Dumbscrolling in Wartime

What happens when your stupidity feed turns into your horror feed?

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IT WAS ON TRACK TO BE THE DUMBEST YEAR on record before it became a horrifying one. 

You know you're in trouble when you find yourself longing for the more dignified days of Rick Perry, Harambe T-shirts, and Mike Posner's "I Took a Pill in Ibiza." But here we are, dizzy and sore at the end of a year when stupid and outlandish things came too fast and too furious to lodge themselves in even our short-term memory. Like, did you know there was a tenth Fast & Furious movie in cinemas this calendar year? True story! Fast X, I want to say! The unrelenting stupid of 2023 wound up serving a tactical purpose. The tiny jabs kept us offbalance so that when a big punch came, when we were faced with legitimate horror, we were unprepared. We lived through the age of doomscrolling, in which we stared at our screens and compulsively checked for updates as the bad news turned worse.

How good we had it back then, when we might have had the energy to pause at each new indignity, to offer an observation as detailed as "Huh." A healthier culture in a more predictable year would have spat George Santos out, quickly and permanently, for the quarter-zips alone. This year, we let the stupid wash over us in an unrelenting surge that wore down the folds in our brains and left us numb. In 2023, we were dumbscrolling.