December 5, 2025
You know one of my favorite rants is about the way media plays us as consumers…they all do it. And today, this isn’t directly about whether Hannity is playing us (he is) or whether Maddow is playing us (she is). Rather about how the technology itself plays us. Here you go:
It’s 2am and you’re still on your phone, thumb flicking around in that familiar motion, refreshing your feed for the umpteenth time. There’s nothing new, or rather, there’s no good news, but you keep scrolling anyway. Another crisis, another outrage, another reason to feel that low-grade anxiety that’s become as familiar as your morning coffee. Congratulations, you’re doomscrolling, and you’re in excellent company. You can call me at 2AM, I’ll answer the phone, just saying.
Fair Warning: You then may find yourself the central character in one of these pieces, so you know.
The term itself only entered our vocabulary around 2020 (gee, wonder why), but the behavior feels like we’ve been doing it forever. In a sense, we have been…we’ve just upgraded from obsessively watching 24-hour news coverage of disasters to doing the same thing on a phone/pad, but now it’s personalized, infinite, and literally in our pockets at all times.
So why do we do this to ourselves? Why, when we know it makes us feel terrible, do we keep scrolling through an endless feed of political dysfunction, climate catastrophes, and people being wrong? The answer, as with most things that make us miserable, is that our brains are working exactly as designed but just for a world that no longer exists.
Let’s start with the obvious: Humans are hardwired to pay attention to threats. This made perfect sense when threats were things like “there’s a tiger in those bushes” or “that berry might be poisonous.” Our ancestors who ignored potential dangers didn’t become anyone’s ancestors…Darwin at his finest.
But here’s a problem: our brains never got the memo that most of the threats we encounter now are abstract, distant, or entirely beyond our control. Your amygdala doesn’t distinguish between “there’s a predator nearby” and “I just read about a political scandal in a State I’ve never visited.” Both trigger the same alarm bells.
Make mental note in your Design Flaw of Humans file in case you ever get some deity-status under your belt.
And here’s where it gets really awful: That anxiety actually keeps us scrolling. When we’re stressed, we crave information. It’s a survival mechanism…if there’s danger, we need to know more about it so we can respond appropriately. The problem is that social media offers us infinite information with no resolution. There’s always another update, another hot take, another angle to consider. We’re stuck in a loop of seeking information to resolve our anxiety, but the information just creates more anxiety, which makes us seek more information. It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Your editor is of the cynical belief that technology and news providers know this. I mean, if you and I do here, they certainly learned it a long time ago.
Then there’s the variable reward schedule, which is just another way of saying “slot machine logic.” Sometimes when you scroll, you find something genuinely interesting or funny or useful. Often, it’s just more misery. But you never know which you’re going to get, and that unpredictability is incredibly addictive. It’s the same principle that keeps people pumping quarters into slot machines, except instead of potentially winning money, you might get a mildly amusing meme. Such a deal!
Social media platforms understand this psychology better than we do. They’ve literally hired teams of engineers and psychologists to make their apps as sticky as possible. The infinite scroll, the pull-to-refresh gesture, the little red notification badges—these aren’t accidents. They’re features designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. When you’re doomscrolling at 2am, you’re not weak-willed; you’re up against some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering in human history.
There’s also a weird social component to doomscrolling. In an era where we’re more physically isolated than ever, constantly consuming news, even bad news, can feel like participation in something larger than ourselves. It’s a way of staying connected to the broader world, even if that connection is primarily through shared anxiety. “Did you see what happened today?” becomes a form of social currency, a way of signaling that you’re informed, engaged, and concerned about the state of things.
Of course, doomscrolling doesn’t actually make us more informed or more engaged. It makes us more anxious and less capable of meaningful action. When you’re overwhelmed by a firehose of catastrophe, your brain eventually just shuts down. Psychologists call this “learned helplessness.” When you’re exposed to so many bad things you can’t control, you eventually stop trying to control anything at all. In common parlance…you freeze at the switch.
So, what to do about it? Well, the usual advice: Set boundaries with your phone, use app timers (although no one will do that), don’t check news first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
We need to recognize that the feeling that we need to stay constantly updated is largely an illusion. The world will keep turning without your real-time monitoring. Very little of what crosses your feed actually requires your immediate attention or has any bearing on your actual life.
I am a doomscrolling expert. Given how active I’ve always been in markets, even today when ½ my day is spent trading, I am hopelessly locked into doomscrolling. There is always something going on somewhere that will either cost me money or make me money. My 2am or 3am investment strategy meetings are always 100% attended by me.
The hard truth is that this is a symptom of a larger problem: We’ve ceded our sense of security and control to our devices, and they’re happy to oblige…anxiety disguised as information. Breaking that cycle doesn’t just require better habits, rather it requires recognizing that the feeling that you’re missing something if you’re not constantly plugged in is the ‘gotcha’ moment endless played back to you/us.
Maybe the real doom isn’t in the scroll. It’s in believing we can’t look away.
Thoughts, questions, or reflections? I’d love to hear them. You can reach me anytime at anthony@workingprofit.com
