Let’s skip the news, boy I’ll make some tea The Arabs and the Jews, boy Too much for me
I think you misunderstand the correlative relationship between doom content and living a good life (or the inability to do so). Here in the States, 80% of people live in precarity. That is to say we’re all either worried about being able to afford a living, about the security of our job, the security of our home, the security of our food, whether we’ll still be able to retain contact with family and loved ones, and so on.
For instance, my wife, who has been a high-performance personal assistant for a contractor’s executive officer for thirteen years is on the verge of being laid off, because the old boss is retiring and the new boss (whose skills are engineering, not management) doesn’t know how to get along with the old way. (My wife knows how to do everything in the entire company, so it’s not that she can’t be placed.) So for us, it’s income precarity. It’s going to be an It’s A Wonderful Life Christmas in which everything is on the precipice until it falls or she is placed elsewhere.
Why are so many of us in perpetual crisis? This is where doomscrolling comes in. It tells us what’s going on that has consequences reverberating in our own lives. Doomscrolling actually helps because it reminds us that we’re in these straits not because we fucked up somewhere (which is what we’ve been taught with decades of personal responsibility rhetoric) but because other things are going on. Considering how I’ve been trained so often that I’m to blame for my mental illness, it’s actually a relief that there are valid reasons to feel crummy about things, and it’s not just a neurological anomaly.
(In the case of my wife’s company, the Fed raised interest rates, so companies are reticent to borrow and are delaying projects with future returns. They aren’t looking to build hotels and townhouses, which is what her company specializes in. But there are public transit projects going up, so there are some prospects with other contractors who will need project proposal writers, which my sweetheart is very good at.)
Most of us aren’t living a good life largely because of the high levels of precarity. It’d be super if our government was willing to invest more in social safety nets rather than just military technology and corporate subsidies, but that’s not going to happen so long as our federal and state governments are controlled by oligarchies rather than serving public interests. It all ties together, and doomscrolling (in my case, compounded with research in to what are real factors vs. what are rumors) informs me the picture is way bigger than I am, and it’s better to come to terms that I may lose everything for completely arbitrary reasons, than to imagine God is watching over me (and not the countless others contending with famine or morbid transmissible disease).
Let’s skip the news, boy
I’ll make some tea
The Arabs and the Jews, boy
Too much for me
I think you misunderstand the correlative relationship between doom content and living a good life (or the inability to do so). Here in the States, 80% of people live in precarity. That is to say we’re all either worried about being able to afford a living, about the security of our job, the security of our home, the security of our food, whether we’ll still be able to retain contact with family and loved ones, and so on.
For instance, my wife, who has been a high-performance personal assistant for a contractor’s executive officer for thirteen years is on the verge of being laid off, because the old boss is retiring and the new boss (whose skills are engineering, not management) doesn’t know how to get along with the old way. (My wife knows how to do everything in the entire company, so it’s not that she can’t be placed.) So for us, it’s income precarity. It’s going to be an It’s A Wonderful Life Christmas in which everything is on the precipice until it falls or she is placed elsewhere.
Why are so many of us in perpetual crisis? This is where doomscrolling comes in. It tells us what’s going on that has consequences reverberating in our own lives. Doomscrolling actually helps because it reminds us that we’re in these straits not because we fucked up somewhere (which is what we’ve been taught with decades of personal responsibility rhetoric) but because other things are going on. Considering how I’ve been trained so often that I’m to blame for my mental illness, it’s actually a relief that there are valid reasons to feel crummy about things, and it’s not just a neurological anomaly.
(In the case of my wife’s company, the Fed raised interest rates, so companies are reticent to borrow and are delaying projects with future returns. They aren’t looking to build hotels and townhouses, which is what her company specializes in. But there are public transit projects going up, so there are some prospects with other contractors who will need project proposal writers, which my sweetheart is very good at.)
Most of us aren’t living a good life largely because of the high levels of precarity. It’d be super if our government was willing to invest more in social safety nets rather than just military technology and corporate subsidies, but that’s not going to happen so long as our federal and state governments are controlled by oligarchies rather than serving public interests. It all ties together, and doomscrolling (in my case, compounded with research in to what are real factors vs. what are rumors) informs me the picture is way bigger than I am, and it’s better to come to terms that I may lose everything for completely arbitrary reasons, than to imagine God is watching over me (and not the countless others contending with famine or morbid transmissible disease).