Life Wish #1: We reeeeeally gotta stop doomscrolling

Hello! My name is Madge and you are hearing from me because you once downloaded my book, Be Less Crazy About Your Body. You also might remember me from that time me and my cute fat self won a crown in the Ms Pittsburgh pageant, or from that custom dress company I used to run called Wear the Shift? 

Nice to see you! It has been a minute! Here I am, sliding back in your inbox with Life Wish, a newsletter about trying to keep it together as things fall apart. 

Why is this important to me? Because the dark forces currently in control of my country and much of the world seem to have a death wish -- happy to kill whatever and whoever might get in the way of them feeling like big men. They don’t mind ruling over ashes, so long as they get to rule. 

But me -- I am firmly on Team Living Organisms. I have a very strong life wish, and I want to live in a world that does, too. Where all people and the entire biosphere are encircled and valued and cared for. Where we center connection, laughter, and compassion rather than money, hierarchy, and violence. Where we base decisions on how much pleasure and joy they will unleash. 

I can envision this world, yet it seems so far away from everything we see happening around us right now. And sometimes, as I witness the crumbling, I crumble, too, especially on those days when I can’t extract myself from the cesspool of endless despair that is the news. 

DOOMSCROLLING. You know, that thing where you lie on the couch staring at your phone, mildly dissociating as you scroll and refresh and scroll and refresh until half the day and all of your will to live are gone? It is addictive, and useless, and much more dangerous than a lot of us realize. 

Because how can we possibly muster the energy to fight when our insides are all ganked up, when our bodies are marinating in stress chemicals, when we can’t stop ourselves from switching and refreshing apps until our eyes and hearts crust over? 

The answer is -- we can’t. Doomscrolling immobilizes us, body and mind and spirit. It turns our spines to mush. It sucks all the beans right out. 

(Interesting fact: this is exactly how the USA’s authoritarian death cult wants us to feel, so that we will relax into the embrace of their power and let them continue to pillage everyone and everything, until … I’m honestly not even sure what their endgame is? Like how do you live on a burnt planet, even if you have all the money? Can you eat stocks? DEATH. CULT.)

But something changed in me last Friday. Losing Ruth Bader Ginsberg was the gut punch, the death cult’s quick and evil response was the swift sharp slap across my soul, and the 1-2 combo popped me out of my semi-depressed semi-stupor. I see it all so clearly -- 

The only way to not give in to the creeping doom is to STOP FUCKING DOOMSCROLLING. 

Why? Because doomscrolling destroys my emotional energy and turns me to a sadness pile on a failure couch. It makes me into a spectator, more invested in the temperature of the takes than the actual issues behind them. It gets me into an emotional cycle of feeling anxious and looking to my phone to relieve that anxiety, but it never alleviates, only escalates. It makes me into a dead-eyed ghost with a lot of feelings but no corporeal power with which to act.

Why do I do it? Well, it’s addictive as sin. And sometimes it even feels virtuous. Part of me feels like it’s my duty to stay informed, and why should I get even one minute of freedom from the essential horror, if others can’t have it, too? One one level, it feels morally right to not ever look away. 

But it doesn’t help anyone. When we sacrifice our emotional and physical health on the pyre of the burning world, we become unable to participate in caring for anyone or fixing anything. We become weaker -- scared, angry, overwhelmed. We become focused on horror and death. We lose our power. 

And the death cult WANTS us to doomscroll. They want to harvest our joy and make us feel like we’re inevitably fucked. That’s why they keep generating so much shitty news every moment of every day! Death cults are relentless and never give you a break on purpose. 

Which means we have to take the break for ourselves. We have to choose another path -- the path of taking excellent care of ourselves so we can take excellent care of others. Engaging in real work and giving ourselves real rest. Participating and regenerating. Putting our energy into real life rather than throwing it down the social media black hole. Centering our own pleasure and joy so that we can stay 100% alive on the inside. 

When I do this -- when I take long breaks from the timeline, attend to my own feelings with compassion, and show up to my life refreshed -- I feel almost like maybe the entire world isn’t entirely on fire. Like there are millions of smart and good-hearted people trying hard to make a better world. Like I have some power in my hands and I can use it. 

It’s a good, wholesome feeling, and it is also true. There really are millions of us pushing for a world organized around an entirely different set of principles, and we really can do it. 

But I’m only able to remember this when I’ve disengaged from their horror machine. Real rest replenishes my energy, and real work gives me a valuable place to spend it. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll talk more about what real rest and real work look like, how to break the doomscrolling habit, and lots more. For now, I’m going to leave you with some links that gave me a long cool drink of life this week when I really needed it. 

• AOC went live on Instagram after RBG died and I don’t know what we did to deserve her. Full of gems to straighten the spine. 

• I’ve been listening to these mixtapes of soul music by women for years, and then I stumbled across this playlist that includes all of the songs they sample. It made a joyful soundtrack to my screen-free Saturday this week, highly recommended. 

• Sonya Renee Taylor, the visionary genius author of The Body Is Not An Apology, was on Brene Brown’s podcast this week, and shared her soul-nourishing ideas about how divesting from the hierarchy that our culture imposes on us actually destroys that hierarchy. Essential listening for the revolution. 

• If you’ve spoken to me in the last decade, you know I am devoted to Octavia E. Butler, especially her book The Parable of the Sower, which recently hit the NYTimes bestseller list almost thirty years after publication (I wrote about the book here). I love this book because it holds the darkness while also lighting a pathway through it. Octavia’s Parables is a must-listen podcast where adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon talk through the book, chapter by chapter, and share questions for all of us to consider as we contemplate our own paths through the rising darkness. 

• The Social Dilemma is a Netflix documentary about how social media is designed specifically to eat our brains from the inside out. Memorable quote from one dude, when asked what he’s worried about in the short term: “Short term? Civil War.” YIKES … but I feel him. If you feel like you could use a boost to shake up your social media habits, check it out. 

I’m so happy to be sharing my thoughts with you here and want to hear what you’re thinking about and struggling with, too. Hit reply to get back at me, and if you think someone else might need to be part of this discussion, too, please forward to this to them. 

Love you, Earthling, and remember

DOOMSCROLLING = DEATH

Madge