The Guide To Staying Off Social Media During An Oppressive Election
Doomscrolling may be essential every other day of the year, but today, you can take a well-earned break.
Unless you have been in a coma and have just awoken, in which case, congratulations on your major step to recovery and what are you doing reading this newsletter, you know today is an important day in the United States of America. The country will nominally cast its vote to decide who the President will be for the next four years starting in January. I say “nominally” because COVID-19 has made in-person voting risky. I am one of millions of Americans who has cast a ballot via mail. Millions more have participated in early in-person voting. It is an important process upon which millions of lives have stake, even if the opposition candidate in this case, Joe Biden, doesn’t inspire a whole lot of hope that things will change. No matter what the shitlibs reacting to John Mulaney’s Saturday Night Live monologue say, Biden himself said that nothing would “fundamentally change” if he got elected. It’s both true that America would go back to the volatile conditions that allowed Donald Trump not only to run as a viable candidate but to win, and that if Biden wins, the next four years might have a modicum of relief to certain marginalized groups of people like Muslim Americans, queer folk, the infirmed, and of course, victims of COVID-19, both actualized and potential.
It’s this dissonance that will make today especially toxic, even more so than all the other days on here since it was clear Trump vs. Hillary Clinton was the play in 2016. Nazis will do everything short of threaten people’s lives. Centrists will start to blame Bernie Sanders supporters and Susan Sarandon and everyone else they can except their own party even before it’s clear that their chosen candidate has lost. Well-meaning leftist friends will serve up both for weak dunks. Lanyard-wearing Beltway professionals will treat the incoming votes like they’re ebbs and flows in a heated NBA Finals game. Even for people who are of sound mind, it can be overwhelming to be online today, even above the pure tension that is seeing votes come in and watching as states are solidly assigned a color on the electoral map. Given most people who use Twitter are depressed, neurodivergent, overstressed, or some combination of the three, no wonder that being online and “doomscrolling” that site or other social media can be mentally taxing to the point of affecting people physically.
Doomscrolling as a practice has been around for as long as social media has been consumable in feed format, but it hasn’t been given a name until recently, where people’s proclivities to keep looking and looking and looking at their Twitter timelines in an obsessive/compulsive desire not to miss out on the latest horrors of life became more and more prevalent over using the medium to retweet unintentionally hilarious celebrity tweets or argue over food. One could argue over whether doomscrolling makes people depressed or whether it is as symptom of that depression, but either way, the practice will be in full swing today as the results trickle in.
One cannot blame a generation for this practice because it’s the mode by which they receive news the most efficiently without the bootlicking spin placed on it by even nominally center-left media outlets. People like to bitch and moan about CNN being this activist news outlet, but would a left network hire everyone jettisoned from the Trump campaign as they were being fired? I wouldn’t blame anyone for their main mode of being informed being the large swath of independent journalists relaying information, no matter how bleak it might be, straight from the scenes without filter. That being said, there is such a thing as “critical mass,” especially for events as pervasive as a national election. There’s staying informed, and there’s consuming as many takes as possible until your brain bursts from the sheer number of ignorant, hateful, or downright nonsensical opinions being levied about what’s going on. It’s possible that the vast majority of those opinions will come from Republican officials themselves embedded in quote tweets by well-meaning folks either worried at the turn of events or enraged enough to use those words as fodder for jokes as coping mechanism.
If it feels like too much for you, congratulations, you’re human. In classic capitalist fashion, networks have found ways to monetize the critical mass of eyes on a newsworthy event and saturated the national consciousness in ways that can be oppressive. The truth, as hard as it may be for the extremely online, is that you can log off Twitter for a day or so. In fact, I would recommend it. The truth is there’s no real new information that you can glean about an event such as the election by gluing your eyes to Twitter (or god-forbid, Facebook… I would never, ever recommend doomscrolling Facebook ever) without being exposed to thermonuclear-levels of opinionated radiation from the braindead operatives of the world from Trump’s own treacherous children to total ciphers like Chris Cillizza. It’s not taking a stance of ignorance to take a break from Twitter for a day. Doomscrolling itself isn’t harmful, no matter how bad the connotation of the word sounds, but there are times when you need to learn when the well gets poisoned.
So what can you do instead of being on Twitter tomorrow? The obvious answer is “be productive at work,” which I guess you should do every day, but sometimes, the cultural currency of staying informed is worth the risk of your boss catching you not being a happy lil’ drone. Honestly, your boss doesn’t do more work than you anyway, but pointing out hypocrisy is never good for someone trying to keep a job, especially if they work in a non-union setting. Just a note, if you can unionize, do it. Unions rule. Still, you’re not working all day if you’re lucky. What should you do if you’re not at work?
