I quit: Why I need to stop doomscrolling

Remember when the news was the inconvenient thing your dad would flick on while you were trying to watch The Simpsons? Now it’s the first thing I see when I roll over and silence my morning alarm.

My dog settles into the nook between my chin and shoulder, waking me up with unconditional love, and I can’t accept it because I’m three paragraphs into a story about Target employees in America being harassed about their store’s line of Pride month merchandise.

Genevieve Novak often regrets scrolling through her phone first thing in the morning.Credit: Simon Schluter

On the train, against my better judgement, I scroll through dozens of vile comments about Brittany Higgins. It reminds me that no matter how well I get along with my colleagues in the office kitchen, I should never forget that a not-insignificant percentage of them hate women, and that if I ever went through something comparable, a few of them would happily pile on in the angry enclave of the internet.

I find no respite at the gym, either, because I inexplicably know all too much about Matty Healy, frontman of the band The 1975 and recent boyfriend of Taylor Swift, and his niche taste in pornography to shake it off in peace.

I hear Trump’s squeaky little voice in my head every single day. I picture Greta Thunberg’s judgmental stare every time I do a poor job rinsing out my yoghurt containers. Ukrainian reports of torture from Russian occupiers pop up between Bumble notifications and prompts to shop The Iconic sale. A dozen articles and Reddit threads warn of imminent recession, and I wonder if I’ll have to move into my sister’s garage because I blew all my money on takeaway coffee and medium-quality dog biscuits. Another mass shooting in the US. Violent threats over drag story time. Protests about the Voice referendum. Rate rises and rental crises and Philip Lowe’s shrug as he tells people to get a housemate. Elon Musk, period.

This all colours the world in deepening greys, and I move through it as though with concrete in my shoes: tired, heavy, hopeless. In a global ecosystem kept running by clicks and outrage, current events and unsolicited opinions slam you in the face whether you’re interested or not.

Greta Thunberg’s judgemental stare is everywhere.Credit: AP

I am a deeply frivolous person who enjoys having pad see ew delivered to my door 15 minutes after craving it; who scrolls through TikTok with the kind of arresting, hours-long dissociation that rivals Buddhist monks’ most committed meditation efforts; who refers to Bendigo as “the country” because it doesn’t have a Mecca store. Yet I fantasise about chewing through the NBN cable in my apartment, throwing my phone into the river, and moving to a tiny house in the Scottish highlands with my dog, where I’d live entirely off grid, and where the mere concept of celebrities hosting parties for mass injections of coveted diabetes medication to facilitate extreme weight loss would put my neighbours into a coma.

Please. My brain hurts. I want to know less. For years I have abhorred ignorance: a weak excuse, a personal failure. We all need to care more about one another, not less, if we want the world to become a better, safer, healthier place.

Being uninformed is a special kind of privilege. If you are a woman, a person of colour, working class, someone who is queer, or any combination thereof, your mere existence is a matter of politics, and checking out of current events is either impossible or a death wish. Like being apolitical, or grocery shopping without first consulting your bank balance, having no idea about the state of the world is something only afforded to a lucky few. So it’s with all the self awareness this middle-class, quietly queer white woman can muster that — at least for now — I am resigning from staying on the pulse.

I want less Taylor Swift - and everything else - in my head.Credit: AP

I know it won’t be easy. I know it probably won’t last more than a day or two. I know I’ll get three chapters into a fluffy book about nothing, and my hands will wander over to my phone, unlock it, and open Twitter. I know binge-watching The Great British Bake Off will leave me hungry for profiteroles and real stimulus. It’s just that I can’t wake up one more day into a fog of doom and gloom. I can’t start my commute knowing I’m stepping into a carriage full of people whose ideologies threaten peoples’ lives and livelihoods. I can’t doomscroll, can’t resist the pull of fearmongering articles, can’t live with the ever-building weight of an increasingly bleak outlook for one minute more.

I quit. I do not want to know anything. Clear my cache. From now on, or for the next two and a half days, the only Taylor Swift reference I want left in my head is something about a blank space, baby.

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