You wake up, reach for your phone, ostensibly to check for any essential emails, but before you’ve even planted your feet on the floor, the flood of bad news hits you. Another crisis, another outrage, another reason to feel like the world is crumbling. Your heart sinks, but you keep scrolling. This has got to be an Onion article right? Obviously this can’t be true. But it is. And it’s worth when ou read it from a second source.
You tell yourself you should do something—sign a petition, make a post, have that hard conversation. But you’re exhausted. Every debate feels like a dead end, every argument more about winning than understanding. Even the people you agree with seem angry all the time. Not to mention they’re talking about it. All. The. Time. And texting you about it. All. The. Time. You can’t escape. The weight of it sits in your chest, tight and unrelenting.
Digital Detox time! Nearly all these headlines and scrolling isn’t doing great things for your mental health. So you stop engaging. You turn off notifications. You delete the most problematic of apps. You float through the rest of your day high on ignorant bliss. But the guilt starts to seep in. Is it okay to be uninformed? Does that make you a bad person? Or worse, a dumb person? Then a coworker drops a comment the latest Congressional drama and you can’t resist. You jump back into the fray of scrolling.
It’s like car accident. It’s horrific. It’s distressing. It makes you feel helpless and disgusted and enraged. And yet, you can’t look away. You check the news again, as if this time it’ll feel different. It doesn’t. The headlines blur together, another cycle of fear and frustration. You miss when life felt lighter—when the world wasn’t so loud.
You want to be informed. You want to make a difference. But mostly, you just want to feel like yourself again. And right now, that feels impossible.