Quick Take
The central experience of our era is a constant, surround-sound, 24/7, weaponized and ruthlessly engineered sense of doom, Wallace Baine writes. And while every era has its crises, our internet addiction and algorithms aimed at keeping us doomscrolling puts an extraordinary, crushing psychic weight on all of us.
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It’s a foggy morning in June and I have a day off. With a freshly brewed cup of coffee in one hand and the other hand idly massaging my cat Bruiser, I’ve just finished off a piece in The Atlantic headlined “America Is Headed Toward Collapse.” Next up, I sink into another thumbsucker like it’s a warm bath. This one is from The New York Times. It’s called “A.I. Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”
I wish I could say that this morning is unusual, that staring into the abyss is something I might do only in rare circumstances when I’m feeling particularly gloomy. But today feels typical, in both my media appetites and what the news cycle is offering at its boundless buffet. I wish I could say I’m an outlier, a masochistic weirdo, a Wednesday Addams in a world of Dolly Partons. But obviously, that’s not true either. I suspect there are millions (hundreds of millions?) of people around the world who are absorbing information of apocalyptic enormity every day, even if they never read The Atlantic or The New York Times.
The central experience of our era is a constant, surround-sound, 24/7, weaponized and ruthlessly engineered sense of doom. For some of us, that anxiety is uncomfortably close — this rent is breaking my back, everything’s going up but my wages, my roommate is psychopath — and, for some — anyone, perhaps, who has the leisure time to read The Atlantic with a cat on his lap — not so close.
Here’s a fun parlor game for The Age of Doom the next time you have friends over (though maybe “fun” is not the right word): See how many terms you can conjure that, when you add the word “crisis” to the end of it, you have a legitimate thing that is now or will soon be contributing to the cumulative strain that just might cause society to collapse like a jenga tower in a tequila bar.
I’ll start: Climate (duh). Democracy. Inequality. Attention. Health care. Fascism. A.I. Housing. Plastics. Post-truth. Real estate. Mental health. Life expectancy. Retailing. Affordability. Insurance. Loneliness. Birth rate. Tiebreaker: Name a phony or manufactured crisis made up to distract from the real ones.
Are we living on the precipice of catastrophic societal change? Is the house of cards about to topple? Maybe. Or we might just be in the grips of a particularly vivid case of recency bias. In fact, you can’t really name an era, in the near or distant past, not colored in some way by apocalyptic thinking. You could design a similarly dire menu of tipping-point calamities for life in, say, 1933, or 1962, or 1987. The “good life” has always been relative. Human progress has always been tenuous. Death and calamity have always been a hairbreadth away.
The difference today is the psychic weight of the world’s problems on the individual. A hundred years ago, most folks had too many worries in their immediate personal lives to mull too deeply any crisis in the bigger world outside. Fifty years ago, all those big-picture anxieties were contained within the morning newspaper or the evening half-hour newscast. But now we’re in the age of doomscrolling and internet addiction, when there are few if any barriers to sinking into a bottomless well of anxiety bordering on despair, whether it be about the coming climate catastrophe, or an abandoned vehicle in your neighborhood (call it the “Nextdoor Effect”).
And it’s not only the case that limits on the flow of information have been obliterated — which they certainly have — but that so much of the architecture of today’s online experience has been designed to keep you in the doom loop, because someone somewhere is profiting from it. Our collective crisis mindset isn’t a byproduct of social media, it’s the primary point of it.
But I see more paralysis and quiet despair as a result of all the doom-mongering, don’t you? It has real consequences in people’s personal lives as well. It’s no coincidence that “catastrophizing” — the obsession with seeing the worst outcomes of everything from the fate of the world to a tummy ache — has become a widespread cognitive phenomenon in recent years.
We all know intellectually that unspeakable tragedy happens somewhere in the world every minute of every day. And, in this case, obliviousness is not a bug of the human brain, it’s a feature. Imagine that some sick-puppy programmer figures out a way to record every traffic fatality as it happens in real time. (Have they made a “Black Mirror” episode about that?) Even if it’s just glowing dots on a map — to say nothing of anything more visceral — who but a depraved sadist could tolerate that for more than a minute or two? Yet, what is doomscrolling if not a similar version of “awareness porn”?
Feeding on an endless cycle of news stories and social-media posts on all that’s going wrong in the country/world is an indulgence, like binge-watching “Succession” when you genuinely loathe every character in the show. Perhaps the human brain’s taste for high-stakes drama is simply more irresistible than its thirst for hope. Maybe a neuroscientist could present a compelling case on what this orgy of bad news does to the brain. Not to slide into the woo-woo, but I’m wondering what it does to the spirit. Idealism, hope, optimism, progress: All these things have been tempered if not nearly snuffed out by the always-on drumbeat of bad news. The space-age optimism of the 1960s, the Reaganesque city-on-a-hill hope of the ’80s, the information-superhighway hype of the ’90s, all of that stuff feels positively antique these days. Maybe we can lay this at the feet of Donald Trump, but do politicians even express confidence in the future anymore?
Of course, maybe rose-colored glasses isn’t what anyone needs right now. If this constant sluice of doom galvanized people into action to avoid the ugly world that it’s predicting, it would be a blessing. But I see more paralysis and quiet despair as a result of all the doom-mongering, don’t you? It has real consequences in people’s personal lives as well. It’s no coincidence that “catastrophizing” — the obsession with seeing the worst outcomes of everything from the fate of the world to a tummy ache — has become a widespread cognitive phenomenon in recent years.
What’s the answer to breaking out of this toxic spiral? It could be activism, spirituality, developing a sense of cognitive/emotional balance through meditation or some other discipline, or a combination of all that. What’s certain is that nothing is going to come from the same commercialist/capitalist machine that created the doom cycle in the first place. As individuals, we are each on our own to determine what’s best for our mental health.
Living fully in the contemporary world means having to adapt to ominous projections of the future — and yes, even human extinction is on the table. But we all have to wring out every morsel of sweetness we can from our individual mortal lifespans. How is a person supposed to live with this kind of contradiction?
Surely, obliviousness isn’t the answer. Then again, my cat Bruiser seems pretty content with his morning.
