Why you joyscroll when the world feels like it’s going to sh*t 🤷

The world isn’t great at the moment. Throw a digital dart at any news site, or your own social media page, and you’ll land on things talking about at least one of the following: 

• The Israel-Palestine conflict 
• The war in Ukraine 
• Global warming 
• The aboslute awful state of Great Britain 
• A general sense of impending doom. 

And it’s not without reason. The world is, I’m sorry to say, the most stressed out and unhappy it has been for quite some time ← this article says “than ever” but I don’t think anyone can compare now with events like, oh, I don’t know, total war, the plague, etc. 

This is precisely why dear reader, you’re quietly looking for something completely different. Whether it’s old photos your phone keeps resurfacing, videos of puppies (or otters) being, well, totally adorable, re-watching old shows you’ve seen 1,000 times, or my personal favourite, videos of children falling over (there’s a sub-Reddit for everything nowadays).  

We are engaging, in what is being called “joy scrolling” or to be more precise: total and utter escape. But why? You’re about to find out. 

Knowing me, knowing you 🤔

The world appears to be changing very quickly, and often in ways that none of us really like and or want. For many of us, we experience this as a loss of control. 

We would like (or at least I hope you do, given you read this newsletter!) everyone to be able to get along, to have enough to live, and for the climate to not be making concerted efforts to kill us. 

But when the world presents us with the opposite view, that, in a word, sucks. To cope with these sudden, and often violent changes, we find ways of exerting a sense of control and order in our worlds. 

That can be achieved in a whole range of different ways, but the easiest and most accessible version of this is to create a particular form of nostalgia. We want to escape into places and spaces, or videos of things that make us feel happy, content, or comforted in some way. 

I had a client the other day, who spoke of this very thing and was concerned it may have felt “indulgent” to only want to do or consume things that were the polar opposite of what’s going on in the world right now. 

Not so, says Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and develops the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. 

“One of the most important aspects of being a healthy human being is having a sense that you are in control of things. When things start to change, either very substantially, such as major events in a person's life… it's comforting to know what the future is going to bring.” 

We exert control in lots of different ways. But when we’re sat in bed, or on the train, or at work, sometimes the only way we can exert that control is to find something that we know is going to make us feel better, even if it is temporary. But it goes deeper than that. Our need to joyscroll can be a counter to a loss of identity.

I scroll, therefore I am 📱

I have watched Uncle Buck, the 1989 comedy about a bachelor looking after his brother’s kids, about six times recently. I’ve also re-watched The Sopranos, Veep, and I may go another time round on The Office (America edition). 

I’ve whittled my social media feed down to essentially, pictures of nice things and things that I find funny (see children falling over). Some people might call this a retreat into a fuzzy, safe, familiar place, and they’d be right. It is. But inside all this nostalgic familiarity is something important. 

It gives me, and I’m sure other people, a reminder of the things we like, the things we care about, and memories about where we were when we first saw all those shows. This can help bolster our sense of self, at a time, when the world feels like it’s lost its mind, says Dr. Batcho. “The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function is that it is a highly social emotion. It connects us to other people.”

But, sadly, there are limits to what joyscrolling and escapism can really offer us if we dwell in this dreamy landscape for too long.  

A recent study exploring escapism online found that prolonged periods of time immersed in these wonderful worlds made us more likely to overlook life IRL, which can be detrimental to our overall well-being. At its worst, we can reject the world for what it is, and choose to inhabit an ever smaller space, because it’s all we can cope with. So like all things, there is a balance to be struck. 

But if we’ve exhausted our joyscrolling quotient, what do we have left? 

Let’s go outside 🏕️ 

The ultimate solution to coping with the world being terrible is to spend more time with the people and the things that matter to you. 

If you’ve read any of these newsletters before, you know I bang the “it’s your relationships, stupid!” drum a fair bit. 

What I mean by that is the things that help ward off the sense of despair are all around us.

The trick is to focus on what we can control: zooming in from the massive, global things that dominate the headlines to the small, controllable things in your life right now. 

The goal is to move away from the empty feeling of “how can I do anything about climate change, or Israel, etc” to “I can help improve the lives of my family, my friends, my community, my street” can help remind us that we can effect change in our own lives that bucks the trend of what we see in the wider world. 

But joyscrolling / escapism / nostalgia / whatever you want to call it can help along the way. 

Things we learned this week 🤓

• 😡 Angry? It can be a useful tool to achieve the things in life you really want. 
• 🫥 Men hide bad news much more often than women 
• 🐉 People with tattoos more likely to go to jail - thanks to good old stigma. 
• 🧗 How healthy you are affects how likely you are to take risks - and be attracted to risk-takers. 

If you would be so kind 🙏

In light of this week’s newsletter, I’ve listed some of my favourite local charities, if you feel you want to make a difference. 

• Raise your Hands - an amazing project that helps local, small charities continue the amazing work they do. 
• Bankuet - A national scheme that helps local food banks stay fully stocked. 
• Refugee Action - has helped refugees the world over find somewhere safe to live. 
• Climate Coalition - A group of charities working to help mitigate climate change. 

I love you all. 💋