God Is Dead and You Can’t Stop Doomscrolling
War, "self-care" distraction and accepting the tragedy of life
It’s 1AM. You planned to log off, read a book and drift off to sleep but a “BREAKING NEWS” banner flickered across your screen. You’ve quickly tumbled down a rabbit hole on the latest bombing of a town in Ukraine.
You see images of dismantled bodies and crying children. You see desperate refugees at the border. You see predictions of nuclear war. You feel sick. You feel anxious. You feel sad. It’s now 4AM. You have work in a few hours.
‘Doomscrolling’ was the Macquarie Dictionary Committee’s Word Of The Year in 2020, describing “the practice of continuing to read news feeds online or on social media, despite the fact that the news is predominantly negative and often upsetting”.
COVID-19 provided plenty of bad news fodder, but the Ukrainian war with its horrific spectacle of militarised violence appears to be luring many of us in.
There’s no shortage of advice on how to cope.
The BBC wrote an article for people who are “upset” and “distressed” by the news of Ukraine. They recommended a two-step process: “The first is to remove yourself from triggers so that you can practice mindfulness”.
NPR similarly provided a how-to of “5 ways to cope with the stressful news cycle” including such wellness tips as “breathe”, “nourish yourself” and “stay connected”.
The expert wisdom on doomscrolling treats it as a “negativity bias” – an unhelpful pattern of thinking provoked by an adverse stimulus. The treatment is simple: disconnect, take time for yourself and only reconnect with the horrors of the world once you feel ready.
This is psychology at its least insightful, acting merely as a tool for comfort in order to orientate people towards more “productive” pursuits.
The problem with such “self-care” is that it often covers up deeper existential truths.
Watching war and disease ravage our fellow man should hurt. It shows that we are vulnerable creatures thrown into a world that is indifferent to our suffering. As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche succinctly put it in Ecce Homo: the truth is terrible.
Nietzschean scholar Brian Leiter noted this connection between media consumption and truth when he wrote:
Examples of the litany of grief that awaits us all are available for regular consumption in the newspapers, a testament to the universality of the afflictions: cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease, agoraphobia, multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, hip fractures, chronic depression, and on and on.
The problem with doomscrolling isn’t the realisation that the world is riddled with cruelties it’s that most people are incapable of drinking in the horror. To doomscroll means to become trapped in the neurotic urge to rationalise and find meaning in the awfulness, to keep looking and consuming media until it all makes sense.
Citizens in the West are particularly bad at dealing with unpleasant truths, still enmeshed as we are within a Christian heritage.
Christianity buckles in the face of suffering. To justify the horrors caused by a loving God, apologists rely on the hope of some future liberation from the body, where all corporal suffering is divinely justified.
Unsurprisingly, the more man understands the revolting features of the world in real-time and in high definition, the less justified all this suffering is in the face of a vague hope of salvation.
“Man cannot endure his own littleness” wrote Ernest Becker, and this is a particularly harsh when God is dead.
How then to live with such torments?
For Nietzsche, and others who repudiate the Christian logic of future salvation, the remedy isn’t to “make sense” of awful events, it’s to accept the tragic as a necessary component of life.
This is best epitomised by the Ancient Greek God Dionysus – the god of wine, festivals, and madness - who played a key role in the Euripides play The Bacchae. The Dionysian is sensuous, frenzied and orgiastic – it is both sadistic violence and prurient pleasure.
The Dionysian, as a feature of Ancient Greek tragedy, is a pre-philosophical orientation which embraces rather than “rationalises” the terrors of existence. Philosopher Simon Critchley notes in his book Tragedy, The Greeks and Us that:
Philosophy, once again beginning in Plato, appears to be committed to the idea and ideal of a noncontradictory psychic life. Tragedy does not share this commitment.
For Nietzsche, amor fati or “love of fate” is a forgotten disposition of Western Civilisation reflected in Greek tragedy and capable of affirming even the most dismal of news cycles:
The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being—all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date
The ability to “say yes” to the interminable horrors we are witnessing today, may appear ludicrous and cruel, but Nietzsche is not calling for people to be passive in the face of suffering.
The Nietzschean lesson is not that the ravages of war or disease should persist unmitigated, but that there are many more awful things to come – a difficult truth that is better off accepted:
I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
To affirm the tragic character of existence is to understand that being churned through the cosmic chaos means an exquisite mix of light and dark, creation and destruction. To “say yes” to life means to acknowledge the dividing cells of a cancerous tumour follow the same inhuman physics as that of the developing foetus.
Thus, Nietzsche’s fictionalised prophet Zarathustra recites in a poem:
O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe;
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity.
Our habit of doomscrolling can provide a glimpse of the tragic, the beginning of a journey towards a more radical acceptance of life.
If you find yourself awake at 4AM – breathe, sure, but don’t look away. There are lessons to be learned in the darkness.
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