I can tell it’s a problem because my jaw clenches when I do it. It’s the part of my body that I’ve been bracing against the surge of the most intense and overwhelming feelings since I was a teenager. What started as a place to harness weekend bursts of synthetic euphoria also became a vessel for kicking out time anxiety, funeral grief, party anticipation, money fears, the dawning realisation of new love… no matter what the emotion is, if it’s intense enough to take over my body and mind completely, it gets packed up and loaded into the jaw.
My jaw is a long suffering friend and it’s been letting me know that doomscrolling has been a problem for some time, but it’s a problem that I’m learning to like. The habit of mindlessly battering your way through your phone for hours on end, letting a torrent of deranged content pour through you like a nuclear bomb through a frog, gets a bad press. People say it’s tearing apart the social fabric. That it’s undermining trust between the generations. That it’s nothing more than a way of deleting yourself from the world. They are probably right. But just like meditation, drink, religion, casual sex or drugs, doomscrolling supplies a demand for oblivion that is already out there, moving through the world. There are times when it feels like you are genuinely in communion with some higher occult power, like a pilot in the cockpit of a fighter jet managing to keep pace with the horizon, or a rocket at the receding edge of the known universe.
I realise doomscrolling might not be a “hobby” in the way that most of the other pastimes presented in this column are generally accepted to be hobbies. But I’m willing to bet I devote more time to it every day than Kelly Lee Owens does to tarot reading, or than Chris Hughes from Fat Dog spends fishing, or than James Dean Bradfield sits around compiling crossword puzzles (and I have the appalling screen time data to back me up). I’d come out swinging for the bloke from Teleplasmiste as well, but I don’t know how many hours a day you need to spend doing chicken husbandry.
Given all this, it’s a miracle I manage to get anything done at all, but in the space of the last year my group Real Lies wrote and recorded our third album, We Will Annihilate Our Enemies. It’s a collection of songs that took its catchy title and many of its lyrics from doomscrolling, an anthology of yearners, bangers, sulkers, and cruisers that are all “about” the present day in some way. I think that in many ways doomscrolling is the present day – a poisonous catatonic leisure state that rips through us like a neverending Adam Curtis program about Our Own Lives™️ and the ridiculous world we’ve created for ourselves set to run at hyper speed.
Here are some things I learned about life and people while deep down in the hole.
The future always finds a way to make the past look quaint
This has become a kind of mantra of mine in recent years. I don’t know why because it’s not very comforting, the idea that however bad things are now, they can – and definitely will – always get a lot, lot worse, or at least more terrifying and dystopian. Once, people laid awake in bed thinking about acid rain and malaria, and nothing was worse than a Tory. But no one really worries about CFC cans anymore, and David Cameron is just another bloke with a boating hat and prostate anxiety eating roast ham somewhere in the Midlands. I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes it takes the real techno-fascists to show up, break capitalism by sucking all the money out, and then spend it all crashing rockets into Mars to provide a bit of perspective on things.
At no time does this mantra seem more valid than when doomscrolling, which is really just a relentless exercise in watching that mantra come true again, and again, and again, over the course of hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Before you know it, you’re 39 and haven’t formed an original memory of your own in the last half decade. Then again, if you think 39’s bad, just wait till you see what 73’s got in store for you, etc, etc.
It’s a weapon against nostalgia
We’ve always been thought of as quite a nostalgic band, and I understand that some of the lyrics I’ve written have dwelt in the past. Mainly, though, I think it’s just a feeling in the music. We never want to write anything that can be easily attributed to any one emotion—I never saw the point in that; you’re just remapping old terrain. But when people can’t describe how music makes them feel, often they’ll automatically just say it sounds ‘nostalgic’ because it’s easier to do than trying to trace the silhouette of some new thing they’re feeling.
Anyway, I realised while writing the new album that I didn’t want to live inside my memories anymore. I thought it would be more interesting to try to love the modern world, and life as I find it today, all its horrors and futility included. It’s not easy but it takes you to some strange places that reveal things to you about yourself. It forces you to rethink everything. Contrary to what many people might assume, it has a way of hauling you off autopilot.
