9 Myths About Doomscrolling and Collapse We Wish Everyone Knew

Some days, it feels like everyone’s a doomer now.

It’s easy to spot the newbies.

And so, after nearly six months of relentless assault from the Trump administration, it makes sense that a lot of newbie doomers who were accustomed to Barbenheimer summers are starting to get tired. They’re starting to haul out their warnings about “doomscrolling” from a few years ago, and it’s tedious.

While many people might’ve stuffed their doomscrolling habits into the closet back in 2022 or 2023, some of us never stopped.

We kept going.

Far from driving us nuts, that “bad habit” evolved into something healthy. We used it to build communities. We graduated from scrolling doom to sharing peer-reviewed articles and conducting rigorous investigations into the sources of our anxiety. For me, that meant deep dives into history and psychology. It became strangely reassuring to see that versions of collapse have happened throughout history, and it’s been giving us a pretty good idea of what to expect.

For me, a moment of awakening happened when I was reading through Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, about the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1962. There’s a passage where a politician’s wife tells someone to cheer up. Their friend basically responds, “What the hell are you talking about, cheer up? You ate human flesh yesterday. GTF out of here with that.” It felt like a flash from the future. Another flash happened when I was reading John Barry’s The Great Influenza and stumbled across passages about Woodrow Wilson’s public health agencies telling everyone to avoid a deadly virus by chewing their food and thinking happy thoughts. One news article even tried to convince the public that people who worried about the flu were the most likely to die from it. So, gaslighting goes back that far…

On that note, here’s 7 things new doomers get wrong.

Feel free to share your own.