It’s funny, looking back and realizing that the term “Doomscrolling” was only invented back in 2020. That’s not to say that 2020 wasn’t a particularly bleak year — the one-two punch of COVID and the election that year were pretty horrific, especially when you factor in all the political upheaval and upset surrounding both — but, when I think about the idea that things started to noticeably go wrong in the world, 2020 feels considerably too late to me.
Instead, I look back to 2016 for that, perhaps obviously. The US election of that year can be pinpointed as a particular level of Bad News; I have very specific, very clear memories of becoming all-too-obsessed with the news especially in the last month or two of that election, as it became increasingly clear that Trump had a very real chance of winning instead of being the joke candidate that people (including me) had initially written him off as being, and that certainly feels like some early form of Doomscrolling.
But it started even earlier than that; that summer saw the Brexit vote in the UK, and there was something there, in seeing the UK (really, England, but the results impacted the entire United Kingdom, so thanks for that) make the stupidest possible choice based on the worst, most xenophobic reasoning, and having a very real sense of, this feels like the start of something very bad.
That feeling of there’s something happening here echoes in my brain right now, with another US election in the offing and complete upheaval in the United Kingdom. Sure, I know that the Tories have been voted out of office (finally!) just a month or so ago, but now we’re faced with a rise of neo-Nazi protests and attacks, and again I find myself worried about what’s going to happen to the US over the next few months. “Doomscrolling” as a term feels too quaint for this feeling, I have to admit; “doom-foreshadowing” or something similar might be more appropriate.