I bike home every Tuesday after class and wonder why overcoming the hill at the end of Pardall tunnel never gets any easier. 

The musical highlight of this past Tuesday’s bike ride: “Once in a Lifetime” played as I flew about the roundabout around the Student Resource Building. Before my house key was even in the lock, I turned off the Talking Heads and went straight to scrolling online — a different set of the talking heads. I flopped on the couch, toggled between the New York Times (NYT) app, Instagram reels and TikTok, doing nothing of substantial value with my time. I watched “Arrested Development” clips and laughed. On my screen, Jason Bateman opened the “dead dove: do not eat” bag and was, in fact, greeted with a dead dove: “I don’t know what I expected,” he sighed. 

Below is a transcript of roughly how my twenty-minute Tiktok scroll went. If you’re reading this online, I encourage you to follow each hyperlink, but only if you feel like watching content which may be disturbing:

I open TikTok and first see that someone has adopted a wild weasel, though the comments are quick to correct: it’s actually a stoat. A stoat is much different from a weasel, pleb. Obviously stoats need different food. Stoats need different care, different attention, different housing. The comments also say that stoats love cat food, and I want to ask why the stoat can be more cat than weasel, but I decide it’s not worth the fight, so I scroll. Here is Mayor Mamdani. He smiles. I smile back. I scroll. A horse running on the beach. I scroll. A Marc Jacobs perfume ad. Scroll. “Arrested Development” and a Phoebe Bridgers song. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll before I even see the next video just because I can. Hudson Williams as a torchbearer at the Olympics — Connor Storrie as a torchbearer at the Olympics. Scroll. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie playing hockey. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie … not playing hockey. Smile, squeal, scroll. Elijah Wood in a Skittles commercial. A seal barking. No, not a seal. Sea lion, sorry — who cares for nuance? Another perfume ad. An advertisement for, quotations and all, Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” which reminds me I am halfway through Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” but I am too drained to read a book. A sonically minimalist “get ready with me.” A “Marty Supreme” edit. Coco Gauff breaking her racket at the Australian Open. A “Challengers” x Troye Sivan mashup. A Basquiat appreciation post from a Basquiat wannabe. An artist stating that they are precisely not a Basquiat wannabe (and therefore morally and artistically superior to the former, they’ll imply). Rama Duwaji. Fleabag. Hot priests. Naomi Osaka. Cats. Weasels. Stoats.Ethel Cain. Will Arnett. A talking horse. A talking head. A man being shot ten times in the chest.

I scroll.

This is just another Tuesday: watching a human being die on my iPhone 13. This cannot be normal — is this normal? My roommates and I joke about our nightly doomscrolls, but this isn’t doomscrolling. I’m not seeking upsetting information online; I just so happen to be inundated with graphic videos of war, of police brutality, of pedophilic manifestos, when I am trying to dissociate from a reality that overwhelms me with these very things. If it isn’t doomscrolling, what is it, and why do I — why do we — still partake?

It’s called dopamine scrolling. Unlike doom scrolling, where people intentionally consume upsetting content, dopamine scrolling is characterized by the quest for new content. The novelty of the content is not necessarily dependent on any one particular emotion, so any fresh content — whether it is immensely joyous or deeply disturbing — pacifies the insatiable watcher and whets their appetite all at once.

Each video bleeds into the next. None are distinct. Every time Timothee Chalamet hits a ping pong ball I hear a gunshot from the last video, and when I inevitably scroll, I’ll hear these pings and these shots as beats in a Troye Sivan song, and then that Troye Sivan song will be layered over a moodboard, and each video will be no more itself than it is the video which precedes it and the video which follows it. One man’s death becomes dismissed when there are surely more deaths, certainly more atrocities, hopefully more internet jokes, just a few swipes away, glowing beneath our fingertips. Why wait? Why dwell when we can scroll?