Life has never been more exhilarating or more awful
There’s a strange new compound emotion in town. You might’ve noticed that most things that dominate timelines these days – war footage, train fights, nervous breakdowns, orgy queue vox pops – are both awful and exhilarating to watch. That just may be because tech and media companies have figured out how to reach inside our brains and tickle our dopamine receptors whenever they feel like it. But it doesn’t make it any less true, and the people who are getting the most out of today’s world are those who are able to tap into and exploit that as yet unnamed new emotional alloy.
Time moves differently these days
One of the happier thoughts I’ve been dragging around with me lately is this: In terms of my biological lifespan, I’ll probably end up hitting the same kind of number as my grandad—mid to late 60s. Yet doomscrolling has taught me that the flow of human history is now so fast that I’m probably bearing witness to six, seven, or eight times as much life as he did, if you can think about life in those sorts of terms. I feel I’m getting a lot more bang for my buck. Eight lifetimes for the price of one. That makes me feel extremely privileged to be alive today, even if people have so many valid reasons to be so down on the way things are generally.
Lots of people are getting the mundane wrong
I grew up listening to bands that mastered that classic (tired?) English pop trick of finding the magic in the mundane. The Jam, Oasis, The Clash, The Kinks… I’ve noticed a lot of lyricists are still writing songs as if the mundane were watching a game of cricket on the village green, before meeting a girl you like at a caf then taking her to the pictures. But the mundane today isn’t that; it’s machete fights at the shopping centre, exploding self-driving cars, Chinese spyware in my pocket, microplastics in my balls. On We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, I wanted to write about that, to update this idea of what the ‘new mundane’ is. And so much of it comes through this shared yet unspoken experience of mass national doomscrolling, chewing up hours every day.
People on Instagram have never been happier, people on X have never felt worse
It’s an interesting dynamic; the currency on one app is the polar opposite to what it is on the other one. Seeing how desperate people are to portray themselves as living one of these extremes – the market-destroying six-pack travel influencers on one app, the anxiety plagued polyamorous long covid sufferers on the other – makes you realise that it’s not really about what you’re sending or receiving down the pipe. The only thing that matters is that you’re sending or receiving anything at all.
Bluesky is awful
A lot of people left Twitter when it changed its name, got taken over by a Nazi, and turned into a cesspit of amateur porn and amateur phrenology. And I can understand that. Today, opening up X is like walking into the thematic universe of the first Bad Lieutenant film: a collection of deranged horny wronguns screaming at each other about failed states and crime stats. But I’d rather that – I’d rather anything – than Bluesky. A load of sensible people agreeing with each other all day? Sounds great! Let me stay here, down in the dirt with all the freaks.
The ‘golden age of TV is dead – welcome to the golden age of train violence videos’
It’s not just trains in fairness, it’s buses, planes, trams, boats; I even saw some bloke getting barged off a penny farthing the other day. People are angry and they aren’t going to take it anymore. The world has never seen such a large and high quality output of transport violence videos and it’s really a lot of fun.
You are never really alone
Wherever I go, I see my comrades, though I’m sure they never see me, so engrossed are they in their screens. They say these days there’s more about life that divides us than unites us but try telling that to the motley crew of folks I share my beloved hobby with. Teenage kids whipping through beheading videos on Snapchat. Brainwashed boomers unwittingly sodcasting their DIY videos to the world in airport terminals and pub gardens, their ailing mental faculties pulverised into submission by awful new technology, like the Polish cavalry charge sent out to meet German Panzers at the start of World War II. Morning migrant workers blasting out their shrill slop to the delight of sleepy overground carriages. The babies in their high chairs out to dinner with their iPads. We are all types of human and we are legion. Expect us, but don’t expect us to notice we’re arriving, for we are too far lost in the endless doomscroll.
Real Lies’ new album We Will Annihilate Our Enemies is out now via Tonal Recordings
