I learned this term the other day. It describes that state of mind where all you're doing is scrolling through social media, looking for something to get upset about. You're not necessarily consciously looking for something to get upset about — you might tell yourself that you're looking for something "interesting" to engage with — but, in practice, you are, nine times out of ten, looking for something to get upset or angry about.
Now I know there's a word for this, I feel increasingly conscious of it, and I've found myself deliberately wanting to avoid social media for the last few days. This is, of course, a double-edged sword — hanging back from social media makes it difficult to talk to people (particularly if you're also hanging back from Discord because the servers you've hung out on in the past are also proving to be prone to this) but it also means you'll almost certainly get a lot more done, and not waste hours of your life getting upset and angry about things that don't matter.
I often think it'd be nice to just close my Twitter account altogether, but the fact is it's an important source of people actually finding and sharing my work — as well as making new contacts, which often leads to interesting things. So I don't feel like I can abandon it altogether, which kind of sucks.
That said, what I can do is try and curtail my doomscrolling. Put my phone out of reach when I'm doing something else. Break the habit of just clicking through Twitter, Discord, Reddit when my mind is idling. Get more shit done. Perhaps even go so far as to set myself some specific "Twitter hours" when I sit down and "do my social media" for the day. That is, after all, how we used to handle email. Six o'clock and cheap rate phone calls would roll around, we'd log on to CompuServe, check our emails, respond to any that needed responding to, then hang up.
Ah, simpler times. Perhaps there's some value in trying to recapture that.
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