Doomscrolling Doesn’t Help

We seem to think that we need to voraciously consume bad news to be engaged. The opposite is true.

Some time in the early-1990s, I remember reading a bumper sticker out loud to my mother and asking her what it meant.

IF YOU’RE NOT MAD, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

The sticker was fairly worn and we were in Eugene, Oregon, so I assume the owner of the vehicle had probably purchased and placed it in reaction to the decisions and actions of the first President Bush, though I can’t be certain. There were plenty of things to be mad about at that time — which is exactly what my mother told me. That there were lots of reasons to be mad and, if you weren’t, it was because, as the sticker chided, you weren’t paying attention.

My mother was not a politically-active person in the conventional sense; she didn’t go to rallies or work in campaign offices in rented storefronts. But she was, in her own way (and in the way of a lot of 90s moms, I think) ruthlessly engaged, tithing what she could to Planned Parenthood and writing scathing op-eds about abortion and taxes to our local paper.

She explained that, while it’s easy to ignore the scary, frustrating, or dangerous actions of politicians and corporations, it was…