscrollers.ĭoomscrolling, or the masochistic practice of compulsively scouring the internet in search of ever more terrible information, might be our nation’s most popular pastime in the year 2020. It came from possibly the least likely source I could have imagined, a man whose job literally relies on people staring at the internet: Nate Silver, the founder of the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, which has been publishing 2020 election predictions for what feels like 100 years.īut now, Nate Silver was saying what we all know to be true despite everything we’ve tried to glean from poll analyses over the past few months: “You’re not going to learn anything useful about the election outcome on here until 7pm,” he wrote, “when they start counting votes.” Unfortunately, he’s right: Twitter does not have the answers right now because nobody does.ĭid Nate Silver’s tweet make me log off of Twitter? Of course not! Like everyone I know and quite possibly you too, I am spending this day refreshing every social media feed for tiny crumbs of information that will turn out to be mostly useless, despite the fact that when anything actually important happens we will all receive simultaneous alerts on our phones. It was noon today, November 3, when I got my first warning to log off Twitter.
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