The phrase “doomscrolling”, which was first popularized during the COVID pandemic, describes a behavior pattern that goes back even further than that – at least to the dawn of social media. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling your Facebook timeline for the fifth time in an hour, re-reading the same (often negative) posts because your brain is hooked on checking for a tiny drip of new information, you’ve participated in the phenomenon. It’s closely tied to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a term coined in 2004 just as the internet was really finding its place in the hearts and minds of people around the world.
What’s changed in recent years is the sheer scale of it. Our ancestors might have worried about their town, their family, their crops. We, on the other hand, are handed an endless feed of every war, every disaster, every outrage – filtered through algorithms designed to keep us hooked. There’s a strange social pressure to stay informed about everything, as if not knowing about a faraway tragedy makes us complicit or self-absorbed. But is this constant exposure actually increasing our depth of compassion – or stretching it too thin to be useful, at the expense of our spiritual and mental health? When everything feels urgent, it’s hard to tell what actually deserves our attention. Our desire to stay deeply informed about the world can end up making our empathy surprisingly shallow.
Continue reading “Doomscrolling and the Global Shallows”