Doomscroll Detox: 6 Steps to Take Back Your Sanity

Somewhere between “I hear it might rain today” and “did you see the game?” people started tossing around “it’s time for another civil war” like it’s a weekend plan. Memes, snarky tweets, podcast cold opens. Doom talk is now small talk. 

But most Americans don’t want violence. At all. According to this poll from the National Library of Medicine, only 3.6% of us say civil war is “necessary to set things right.” The rest of us would like to set things right with, you know, elections, laws, and the occasional neighborhood barbecue.

So why do we talk like we’re already fortifying the cul-de-sac? Because doomsday thinking has become a hobby. It feels edgy. It bonds us to our tribe. And it completely warps our sense of reality. The good news: this isn’t destiny. We can throttle back the apocalypse mood without pretending our problems aren’t real.

Doomer Memes & Social Media Fatalism

There’s a pipeline for doomer rhetoric:

Irony → identity → impact

Pizzagate started online in 2016 as a mix of ironic memes and conspiracy chatter claiming Hillary Clinton and other elites were running a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. What began as internet “jokes” and edgy speculation hardened into an identity for believers, who saw themselves as the few “awake” to elite corruption. That shift pushed it offline: in December 2016, a man from North Carolina drove to the restaurant with an AR-15, fired shots inside, and told police he was there to “self-investigate.” Nobody was hurt, but the incident showed how quickly a meme-ified story can mutate into a worldview—and then into real-world danger.

Then there are phrases like “eat the rich”—centuries-old gallows humor revived to help people cope with the age of obscene inequality. It’s a punchy way to say “tax and regulate the ultra-wealthy.”  But repeated enough, it stops being satire and becomes eliminationist. In 2020, demonstrators “preparing for a revolution” set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos’s D.C. mansion. Many netizens celebrated the murders of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, and Wesley LePatner, a senior managing director at Blackstone. What began as humor calcified into a mood—as if sarcasm bought a megaphone (and a gun). 

The story we consume trains the story we tell—and eventually the story we live.

So why does fatalistic media spread? Because it’s snackable and spicy. Doom content has great mouthfeel. It’s simple, dramatic, and algorithmically blessed (the platforms reward the stuff that makes your pulse jump). Doom is entertaining, which is why it outruns the boring truth: progress is slow, local, and lousy at going viral.

The problem isn’t that people are angry. Some anger is earned. The problem is when doom becomes your operating system. You stop seeing neighbors and start seeing combatants. You stop asking “what would fix this?” and start asking “what will I do when everything collapses?”

This is how we talk ourselves into a future almost nobody wants. The story we consume trains the story we tell—and eventually the story we live.

How To Break Out of the Doom Cycle (without pretending everything’s fine)

1) Don’t feed the algorithm.
If a post makes you think “we’re doomed,” your nervous system has been monetized. Starve that beast. Pass on sharing fatalistic content, even ironically. And call out or debunk doomposts as you see them.

2) Follow rational thinkers on purpose.
Balance your doom diet with people who solve things across lines. Add a couple cross-partisan thinkers, local problem-solvers, and reporters who cover policy over performative beef. You’ll start seeing how often Americans fix stuff quietly. Cooperation may not dunk as hard, but it wins games.

3) Ditch memes for stories.
When a conversation goes DEFCON 2, ask, “What happened that led you there?” Listen for the story. Share your path back. Ask one curiosity question (“What makes this issue or topic feel urgent to you?”) before any counterargument. It’s astonishing how fast the temperature drops when people feel heard.

4) Re-localize your hope.
National politics is WrestleMania. Local is where doomspeak dies. Show up where your effort scales: school board listening sessions, budget workshops, neighborhood safety meetings, citizen assemblies. Showing up to even one of these meetings will do more than a lifetime of doomscrolling.

5) Use humor to deflate, not detonate.
Humor can puncture performative chest-thumping without demeaning the person. Aim your joke at the absurdity, not their humanity. 

• Them: “The media is brainwashing you.” 
• You: “My brain’s mostly coffee and dog videos, but fair.

Meme the temperature down.

6) Have a personal “Doom Off-Ramp.”
When you catch yourself spiraling (“we’re cooked”), do one corrective thing in 10 minutes or less: email a local rep, donate $5 to a boring-but-effective group, RSVP to a town forum, or text a friend you disagree with and ask about their week. Action beats abstraction.

Not Today, Doom

Civil war isn’t inevitable. It’s optional. And most Americans already opt out. The problem with doom culture (aside from stress ulcers) is that the more we anticipate violence—even in jest—the more we narrate ourselves toward it. Flip the script. Move energy from collapse memes to cooperation stories. Admire the quiet work of people who patch and rebuild. Keep the jokes, lose the dehumanizing jabs.

We don’t have to agree on everything to agree on this: we’re stuck with each other. That’s not a threat. It’s a relief. The temperature comes down when we stop rehearsing the worst future and start practicing the better one—together, imperfectly, one very boring, very effective fix at a time.

—Alex Buscemi (abuscemi@buildersmovement.org)