Blurring the lines between sorrow and humor, in my opinion, is part of the reason why, at least online, people do not take anything seriously. We scroll without conviction, we rapidly recycle, we move onto the next video before we have even attempted to process the one we just skipped. Whether it be a coping mechanism — seeking solace in sorrow — or an aversion to feeling itself, we have become rather unsympathetic beings. We are able to not only joke about tragedy, but to justify our insolence, to label our laughter at crimes against humanity as simply “dark humor.” Why are we making satirical moodboards of Jeffrey Epstein (and why does it have two hundred thousand likes)? In reducing anguish to farce, in sacrificing sincerity for satire, we subject ourselves to emotional incapacitation and diminish the severity of someone else’s sorrow; sometimes, we need to be deeply disturbed.

I have to ask myself, why do I still scroll like this? Like Jason Bateman, surprised to be holding a dead dove despite being told he would get just that, I scroll online expecting not to be overwhelmed when all I have ever felt after scrolling online is overwhelmed. I don’t go online hoping to find something negative, but I can almost guarantee that I will find precisely that. Why scroll, why not dwell? The quick answer: loathingly scrolling through promotional videos for quotation Wuthering Heights end quotation is potentially more exciting than actually reading Brontë’s beloved “Wuthering Heights.” Whereas I roughly know what happens in the book, I am entirely unfamiliar with the characters who will appear on my screen after Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff and Margot Robbie’s Catherine embrace. Scrolling invites curiosity, though it also invites dread. 

This feeling is not localized to TikTok. Even when I closed TikTok with conviction, even when I actively opened the NYT app to watch the video analysis of Alex Pretti’s death, I was unable to focus on the video at hand. Segmenting the article’s text was an advertisement for men’s boxers, boasting an artificial intelligence male model with an offensively sculpted V-line. This is neither the time nor the place to be advertising men’s underwear — to be advertising anything. Perhaps it is not just us as consumers of media who are desensitized, but, too, the curators, who continue to perpetuate insensitivity. 

Whatever our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same, dear desensitized reader. Our minds are made of thirst traps and footage of civilians being gunned down in the suburbs, so of course, our souls are confused. How do we stop? I won’t claim to solve the dopamine scrolling issue in 1500 words (largely because the undying dopamine search is much deeper than being addicted to our phones), but I can’t stop myself from trying.

As always, recognition is half the battle. After I watched the video of Pretti’s final moments, I spent an hour writing down the above video transcript in my journal, attempting to process my emotions. Even if saddening, it was cathartic. At the end of that journal entry, when I crossed the “T” in chest, my hand ached. I wondered if the agents’ hands ached after pulling the trigger that many times. I wonder now if they wear that ache like a badge of honor, if they revel in the glory of their own gory indiscretions, or if, like me, they just shake their hand out and keep scrawling, keep scrolling, keep shooting.

We should not stop at recognizing our own discomfort; we cannot just keep scrolling. It is a privilege to be able to scroll, to watch somebody die and scroll with enough apathy to drown death out in distractions. In doing so, in relentlessly searching for new media, we not only overwhelm ourselves, but we do a disservice to those who ask that their suffering is seen. When distressing scenes and videos of people being killed get sandwiched between thirst traps and tired Saturday Night Live skits, we lose a certain reverence for the dead, and thus a vigor for life. 

If you found any of this relatable, I implore you to make small changes that allow you to feel more. Even something as small as one screenless night per week, 20 minutes of reading immediately before bed or a walk along Devereux Beach in the evening might help regulate you. If you find yourself locked in the scroll, first recognize the disturbance, and then, hard as it may be, set the phone down (I promise, things will be better).

Do not let the days go by, do not let it be the same as it ever was. Slow down, take each moment, each video, as it is. If something disturbs you, let it disturb you. Let yourself feel something uncomfortable, let your discomfort spur you into action. We do not exist solely to consume — we cannot abandon our compassion for the insatiable hunger of novelty.

Emma Bogna plans to spend next Tuesday watching the snowy plovers scuttle across Sands Beach — sans screens.