Dear Reader,

I just spent the better part of a day verbally doomscrolling. 

It all started with a good breakfast.  Our host made waffles.  We set out local maple syrup and strawberries and whipped cream.  There was hot coffee, freshly ground, for the adults and orange juice for the children.  It was all served nicely — white china with blue flourishes, cloth napkins, and a fancy doily on the table.  We smiled, sat down to eat, and promptly began talking about everything that’s wrong with the world.

If you’re not familiar, “doomscrolling” is a neologism, coined to describe the act of binge-reading foreboding news on the internet.  It seems to be the preferred, addictive hobby of our day.  And, for better or worse, it has a social parallel, appropriate for times when folks are away from screens and in the presence of human beings.  On such occasions, there begins to be a bit of an itch.  It has been minutes, maybe hours, since we’ve had a bad-news hit.  The mind wants a path back to its comfort zone, and so, unable to read about doom and gloom, we switch to telling everyone about it. 

I must confess, I am a regular participant, but I’m not the only one.  The setting in this particular case was a friend’s beautiful house, built in the 1920s; we all sat together in the century-old, oak-floored dining room.  But, near as I can tell, verbal doomscrolling happens regularly, everywhere, regardless of venue or occasion.  It seems to be a normative part of Covid-era culture; it is, increasingly, just the way people interact.  So long as those in a discussion agree on what sorts of things they think of as bad news, bad news is probably the main sort of thing they’ll think of to discuss. 

It goes like this: Regardless of where a conversation starts (waffles, let’s say) it invariably reminds someone of something bad going on in the world (global wheat shortages, let’s say).  Sometimes this provides a good opportunity for others to learn about new bad things they didn’t previously know. But most of the time, since everyone at the party reads the same publications and is informed by the same echo chambers, everybody is already aware of the bad thing currently being retold.  This does not in any way dissuade the retelling.

When it becomes obvious that all present have seen the article or statistic or video that the speaker is recounting, the speaker only becomes more encouraged and animated, spurred on by a sense of accord.   Soon other folks join in the clamor.  There rises a scattershot chorus of words and details and quoted half-phrases from all corners of the table, in impassioned crescendo as the group enthusiastically tells itself a story it already knows — climbing together to the riveting final point, proclaimed by all.  A depressed but triumphant sigh then rounds the room. Everyone rests for a moment, then races to think of the next bit of excitably discouraging information they might share.

And so it went that morning.  Until morning became late afternoon.  Because there is something pleasant about agreeing with people about things, even when those things are unpleasant and disagreeable.  And therein lies the danger. 

Wheat shortages are, of course, a problem, and I do not deny they are the sort of problem we ought to talk about.  Russia and Ukraine together provide nearly a third of the world’s grain.  Grocery costs across the board are skyrocketing.  The food supply chains have been crumbling since Covid started, and now we add a war and multiple cargo ships that have recently been sunk by munitions in the Black Sea.  But there I go again! — I suspect we have grossly underestimated the time we spend talking about such things and overestimated the benefit of the talking.  We have the notion that the more we converse the more we accomplish, that we are preparing ourselves for something, or somehow helping someone else by the sheer intensity of our chatter. 

Of course, it’s not true; it’s an addict’s rationalization.  We surely must talk about bad things when it is prudent and beneficial to do so, and when we do so intentionally.  And many things right now truly are bad, deserving of our criticism.  But there can be an obsessive, hypnotic pleasure in the talking that paralyzes all else.  It’s the same as the screen-based version, doomscrolling classic.  We have confused addiction for action.

I suspect breakfast guests visiting that oak-floored dining room in its early days didn’t have this problem. No doubt they talked about the world war just concluded and some years later the world war just begun.   But I doubt that they talked obsessively, ad nauseam, about those two world wars just for the sake of a dopamine rush. If so, they wouldn’t have won them.

There are many reasons for the societal change, but the most obvious is simply that, back then, they didn’t have an internet.   I presume that my great grandparents read the paper once a day, or once a week, and discussed it.  Sometimes they probably complained.  But a newspaper tends to have war coverage on the front page and high school football on another, maybe garden tips in the middle and comic strips at the back.  It is not designed to entice readers deeper and deeper into every imaginable dour topic and sub-topical rabbit hole.  A newspaper is always a mix of good and bad, near and far.  Like all forms of older media, it does not wave itself in your face.   And, like all forms of older media, it is easy to put down once you finish your coffee.  And it stays where you put it. 

I don’t wish to idolize the past, but I note at least that media patterns inform conversational patterns, and conversations drive actions — or lack thereof.  And all of this seemed healthier prior doomscrolling.  Thus I think past generations not only made for better breakfast guests, they probably were (for the most part) better able to stay focussed on doing the next, right, tangible thing. Sometimes that means action for matters far away; sometimes it means action right in front of us — often they are the same thing.

Eventually, the shadows outside the window stretched across the yard and over the dormant raspberry bushes, and our host heroically broke the vicious spell.  “You know, I just got a new seed catalog in the mail, and we haven’t once talked about it.”  I think our ancestors, even if there was a war going on, even if they might soon be fighting in it, would have gathered around that seed catalog shortly after breakfast.  They would have talked for a while about grain ships in the Black Sea, but then moved on to seeds in their backyard.  They’d have planned out their Victory Gardens and done all the sorts of things that help provide for families here and reduce the burden on families far away.

Whatever does or doesn’t come next, those are the sorts of things I ought to be doing right now; later I’ll be glad that I did.  They’re the sorts of things that tangibly remind me this is just a season, and death precedes life.  And they’re the sorts of things we all ought to try to talk about more often when we get together.

Sincerely,