The Anti-Doomscroll Movement – Is Substack Really Going to Save us?
By Katie Ward
The internet is constantly evolving – or devolving, depending on how you look at it. Almost everything online now is placating, full of bots, and designed to keep you scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, consuming hours upon hours of mind-numbing short-form content that is making us all attention-deficient. [1] And it’s not like, nobody realises this. The hashtag ‘brainrot’ – coined online to describe the mind decaying content that makes up much of what is culturally relevant to the youth of today – has three million posts on TikTok. [3] Not only that, but it was also Oxford University Press’ Word of the Year for 2024.
This cultural landscape would be overwhelmingly depressing, were it not for a new trend growing in popularity. Creators across TikTok and YouTube are posting more and more content, ironically about consuming less content.
Most highly recommended is Substack, a video/podcast/article platform that is the current big thing. My For You page is inundated with slideshows titled ‘Substack Articles to Read Instead of Doomscrolling’. A video with 200k likes tells me reading one Substack article a day will help me become ‘disgustingly educated’. [3]
So, I log on. The ‘for you’ tab full of ‘notes’ is the first thing that pops up. I spend a long stretch of time doomscrolling through memes and reading straight-from-TikTok articles about cool girls and thought daughters. I don’t feel more educated. I just feel zombified and vaguely annoyed. Then, I stumble across an article by user @lucianacole titled; ‘Substack is a social media you c*nt’, [4] and I think, exactly! Placated, I let this article lead me to other articles of interest, and I begin to enjoy myself. But my ultimate Substack takeaway is that though it can be fun and interesting, it isn’t the best doomscrolling alternative.
I have more success with the other trends. I watch JENeration DIY’s YouTube video on creating a dopamine menu, a list of activities, ranging from quick (starters) to time-consuming (mains) to provide a healthier alternative to the cheap dopamine hit your brain is craving when you reach for your phone. I create my own dopamine menu and end up having a lot of blissfully disconnected fun with it. [5] Also, fun is the personal curriculum, a scholarly pursuit where you undertake to teach yourself about quite literally anything that interests you. For example, TikTok creator @macysmells lists puppetry and cryptozoology as subjects on her personal curriculum.[6] It’s learning, sharpening your brain instead of liquefying it, but it’s fun!
There are many more de-brainrotting trends out there – digital gardening, going analogue and cold turkey digital detoxes, to name a few. To be quite honest, I didn’t keep up with any of mine after initially trialling them. My solution is putting an app block on my phone and just going about my daily life without it glued to my hand.
It is important to disconnect yourself in the digital age, to fight to keep your mind sharp. But we must be careful that we aren’t consuming more of the online world in hopes of getting ourselves off it, getting wrapped up in trends that make us feel like we’re doing something, rather than actually doing it.
Sources:
[1] Nussenbaum, Tessa ‘Social media causes attention spans to drop.’ https://standard.asl.org/27705/uncategorized/social-media-causes-attention-spans-to-drop/
[2] Tiktok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNHoMBJbFBC2P-W1rEl/
[3] smarter_with_sara, Tiktok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRhtkD7U/
[4] Cole, Luciana, ‘Substack is a social media you c*nt.’ https://open.substack.com/pub/lucianahego/p/susback-is-a-social-media-you-cunt?r=767spd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[5] JENeration DIY, YouTube https://youtu.be/spR_TGowWGc?si=Msns4_LNjrjarKVo
[6] macysmells, TikTok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRkenmRf/
Photo Credit – Ms Tech | Wikimedia, Pixabay
