A young person, covering their face while scrolling on their phone. Photo: By Adrian Swancar on Unsplash.
Voice of doom: Tony D’Souza on an era-defining term
‘None of this is new.’
Doomscrolling is ‘the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories’. I do it more often than I should. The minutes turn to hours and time slips by imperceptibly as if in a dream. That’s the worst thing about it. Doomscrolling robs me of time I could have spent doing something meaningful. It is time wasted in a fear-filled reverie.
And none of it is my fault. The algorithms in social media recognise what interests me and serve up more and more of it in order to keep me hooked. They want me to keep scrolling because this increases their revenue. Habitual doomscrolling fills me with foreboding and sucks me down the vortex of the plug hole. It’s not surprising psychologists are now saying it causes mental illness. But asking the companies that run the algorithms to change is like asking a great white shark to stop chewing your leg off.
None of this is new. The tabloid press have been doing the same thing for decades. They have always known bad news sells newspapers. There is even a saying for it in the newsroom: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Human misery sells media, and the new technology serves up human misery far more efficiently than the old-style press.
But someone is at last beginning to see sense. The Australian government has just passed a ban on social media for anyone under the age of sixteen. A petition to the government said that ‘excessive social media use is rewiring young brains within a critical window of psychological development, causing an epidemic of mental illness.’
The power of that last statement deserves more attention. As a follower of the Buddha and George Fox, I can speak from my own experience. The Dhammapada, a collection of the sayings of the Buddha, opens with these two statements:
First: All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts. If someone speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows them, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
Second: All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts. If someone speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows them, like a shadow that never leaves him.
All that we do, every action, every word we speak, is preceded by and created by thought. Thought is the foundation of who we are. It’s really quite simple. Just as dieticians say ‘You are what you eat,’ the Buddha and 2,500 years of meditation practice say, ‘You are what you think.’
For example, if your diet is exclusively cheap fast food, you will put on weight and your general health will suffer. In the same way, if you fill your mind with corrupting images, you will eventually be affected by them. They will change how you behave. They will corrupt you.
Perhaps the road to hell is not just paved with good intentions, but with clickbait images of grumpy cats and teenagers falling off diving boards.