Play a Video Game – Video games are a great escape from reality because they require you to pay attention to them and not your phones or laptops. As a proud Switch owner, there are several options I can recommend. The first one is Super Mario Bros. 35. I wrote about it extensively a couple of weeks ago, but the game’s worth is, well, worth repeating. As with most battle royale games, you can’t pause it either, so there’s no temptation to look at the phone while half-assing a task if you want to survive. You won’t want to look at your phone though. If you’re like me, you remember playing the original game in the ‘80s and becoming so engrossed in it that nothing in the outside world, not your parents, not a snack, not the house burning down around you could take your concentration off of avoiding Spiny Eggs thrown from above or making that impossible jump in Level 8-2, you know, the one where you have to run across a narrow chasm to make a jump across a larger one? Yeah, that one took me forever to master. There are other really fun games that can take your attention. The Pokémon DLC is quite fun, and if you didn’t get the first half of it, you can double up and have a whole day’s worth of stuff to do. Dead Cells is a rougelike game that can soak up the hours with fun, beat-em-up action, and if you like that genre, the cool kids on Twitter have recommended the game Hades with high marks. I haven’t played the latter, but I will always defer to the opinions of the cool kids. Either way, there are a ton of games to help you soak up time between glances at your phone or TV to get a summary of the election to date.
Cook Something – Food is a simple pleasure in life, a staple of survival that can be as fun and rewarding as one wants it to be. Ordering food from a takeout place only increases the desire for screentime, however, so I would suggest that trying your hand in the kitchen is a worthwhile exercise to pump some joy into your life as well as soak some time away from obsessively poring through bad tweets to get information. There’s no room to look at Twitter when you’re chopping vegetables anyway. What you cook will be all up to your skill level. For novices, the easiest techniques will take some time and maybe even more than one try to get right, not ideal for self-esteem but the best measure for keeping attention. More skilled cooks will find it easier to make what they want to make, but they can also keep plowing ahead in the kitchen and make things like dessert or lunch for the rest of the week or a duplicate of their dinner to give to their crush. Still, cooking requires attention that other hobbies might not, so give that a try and enjoy the fruits of your labor for when you do settle down to eat and then fall into looking at Twitter again. It’s always better to take bad news if you have the comfort of well-made food to soften the blow. The dopamine rush from having eaten something you yourself have made will only heighten the experience.
If you want some good recipes to work from, I would suggest checking out two other Substack newsletters I subscribe to. Letters from Paris on the Genesee is mostly a dad’s experiences in the kitchen making accessible pub grub homemade. Action Cookbook, which requires a paid subscription (well worth the five bucks a month, in my humble opinion), has a Friday feature that not only has a recipe but also a cocktail you can make. I would seek out the chorizo mac ‘n cheese from the former and the Kentuckiana Hot Loin from the latter. IF you want more recipes, you should check out Serious Eats, which has a lot of cache among my circle of Twitter heroes and miscreants for having good templates for tasty dishes.
Read a Book – Reading blog posts on the Internet is fine and good, but you have to be on an Internet-ready device. The temptation to switch tabs between paragraphs to Twitter is too great. I suggest going with an actual book, fiction or non, whatever your desire, or at the bare minimum an e-reader where the app is separate from your browser. Still, the binding and paper pages would give you fewer hands with which you can grab a phone. As for what books you could read, well, I’m afraid I’m a bit of a hypocrite here because I haven’t read a book in several years. I know, I know, I’m the worst. However, why not start reading, say, Lord of the Rings? As much as I hated the Tom Bombadil chapters, they are way better than anything you could read from Tomi Lahren or Tom Watson about what is, will be, or could be happening today.
Adopt a Pet – Hey, have you ever wanted a pet, but were unsure when the timing was right? The timing is right TODAY. The first day with a pet, especially a dog, is spent getting that critter acclimated to their new living arrangements. While pet ownership tends to settle into routine, where you and your animal leave each other alone for the most part, that first day is a whirlwind of emotion, excitement, and in many cases, cleaning up errant excrement from your floor. You will be too busy taking care of your new furry family member to care about what some shithead has to say exit polls in Montana.
Hell, even if you’ve had the pets you’ve had for a long time, do something with them special. Granted, this only really works for dogs. Cats are self-sufficient for the most part, and you can too easily cuddle one with one hand with your phone in the other. A dog, however, you can do lots of dopey shit with a dog that they’ll gladly oblige their attention and activity. You can walk them! You can play fetch with them! If they’re small enough (or if you’re buff enough), you can lift them up like they’re Simba and you’re Rafiki and recreate the beginning of The Lion King! Dogs really are the best. Here are my dogs!
In closing, social media is how most people stay informed, and I am far from one of the anti-technology people who thinks that the greatest plague facing the world is young people on their phones all the time. That being said, just as you can take a vacation from your everyday life, you should look into taking breaks at strategic times from being online all the time for your own health. There is nothing you can do to influence the overall arc of this election, and you can do even less to influence the dissemination of takes, especially since the people giving them take negative reactions as more impetus to share even worse opinions:
If you can take the heat today, or if you want to take it, by all means, take the bullet for people who don’t want to. I would suggest if you want to say somewhat calm and distracted, today’s the best day to do it.
Photos taken by me, TH