The dangers of doomscrolling

TO find oneself in a make-believe world of altered reality and severe, draining, emotional intensity must have been exceedingly uncommon in the era before the internet.

- FRANCIS CHRISTIAN

But now, it is the order of our day and I fear that unless the human race finds a way of stopping the reflex scrolling that has become our lodestar of reality, we will meet a savage end when the actual world collides with the artificial one we have constructed around ourselves.

The modern phrase for this special ability of modern man to live in his own, manufactured environment, which can alter from day to day and even hour to hour, appears to be to ‘live in a bubble’. It is an inadequate term for two reasons. A bubble, by definition, is invested with the imminent possibility of bursting and terminating its existence - and we all know that the particular bubble/s the internet is capable of constructing around us can last for days, even years!

The other problem with the living in a bubble idea is the implication of there being just one bubble — nota mass of coalescing, squishy bubbles, amalgamated together, enabling us to skip (or leap) into another related bubble and back again to our original bubble, ortoa closely related one!