I Replaced Doomscrolling with Escapism. Here's What Happened.
Doomscrolling. It gets the best of us. I imagine most of you reading this have had to pull yourself out of a doomscroll, your brain eating up the strangely addictive flavor of the latest bit of social media drama, climate disaster, or international clusterfuck.
That was me. But recently, I saw a YouTube video from Sean McRae on how he replaced his doomscrolling with the Switch 2.
And I realized that not only had I started to do the same myself, but I was going a step further. I was replacing my doomscrooling with escapism in general.
My Doomscrooling Origins
I was in Berlin when Russia launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We didn’t know what could happen or how much Putin would be willing to escalate things.
Was he going to launch us into World War III? Did we need to pack a go bag? Is there enough space for us at our Norwegian friend’s farmhouse if shit really hits the fan!?
Seeing as Germany isn’t far from Ukraine in the grand scheme of things, I thought that I needed to be informed of every single update as it happened—just to be safe. I read everything I could and even turned on notifications for tweets from specific news outlets to make sure I knew what was happening as soon as it happened.
Needless to say, I quickly became an anxious stress-ball. It negatively impacted my sleep and my mental health in general. My heart would race with each and every push notification.
I was doomscrolling like a motherfucker. And whether it’s to follow war, climate change, or pick your disaster, I’m not alone. A 2024 survey found that 31 percent of American adults engage in doomscrolling regularly. That number jumps to 46 percent for millennials (hey, that’s me!) and 53 percent of Gen Z.
And none of it is good for us. The American Brain Foundation noted that “constant negative stimuli can negatively affect your mental health.”
That makes sense to me, because I never feel better after a fresh batch of doomscrolling. I always have to pull myself out of it as if I was about to be trapped in “the Sunken Place” from Get Out.
My doomscrolling is well intentioned. I want to be informed. But if I’m honest with myself, doomscrolling doesn’t make me that much more informed. I might be able to recall certain facts in the moment. But once the next disaster strikes and my algorithms shift, my brain makes room for a fresh dose of calamity.
That’s why I’ve decided to swap out my doomscrolling for escapism.
Why We Need Escapism
Escapism generally gets a bad rap. Oxford defines it as “the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.”
But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I’m not saying we should bury our heads in the sand. But I don’t think hyper-focusing on “unpleasant realities” is good for us.
Johnny Harris, who’s a wildly popular YouTube journalist, touched on this during his Subway Takes appearance. His take was that people should stop consuming the news. To make his point, he asks what we learn by reading the headlines everyday and how we feel afterwards.
The answer? “Horrible.”
But the host, Kareem, says he does it because he feels like he needs to be an informed human being. Harris contends that the news, especially the 24-hour news cycle, is showing us how the world doesn’t work and is primarily motivated to make us feel angry, scared, and overwhelmed.
Well, mission-fucking-accomplished, news!
Johnny’s solution is to consume slower journalism that offers analysis about how the world actually works.
“If you just read the headlines, you’re gonna think that the world is all war and crisis.” And turns out it’s not.”
If you’re able to pull yourself away from your phone long enough to look, you can see that Johnny’s on to something.
So instead of soaking in every last headline or falling down a rabbit hole of despair, I think we should inject a little more escapism in our lives. Here’s how I do it.
How to Escape
Escapism is usually a negatively charged description for hobbies that the person using the world doesn’t like or finds frivolous to be more serious pursuits, like… I don’t know. Stock market stuff and fixing that gutter or whatever.
Video games, comics, popcorn movies, and fantasy novels have at various points found themselves in the line of fire for charges of escapism. But I’d argue both that escaping into a video game or fantasy novel is a wonderful way to spend your time. And they’re also not the only ways to escape.
Traveling is escapism. You’re most likely going on that beach vacation or, if you’re like me, heading off into the mountains for an escape from the drudgery of everyday life. Unless you’re reading the headlines to help plan your next vacation, then you’re escaping with travel.
But you can’t always travel every time that urge to pick up your phone and doomscroll strikes. So you have to have devices—metaphorical, not literal—to help wean yourself off those urges. For some that means putting the phone in another room and picking up a book. For others, it means disappearing into an interactive fantasy world on the Switch 2.
I dabble in all of the above. But I’ve recently picked up a new tool in my arsenal. And that is, writing my own goddamn book!
I’ve published and self-published non-fiction, but I’ve had this idea for a story that I’ve kept coming back to year after year. I thought I got it out of my system when I wrote it up as a screenplay. But besides not knowing what the hell to do with a screenplay, it came back to me as a graphic novel. So, I wrote a graphic novel script.
Still, I couldn’t shake it. So when the urge to doomscroll started making my fingers twitch with the latest batch of wildfires, I decided to put my phone down, write up an outline, and start working on a blank draft for a novel. I’m about 100 pages in already, chipping away day by day.
Now, whenever I catch myself doomscrolling on the cusp of the Sunken Place, I get rid of my phone and open up my draft. And guess what? The story is largely inspired by the video games, comics, and movies of my childhood. All that ‘pointless’ escapism is coming back to help me.
That’s of course not to say that escapism is only worthwhile if you’re somehow productive with it. All these forms of escapist art can relax, inspire, motivate, or heal in their own way. Hell, I made a whole video on how I can draw a line from playing Zelda as a kid in suburban American to my ultra running and long-distance hiking today.
Or they can just be entertaining and make you laugh! It’s okay to laugh. We don’t need to be miserable 24/7 just because that’s what the headlines are coaching us to do.
Don’t Let the Jailers Win
When I started writing this, I tried to find another word with a more positive connotation than “escapism.” In doing so, I found this anecdote from C.S. Lewis in an essay called “On Science Fiction.” He wrote that:
“…people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
So don’t let the jailers win, people! Escape while you still can.