I Can't Stop Doomscrolling

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 575 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Doomscrolling—everybody's doing it! You’re lying in bed, on your phone, trying to fall asleep, but then you end up staying awake for hours as your social media timeline fills you with anger and anxiety. This isn't just your garden-variety FOMO either. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and it can feel like there's a fresh new calamity or setback every single day. Add displays of collective grief over racial injustice to the mix, and it can be even harder to look away. So how do you stay informed without growing enraged? How do you stay connected without spiraling into despair?

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter joins us to talk about our shifting relationships with social media and how we’re dialing back the doomscrolling.

Show Notes:

Read Angela’s story about how doomscrolling is eroding your mental health here. Read more about digital wellbeing tools on Android phones here and find all of WIRED’s suggestions and coverage of digital wellness here. Find Ram Dass’ Here and Now Podcast here. Our guide to the best Kindles is here.

Recommendations:

Angela recommends I May Destroy You on HBO. Lauren recommends The Netflix Effect: Land of the Giants by Recode/Vox. Mike recommends the music of Ennio Morricone and that you read John Zorn’s obituary of Morricone in The New York Times.

Angela Watercutter can be found on Twitter @WaterSlicer. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired, and I am joined by my co-host, Wired Senior Editor, Michael Colore.
0:15.4	Aloha. Hi, how are you?
0:17.8	Aloha. Are you in Hawaii this week? It's a state of mind. It's like Margaritaville.
0:22.9	It's anywhere you want it to be. I'm going to have to take that into consideration, since we're not going many places this summer.
0:29.1	We're also joined this week by Wired Senior Editor Angela Watercutter, who I just found out, despite the fact that she has been at Wired for many years and is one
0:39.6	of our very esteemed colleagues, this is your first time on the gadget lab?
0:43.8	Yes.
0:44.4	Yes.
0:44.9	Hi, everybody.
0:46.3	I am both a gadget lab virgin and an aspiring parrothead in these times of wishing I was in
0:53.5	Hawaii.
0:54.2	I really can't believe that we haven't had you on yet, but I'm glad we're remedying the situation.
1:00.2	I'm available any time. I have more free time now than I normally would.
1:04.6	All right, we can't promise remedies for everything these days, but we can have Angela on the
1:09.6	podcast more. All right, today we're talking
1:12.3	about something you are probably all very familiar with by now. And it's called doom scrolling.
1:20.7	I'm laughing when I say it, but it's not funny. Okay, maybe you didn't realize that's what it's called,
1:24.5	but that's what we're calling it. It's that thing where you just stare at social media, you're constantly refreshing and scrolling, you're unable to tear yourself away
1:32.7	from whatever fresh hell the world has cooked up in the past hour or two. And then suddenly it's
1:38.3	two o'clock in the morning and you're so filled with anxiety that you can't sleep. Angela wrote a
1:42.9	story about this for Wired.com recently.
1:45.6	And so we brought her on to solve all of our problems around DoomSroll in about 30 minutes.
	...

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