Everything Is Bad and the Only Remedy Is Doomscrolling

The “bum a scroll” tweet is the most accurate description of modern social media addiction ever written. Somebody deleted their Instagram app, found themselves twitchy and irritable, and asked a friend if they could borrow their phone for a moment of vicarious scrolling, the way you would ask to bum a cigarette. The metaphor is structurally identical. The addiction is structurally identical. These social media addiction memes have correctly identified that the platforms are operating with the same engagement loops as nicotine, and the withdrawal is real.

The “cursed amulet” metaphor for the smartphone is essentially correct. You pick it up for one thing. You put it down three hours later, dazed, confused about what year it is, and slightly horrified at the inside of your own head. The internet addiction memes in this gallery understand the experience because the people writing them are also having the experience. The empathy is built in. Nobody is lecturing anybody. We’re all in the cave together. The cave just has Wi-Fi.

The “doom only counts if it comes from the Mt. Doom region of Mordor” joke is a small piece of comedic perfection. The internet has produced a category of content called “doomscrolling,” the joke pivots on whether the doom is properly sourced from its region of origin, and the resulting bit is somehow both extremely literary and extremely current. The funny burnout memes and tired internet user content in this gallery thrive when they take the language we use about our own behavior and rotate it just slightly enough to expose how absurd it sounds.

And the “I miss when the computer lived in its own room” tweet. There used to be a single computer in a single room of the house, you went to it on purpose, you used it for a specific task, and then you left. Now the computer lives in our pockets, follows us everywhere, and has integrated with every part of our lives. The genie is out. The bottle is on a charger.

What this whole gallery is really documenting, beneath the jokes, is a generational acknowledgment that we have collectively traded something we did not fully appreciate for something we did not anticipate. The “old” internet was patient. You had to go to it. It had limits. The new internet is the opposite of all of those things. It is right next to you. It is on you. It is in you, in a sense, because it has shaped how you think, what you worry about, what you do with your downtime. The doomscrolling genre is, in its own way, the species processing this trade-off out loud.

There’s also a tenderness in how the genre tends to operate. Nobody in these tweets is judging the audience. The writers are also doomscrolling. The platforms hosting the tweets are the same platforms enabling the behavior. The whole genre exists in this strange recursive loop where the medium is the message, the message is “stop using the medium,” and the audience nods, hits like, and keeps scrolling. It’s a uniquely modern form of communal sadness, and the gallows humor is what makes it tolerable. Without the jokes, this would just be despair. With the jokes, it’s at least funny despair.

The other thing this gallery captures, quietly, is the small acts of resistance that people are starting to organize around. The “doomwalk.” The “doomdrink.” The deleted apps. The transparent corded phone fantasy. None of these are going to fix the structural problem, which is that our entire information environment has been engineered to keep us scrolling. But they are, collectively, the first signs that the species is starting to push back, even if only individually, even if only for an hour at a time. The amulet can come off. Briefly. The amulet usually goes back on. But the impulse is there, and that’s not nothing.