The Philosophy of Doomscrolling

Maybe I should be doing something else

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.” - David Antin

“The Internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us.” James Veitch

I should be writing my final installment of my Evil Series Newsletter. It's supposed to be grand and riveting. It’s supposed to be bold and provocative, but also at the same time, elegant and restrained. It's the kind of letter I'd want to write in a leatherbound book, hand white and cramped from the strain of trying to perfect each word with dignified style, like it'd later be scrutinized by scholars with Byzantine tastes. It would help me prove to myself that I don't have brain damage. I haven't lost the spark, I can still write. I still have the mandate of heaven. I haven't been bleeding for nothing, and the spear I've been sleeping with, dipped in ichor, slipped between my ribs, like the sword of Damocles but it's already fallen, hasn't infected my mind, hasn't killed my heart, hasn't murdered me in fragmented slices and nightmares and sighs, and despite all the exhaustion and pain I put myself through it never will. I'll never let it. Here is the proof.

It's a lot to ask a piece of writing to accomplish.

Three weeks have gone by and I haven't even started drafting it. I don't even know where to begin. I am a wounded bird fluttering in the foam of its dark ocean. I am standing at the edge of its depths and every time I want to take a hesitant step forward, to get the damn thing written already, all I can see is the vast and monstrous landscape of the Unwritten unraveling all around me.

So instead of even trying, I end up doomscrolling on X or TikTok or Reddit. I play Persona 5 on my Nintendo Switch. I pick up my Kindle and read one book for two minutes, then another, unable to find something to hold my attention. I stuff my brain with noise, data like junkfood, until my weak and wobbly and whiny little inner voice is quieted and I'm left with nothing but a vague sense of unease.

Sure, I know the steps to get through that feeling. I know how to fight procrastination and anxiety. I've been a writer long enough to understand the oblique ways in which I have to approach an idea, the tricks and tips to take an enormous inner landscape and make it a manageable little story. I've learned to be comfortable with the constant, vague sense of disappointment that comes with every sentence I write. Words are imperfect vessels, after all, and writing is a medium that's somehow both too sophisticated and primitive to ever fully capture the true essence of a thought. With one hand you’re trying to transcribe the message of God. With the other, you’re whipping your own back with a cat-o-nine tail because you know you’ll never be able to.

Most of the time I like the agony of art. I like debasing myself in front of the infinite, dancing like a court Jester as it laughs at me, laughs at my silly little attempts to write something that matters, flings stars and the weight of gravity at me, all of the unknowables at me, burns me up, uses me up, a day at a time, until there’s nothing left to burn. I know that my words will be chewed up by the great maw of time, and all I have to sustain me in the knowledge that maybe what I’m doing has any impact at all is an email every couple of weeks that my writing touched someone’s heart, or a 4 star review on Goodreads, or a message from my publisher that we sold a decent amount of books. That’s fine with me. I knew the price of doing what I wanted, on my own terms, was that I’d have to do what I wanted on my own terms. Success and praise were never guaranteed. Better writers than I have been destroyed by the great consuming machine of life. Bukowski said to find what you love and let it kill you, because anything pursued with passion is bound to kill you. I am okay with my body breaking over my computer keyboard. (Or my phone, which I'm writing this on right now.) I am okay with arthritis and ugliness and poverty, not enough money to afford Botox, not enough money to afford a decent nursing home. I understood the price of true love. It’s always death.

So why can't I bring myself to write this newsletter?

I guess I just want to feel inspired again.

I want to feel like what I felt three years ago when I went to the edge of Lake Elmer in the misted afternoon, in the deep noise of protracted isolation, and I was so connected to my creative self that I whispered speak and the giggling spirits all around me chortled and changed and swung from every. Wade into the water, they told me, in voices tinged with amusement, in giddy joy at my bumbling ignorance in the face of the eternal. Wade into the water. What are you, afraid? All you have to lose is everything.

