What Happens When You Stop Doomscrolling

Right now, I’m thinking about the last time I tried to have a serious conversation about any of the things with one of my best friends.

About that friend:

Like me, she’s a professor (or a former professor). We’ve known each other for going on twenty years. We’ve been friends since grad school. We had classes together. We went to conferences together. We even read each other’s dissertations, the academic version of an unbreakable blood pact.

We traveled to see each other. Our kids played together. She held my daughter when she was a baby. For most of that time, we could talk about anything. We could talk shop. We could trade academic gossip. We could trash talk our bosses. But as I learned, there’s one thing we couldn’t discuss:

Climate change.

Last year, we were talking about why I was quitting my job and moving. To everyone I knew, it sounded like a sudden decision. They wanted to know why I was leaving academia. They wanted to know why I was relocating to a specific place in the country, without necessarily trying to find a job first. It felt like I owed my friends a real, thoughtful explanation. The moment I mentioned the climate crisis, an intense silence settled over the phone. It was immediately apparent that I’d crossed some kind of red line. I kept waiting for her to say something…

Anything…

The silence lingered. It was even worse than those moments when you toss out a question to your students, and they just sit there.

So, I changed the subject.

The conversation recovered. We started talking about universal healthcare and living wages for grad students and teaching assistants. We talked about it at length. We talked about colleagues leaving the field over low pay.

The same thing has happened with every single one of my other close friends, people I’ve known since college. It’s not just when I try to talk about the planet. Our conversations preclude a range of subjects. It’s a lesson in limits. Even our kindest, smartest, most liberal, most progressive friends aren’t dealing with the core problems we’re facing. They don’t want to talk about any of it.

That’s why some of us started “doomscrolling.”

We were looking for friends.