Another take on the "sordid undertow"

That David Brooks Op-Ed was incredible, and timely. I really enjoy when someone takes a seemingly very contemporary and "unique" phenomenon and put in into a historical perspective. That, as well as your wonderful description of doomscrolling as a "sordid underdow" immediately reminded me of an article I read recently An Apocalyptic Meditation on Doomscrolling by Erik Davis.

Rather than a historical perspective though he was looking at the etymology of the term, and the word's usage in pop culture. Still, as with the Brooks article I found this one to be extremely helpful, a "media lifesaver" as you phrased it, in that it highlighted the psychological "trick" behind doomscrolling. He starts with a wonderfully accurate description of how it plays out for most of us:

We never begin the day doomscrolling. We are reading or researching, and then doomscrolling takes over, an uncanny transition from worried and even obsessive concern to hopeless dread and apocalyptic nausea. It’s that moment when, rather than turn from the proximate source of your stress [...] you neurotically and addictively cling to the invading infoswarm of present and likely horrors, chain-smoking the grim tidings like they were butts picked from the gutter. What was once news of the world, consumed with the thoughtful if sometimes enraged concern of the citizen, metamorphs into one of those classic psychoanalytic objects of ambivalence: an amorphous and sickly nightmare Thing that simultaneously fascinates, compels, disgusts, frightens, and destroys. The more you try and get to the bottom of it, the more it sucks you under.

That resonates so so much. But if this were just an article about what happens I don't think it would be helpful. Instead, I really appreciate his description of doomscrolling as a distortion of reality or, again, a psychological trick

Within the fantasy that drives doomscrolling, we may imagine that we are finally submitting to Reality, to the hard fact of a world collapsing like dominoes. But we are really bending down before our feeds. In this game, media is the Master.
[...]
But there is something deeper afoot, something about the mediation offered by narrative itself, or, more accurately, the intensification of narrative affect, the tendency of our storytelling to drift toward sensation.
[...]
Over and over, this online game of telephone intensified the threat and thickened the telling with panic. Moreover, in the face of this “contagion of fear,” the re-injection of the original, less extreme data had virtually no effect on reducing people’s anxiety.

As I wrote above, we ramp stuff up because on some level we enjoy this shit.

I'm being lazy by quoting so much but, really, he just says this so well and the article is very worth reading. I'm not entirely convinced that I actually enjoy spinning when I'm stuck in a doomscrolling session. To me it feels more like desperately looking for a counter-narrative to whatever story I'm stuck on, and the more I search and see bad news the more I'm "researching" or grasping for a different take. However, I fully agree with his point about how the "intensification of narrative affect," takes over. In what might be the best summary this effect he says that

...doomscrolling is a way of “weirding” crisis media in order to secretly, unconsciously transform it into a subgenre of horror [...] we are thrust beyond the Enlightenment’s circle of illumination, facing an inner dread and an outer darkness that only myth or religion or cosmic horror can limn.

I appreciate that he acknowledges that, often, our fears are valid, but they are often warped in the sense that they're sensationalized or, at the very least, we are so hyper-focused on them that "a kind of vertigo seizes hold."

I'm ever so slightly better at handling this, or rather avoiding it, than I have been in the past. Some key takeaways I try to remember (from this and other sources are):

• Whatever I'm spinning on is not the whole story
• Whatever outcome I'm dreading is not necessarily "true"
• Very often (almost always) whatever seeming-calamity I'm reading about is not unprecedented, even though it often feels that way
• Regardless of how likely or unlikely a thing is, the productive and useful thing to do is focus on what I can control, which often isn't much. But as a climate advocate I work with often says "action is the antidote to despair"
• As I've worked in advocacy I've learned that many more people are working to make the world a better place than are working in the other direction (but it's the worst people and worst actions being highlighted)

As mentioned above I'm not entirely bought into the "masochistic horror narrative" explanation for doomscrolling. Another explanation that I've heard that seems reasonable is that humans are simply adapted to pay much closer attention to threat than to anything else. Risk, threat, uncertainty, the possibility of loss, are all weighted so much more than are other events and possibilities.

Regardless of what's really going on I'm just very glad to see this phenomenon getting some attention. What strange creatures we are that we invent these amazing technological tools that we then must grapple with, develop strategies for, or retreat from.