the.com/doom scroll
Compulsively scrolling through distressing news long after it stops informing and starts hurting you.
means To keep swiping through an endless stream of bad news on your phone, long past the point of being informed and well into the territory of being miserable.
from A 21st-century compound, built from 'doom' (ruin, dark fate, from Old English 'dōm' which originally just meant judgment or law) plus 'scroll,' the verb for endlessly sliding your thumb up a screen of content. The word caught on hard during 2020, when lockdowns and nonstop crisis headlines gave everyone the habit and someone, mercifully, coined the term for it.
- origin
- term spiked during 2020 lockdowns
- brain chemistry
- dopamine hits keep you swiping past dread
- irony
- makes you feel informed and worse, simultaneously
- cure rate
- low, you are reading this instead of stopping