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Watching the War Won’t Stop It
How to turn doom-scrolling into ‘do-scrolling’
I can’t stop watching. The shattered skylines, and lives, of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and other Ukrainian cities fill my TV screen, my laptop, my smartphone. Even when I press mute, I can still hear the fear in the voice of a terrified child or the quiet determination of a resistance fighter.
If an hour goes by and I haven’t checked the news, I get antsy and click. (I’ve checked the news seven times in the course of writing this article.) I watch the news from Ukraine as if my watching is somehow helping the people of Ukraine. It is not. It is not helping me either. It is, I now realize, an indulgence, doom scrolling on an industrial scale.
I’ve written about the media’s bad-news bias. It is real, but so is this war. Sometimes the news is so bad that turning away feels like a cop-out, an abdication. This is one of those times.
Watching the grim news out of Ukraine, it’s easy to slip into “learned helplessness.” That is a behavior exhibited when a subject, animal or person, is repeatedly exposed to negative stimuli beyond their control. The phenomenon was first identified in the 1960s by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. In a series of experiments, Seligman and a colleague placed dogs in three different groups then…
