Doomscrolling and Tuning Out
How Detachment Can Be a Surprising Form of Engagement In Chaotic Times
Going into Trump’s second term, I was one of those people vowing to not let the news consume me, to not let the absurdness of Trump invade my mind. I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes from the first Trump term, where I let every tweet rile me up. I was going to counter the chaos of Trump by focusing on what was in my control within the small realm of my own life. I was going to put clay plaster on the walls of my house.
That strategy lasted for a couple hours. I decided to take a quick look at the news on Inauguration Day, saw that Elon Musk made a questionable salute, and anxiety snuck into my mind, where it has remained ever since.
I knew Trump’s second term would be chaotic, but suddenly I felt a need to understand the nature of the chaos. Was Trump’s musings about owning Greenland just bluster, or were we about to enter a new imperialist era? Was I witnessing the once-unthinkable breakdown of American democracy? Would the Ponzi scheme of Bitcoin infect the wider economy?
If it was all just trolling, if it was just a strategy to flood the news with distractions, it was working on me.
I have had plenty of conversations since the inauguration about our current political moment, and these conversations always seem to lead to a sentiment of “Yeah, it’s bad, but what can we do?”
Many have decided to deal with the chaos by tuning out. The millions of protesters from the Women’s March that greeted the first Trump term have largely stayed off the streets during Trump’s second term, even though the threats to democracy are now clearer and more dangerous.
This tuning out might be taken as a sign of defeat by exhausted activists. It might be a coping strategy to deal with the anxiety of a constant barrage of worrying news, or it might be a simple acknowledgement of electoral truth. This is what the country voted for, after all.
A massive street protest of course isn’t the only form that engagement needs to take on, just as doomscrolling isn’t the only way that we can pay attention. Engagement can also take on quieter forms. Engagement might even take a form that appears so quiet that it might look like detachment, yet detaching is not necessarily the opposite of engagement that it appears to be. A quiet detachment from common systems can sometimes be a quiet, yet powerful, form of activism.
The back-to-the-land movement of the sixties saw city dwellers reject modern consumerism to become rural homesteaders, and while these new homesteaders were seemingly disengaging from the modern world, they were also demonstrating to the modern world that an alternative way of life was possible. They were expanding the collective imagination of what could be achieved. The communal dream of the hippies may have never been realized, yet the anti-consumerist philosophy of the era has left an enduring mark on culture. We live in a world with local food movements and farmers markets now at least.
Beyond those heading for the country, there were other calls for detachment during the sixties. The decade is remembered for its marches and protests, yet alongside this wide civil engagement, Timothy Leary was urging the country to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” while Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech movement, delivered his passionate plea for refusal on Berkley’s campus in 1964:
“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part.”
Amid all the worrying news right now, it is easy to forget about climate change, yet the climate crisis is of course as urgent as ever, and it is worthwhile to consider that the selfishness that is at the root of most of Trump’s motivations are not so different from the attitudes which have led us into the climate crisis. Trump’s desire for new territory is a reflection of a national economy that has an unsatiable desire for more stuff. His love of money at all costs is the same as our love of cheap gas and online shopping deals. His isolationist impulses are the same impulses that have led us to not consider the effects that our own individual actions have on the rest of the world.
Climate change is an odious system. It is a system that has created tremendous amounts of wealth and convenience for many while ushering in a dangerous new world for all of us, a world in which many of those who contributed the least to the crisis will face the harshest consequences.
Climate change is also a system that we can choose to disengage from. Cheerfully refusing to be part of the odious system of climate change can be a way to refute everything Trump stands for in the quiet moments of our own lives. We might not be able to stop Trump’s assault on climate legislation, yet we do have the power to demonstrate that we do not share the same impulses that have led Trump to deny climate change.
It of course won’t happen overnight. In a world that is built on fossil fuel consumption, there is not a simple switch we can pull to immediately rid our lives from fossil fuels, yet we can make the decision to wean ourselves from polluting energy bit by bit, and we can take joy every time we do so, every time we pass on buying a cheap good manufactured far away, every time we don’t get in a car, every time we eat with the planet in mind.
We can take joy every time we cheerfully refuse to take part in the odious system of climate change. We might not have a president that believes in climate change. We might not live in a world that seriously cares about the climate, yet in our own lives, we have the power to disengage, and disengaging can show that another world is indeed possible.