Watching The World Burn on Our Phones

Why we doomscroll.

Shotprime

There's this play by Eugene Ionesco called, "Rhinoceros."

You should read it sometime.

It's about an ordinary dude named Berenger, a Lebowski type who drinks too much and never shows up anywhere on time.

Things get interesting when he meets up with a friend for coffee, but their conversation gets interrupted when...yep... a rhinoceros charges through the town square. Over the course of three acts, Berenger watches everyone he cares about, including the woman he loves, transform into a rhinoceros.

Nobody believes him.

The transformation into a rhinoceros starts off with a mild cold. As people transform, they get cranky and aggressive. They accuse Berenger of paranoia. They tell him to stop obsessing over rhinos.

They lose all their empathy.

They start talking about letting everyone live their own lives and getting back to normal. It's ironic, because after they transform, all a rhinoceros wants to do is chase everyone else down and turn them.

Scholars have described the play as a metaphor for the spread of fascism, but it applies to a lot of situations these days. I never thought I'd live through something like that, and yet here we are.

Around this time last year, I was going for a walk during a 120F heat index in the early evening. Newspapers were telling me to build up my heat tolerance. That was after surviving an F3 tornado that almost hit our house. In that moment, I knew what it felt like to be the doom scrolled on someone else’s phone.

Now we’re watching a hurricane wash entire towns off the map in the mountains of North Carolina, regarded by many as a final safe haven in the U.S., a place where you might escape the doom, or at least delay it.

I have family in Asheville.

I have friends in Boone.

We can’t get ahold of them because the power, the phones, and the roads are completely taken out across these areas.

They’re trapped.

A few years ago, we were crowdsourcing help in response to polar blasts or surprise heat waves. Now we’re just sending whatever we have to the people we already know who are living through these nightmares.

We know we’re next.

My family spent last night on tornado watch. At one point, we took shelter in a downstairs closet because our weather station spotted rotation in the clouds. In the mountains. In early fall. This is not supposed to happen.

And yet, I’m not shocked.

This weekend, we can watch climate catastrophe unfold in our backyards while scrolling genocide halfway around the world, a genocide many of us feel helpless to stop, and we can’t even talk about it.

A few years ago, someone I used to respect wrote a series of articles slamming doomsayers and fearmongers for hurting everyone else’s mental health. He described me as a suburban mom pacing around my living room pulling my hair out. Another writer wrote a satire about me fighting an old woman for a bottle of water. Now I have a warped immune system from the virus I was writing about, my home was almost destroyed in a tornado, and I have friends and family living through the worst floods their states have seen in a century.

There's a relentless pressure to act happy now. You have to go to the office. You have to go to bars and restaurants. You have to go to concerts. You have to go on vacation. You have to post about it. You have to talk to strangers.

But...

You can’t salt the vibes.

You can't talk about all the friends and family you've lost. You can't talk about how tired you are. You can't talk about politics. You can't talk about climate change. You can't talk about the wildfires or that town that burned down. You can't talk about living through the hottest days in human history. You can't talk about masks or air purifiers. You can't talk about student loans. You can't talk about the wars we're fighting or getting ready to fight, or the genocide.

You can't talk about anything that matters.

You can only talk about the latest shitty superhero movie. You can talk about what you’re streaming. You can talk about celebrity gossip. You can talk about the vacation you pretended to enjoy. You can talk about yoga.

You can talk about your morning routine.

You can talk about sports.

We live in an age where one pandemic clouds the start of another. Ten years ago, when television shows made fun of doomsday preppers, I never thought we would live through a time when people were actually bored by bird flu, catastrophic hurricanes, and global warfare. And yet, here we are.

There's a reason why everyone's so tired and miserable beneath all the delirious joy. It's not because of climate change. It's not because of the pandemic. It's because of this tedious, soul-sucking normal we're forcing each other to endure.

It doesn't have to be like this.

We don't have to turn into rhinos. We could ditch this normal for something else. All we have to do is stop pretending.

It would be easy.

Sure, we couldn’t stop the disasters or the violence. But at least we wouldn’t have to go around pretending it’s not happening, watching it all burn down on our phones while we drag ourselves through routines we loathe.

We have the knowledge and tools to survive. We could build tiny houses for everyone. We could build root cellars. We could build earth tubes. We could leave these shitty jobs and ugly McMansions in the desert. We could localize our supply chains. We could let go of beef. We could build rain catchment systems. We could get around on carts and bicycles. We could ration energy and electricity.

We could be happy.

Every time someone asks that gotcha question “What’s your solution?” we have offered up these ideas, a simple life where we take care of each other and do the right thing. And they have shrugged. They have told us that will never happen, because they aren’t going to help us. They would rather let idiot sellout doctors and billionaires go around spouting the most audacious lies under the banner of free speech, because that’s easier than trying.

There’s this idea called Kanter’s Law. It states that most people are afraid of change because change always produces a mess.

But we’ll be in a mess either way.

We’re already in one.

We’re beyond warnings. We’re beyond turning back. Our technocratic overlords are booting up nuclear reactors to power their data centers and artificial intelligence experiments. I’m not worried about the reactors. I’m worried about them being operated by crews who are repeatedly infected by diseases that cause brain damage. Meanwhile, climate protestors go directly to jail now, three years for throwing paint in a museum, five years for obstructing traffic. That’s if you don’t get shot. Something tells me we’re not going to stop burning fossil fuels.

Not until they’re gone.

Optimists say we still have time to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis, but they say that from houses that haven’t flooded yet. For everyone who lost their homes this week, it’s too late. Even if they survive, they’ll spend the rest of their lives recovering from this. Listen to the ones who’ve already lost everything in climate disasters. It changes you.

Optimists sneer at us when we talk about collapse. Well, there is no better word to describe what’s happening right now.

People ask why I write things like this. I write things like this because it’s the only way I can feel better. It brings me a moment of peace.

That’s why.

Do you know why people doomscroll? It’s not because they’re addicted to bad news or negative information. I don’t even think it’s solely to gather information about threats. Their phones are the only place they’re allowed to bear witness to the chaos. It’s the only place they see someone else express genuine emotion. It’s the only place where right and wrong still mean something.

At this point, I think most of us just want the freedom to feel reality instead of having to pretend we live in the last decade.

We're not miserable because of the doom on our phones. We're miserable because this system forces us to participate in our own destruction. We're miserable because we know deep down that we're in trouble, that we have to adapt, but we're still expected to froth lattes for assholes, all the way up until the moment a wildfire or a flood engulfs our neighborhood.

We're miserable because we're forced to watch the world burn on our phones, and then we're accused of doomscrolling.

Isn't that something?