Some people say that there is no real inspiration. That the muse is a myth. They say you have to sit down at the computer day after day, like some kind of broken workhorse, and beat your fingers against the keyboard until they break. And while there is some truth to that, some days you do just have to push yourself, how can they say there is no such thing as inspiration? Like it's some kind of construct, an illusion, perpetrated by amateurs and wannabes looking for an excuse to give up?

Have they never seen the face of God, shining on the water, illuminating the surface of the dark heaven that spirals out in all directions forever?

That was an inspiration. That was divinity. In those days I fully and truly saw the link between creativity and psychosis, not a line or a divide, but an endless tunnel, a place that I could either swim or drown in, that sang with the endless pulse of all life, its teeming and unbroken mass of infinite data. No drugs required. I just had to look and see. I had to be honest with myself. I had to be willing to bow down in front of all the angels and spirits, admit that I knew nothing, and ask for help.

But that sounds terrifying, and like a lot of work. And I have a toddler to take care of, you know. Can I bring my toddler with me to the edge of the stream of madness, in that place where all sense of space and time is lost, where I have to wade carefully, lightly, lest a conflagration of demons catch me unaware? It's probably irresponsible.

So I go back to doom scrolling. I gorge on TikTok videos about anabolic protein cheesecake recipes. I delve into hairTok where everyone is putting rosemary oil on their scalp to try to stimulate hair growth. I look at Reddit posts and then screenshots of Reddit posts and now suddenly I feel like I need to have an opinion about the man who wouldn’t open a can of beans for his daughter. I scroll through the infinite feed of Twitter, which right now is just showing me a bunch of posts about the “gender discourse,” where adults in their 30s and 40s are fighting each other while being locked in a prolonged adolescence.

When I get a moment to stop and think, I think:

What am I doing?

Why am I stuffing my mind with all this noise?

Shouldn’t I be working on my newsletter?

When I was a child I used to scroll the Internet for hours, searching through arcane websites and buried message boards. My dad used to work at Paradigm (Which later became THQ), and he’d take me and my brother to the office during his overtime. I’d grab an orange soda from the vending machine and find a free computer to scroll on. It never felt like wasted time. I always learned something new, or found an entertaining tangent, or a fun game to play. It's difficult to admit that place is gone. The Internet was a new frontier, and now it's not. It's a worn out path, paved over with “content.”

Every writer and creative person I know hates the word “content.” It implies a tepid, homogenous mass of slop. A thing without texture or edges or end that goes down easy but never quite fills you up. I don't want to doomscroll. I don't want to consume “content.”

I want to sit on the edge of a new world and look over until my stomach flips upside down. I want to grit my teeth and have my hair blown back with the anticipation of the new. I want to gorge my eyes on things that I've never seen before. That's my vision of heaven. Not an eternal, unchanging paradise, where we all join hands and sing in celestial praise. But a cyberpunk wild west, where all possibilities are available at my fingertips.

Like I said before, I want to be inspired.

In the middle of writing this newsletter, which is about writing another newsletter, I went and asked my husband, “If the Internet is no longer the new frontier, then where is it?”

He replied: “Outside.”

“Outside. You mean, like, meatspace? I don't think I'll find the new frontier in a town like Kingfisher, Oklahoma.”

“Yes you will,” he said. “It's everywhere.”

I thought about this before a little bit, and then went back to doomscrolling. I looked up coffee shops in Dallas, Texas. I read a Wikipedia article about yellowtail fish. I read a Twitter thread full of angry parents, each with a violent and decisive opinion, about whether or not the husband should have to parent and do chores after coming home after working 40-80 hours a week. I read advice on a DBT forum on how to access wise mind, which seemed to get me even further away from any kind of wisdom, and catapulted me instead into a dark unease about how I seem unable to put my phone down and do any kind of laborious spiritual work.

Carl Jung once wrote that “the mystic and the psychotic drown and swim in the same waters.” I feel like I'm drowning, but I'm not even close. I'm just sitting in waist-high tepid water. I stir it up just enough that I don't smell the stagnation that collects on the surface.

Maybe my husband is right. I should go outside.