How hasn’t wanted to do what they preach?
We all share the desire to do better, be better, choose a healthy lifestyle, go to the gym, wake up early to meditate, quit staying up all night, decrease our intake of caffeine, and resist binge-watching shows on work days, but we don’t do that now, do we?
Those tempting TikTok videos, YouTube Shorts, and IG reels are like catnip, and we fall victim to staying up all night watching until the crack of dawn, leading us to wake up groggy, late for work, and regretting spending the entire night giggling over brainrot.
We know better than to keep consuming media all day and all night, to keep doomscrolling every single social media app, and wasting our time procrastinating instead of zoning out and being productive.
It’s addictive, just gives the right boost of dopamine, and then it goes downhill from here. We should do better and have a better grip of how we consume social media, but I’m here to give a very controversial take. I’m going to ruffle some feathers and play the devil’s advocate here, by presenting my case that sometimes, doomscrolling has its twisted benefits.
Hold down your pitchforks for a second and let me explain. We already established that the doomscrolling and going down the rabbit hole all night is literally destroying your body. What case am I going to make to defend this awful action? Well, of course, there’s no doubt about that, but with all the bad or unfortunate situations/habits, there’s a silver lining that we gain from it, and that’s information.
Let me paint you a picture. At night, you’re sitting in bed, just watching reel after reel, and suddenly, you come across a video that sparked your interest. You watch it till the end, only to be fascinated by what you’ve known and afterwards, you are going to Google everything about it to know the ins and outs of the topic.
Each topic and rabbit hole we go through because of a tiktok we’ve watched is different. One day it’s cinema, the next it’s history, three days later, we are drawn into true crimes and psychology, a week later, it’s fashion, and so on.
The algorithm is made to keep us glued to our phones and just take content after content, and shut down our brains, that’s for certain. But if the algorithm has led us into expanding our horizon and knowing more about different topics, then are we really weak and susceptible to just being glued to our phones for the memes? It seems contradictory, don’t you think? Yes, we all say 67 now, and we have bought labubu’s because of the TikTok influence craze, but we have also been able to see very interesting and mind-blowing content, made by creative people that aim to inform, educate and entertain.
Even if we don’t end up with brand new information because educational content didn’t pop up on your feed, a movie edit surely did, or a compilation of a character from a TV show or a play, or an edit featuring a song you’ve never heard before, but you end up liking, those “silly” videos that we consume on the daily have an effect on our lives. As mentioned above, a film edit can spark curiosity and interest that leads you into watching the film, then afterwards you become a fan of said director or actor or even cinema movement, you have found a new thing to have passion for, and isn’t that what we all want in life? It’s simple, small, but effective in the long run with a massive impact, like a snowball effect.
While my case isn’t strong to defend why doomscrolling can be good sometimes, but facts are facts and we cannot deny that despite our lack of sleep, and the increase of dark circles under our eyes because of the time spent on our phones, i think the “best” solution to this is a proper limitation to phone usage, to restrain ourselves from consuming content in workdays and just bookmark, save for later the videos to be watched on weekend when we can go crazy and pull all nighters. If we are going to go through the rabbit hole, then assign the time and place for it on weekends, not weekdays.
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