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The Observable Unknown
Mailbag XXXVII: When the World Feels Like It’s Ending | Doomscrolling, Anxiety, Information Overload, Insomnia, and Temporal Collapse
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Welcome back to the observable unknown. Today's letter comes from Richard L. He writes, Dear Dr. Ray, I think something might be wrong with me because I feel like the whole world is falling apart and ending. Everything around me is so strange and people feel so disconnected. Everything seems like it's through a magnifying glass. I don't know if it's just technology and people knowing too much too fast or if it's the economy, but everything feels really unmanageable right now, and I don't know how to find my footing. It's starting to really scare me a lot, causing me insomnia, and I just don't know what to do. Do you have any advice for me? Sincerely, Richard L. Richard, the first thing I'd tell you is that there's an important difference between the world contains frightening things and the world is ending. The first may describe reality. The second is a conclusion your nervous system is making about reality. And right now I wouldn't trust that conclusion without examining the conditions under which it's being produced. You used a revealing phrase, people knowing too much too fast. I think you're on something. For most of human history, terrible events had geography. Something could be happening, but it was happening elsewhere. Now. A war, a market drop, a murder, a political crisis, a wildfire, somebody's divorce, an earthquake, an abduction, an argument between strangers, and a photograph of somebody's lunch can arrive within 30 seconds of one another. They occupy the same rectangle of glass. And the feed doesn't tell your attention, this is 6,000 miles away. This affects you directly. This probably doesn't. This matters next month. This requires absolutely not from you right now. It simply says next. Psychologists Amos Fersky and Daniel Kahneman gave us the concept of the availability heuristic. When examples of something become easier to call to mind, they can influence our judgments about how common or probable that thing is. Now imagine that mechanism living inside a device capable of supplying memorable examples of catastrophe without end. That doesn't mean the catastrophes are vague. It means your estimate of reality is being constructed from a sample that was never designed to represent reality evenly. A feed isn't the world, it's a selection system. There's newer research around what we now call doom scrolling too. A 2024 study of social media users found an association between doom scrolling and poorer mental well being, with mindfulness and secondary traumatic stress playing important roles in that relationship. So when you say everything feels as though it's under a magnifying glass, I'd pay attention to that description. The problem with the magnifying glass isn't that what you see through it is imaginary. It's that scale has been altered, and scale really matters. This brings me to something from my own work in temporal architecture. Human beings don't merely live in time. We organize experience through time. There's what requires attention now, what belongs to tomorrow, what's probably coming next year, what happened 20 years ago, and what never affect us at all. A healthy temporal structure gives events distance from one another, but digital life can collapse that architecture. Yesterday's catastrophe remains on the screen beside today's crisis, while tomorrow's prediction is already demanding an emotional response. Past, present, and hypothetical future begin arriving as one continuous emergency. That's temporal collapse. And when everything becomes now, everything starts feeling urgent. Richard, your job isn't to become indifferent. It's to restore scale. For the next week, I'd conduct an experiment. Don't stop being informed. Stop being continuously informed. Choose one or two deliberate periods each day when you check the news. Use sources you selected before you became frightened. Rather than allowing an algorithm to decide what deserves entrance into your nervous system. Outside those windows, let events happen without witnessing every update. You aren't morally required to experience the entire planet in real time. Then rebuild what I'd call your near field. Every morning, ask what's actually happening within 20ft of me? Is there food in the fridge? Is anyone I love in immediate danger? Is there a bill I genuinely need to address? Is my body asking for movement, rest, conversation, sunlight or food? What problem exists today that my hands can actually touch? That's not denial, it's proportion. The world transmitted through your phone and the world available through through your senses aren't always the same world. You need contact with both, and I want you to take the insomnia very seriously. Stress can disrupt sleep, and persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep deserves attention rather than simply being endured. The CDC recommends regular sleep and wake times as part of stress management, while the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia, or CBTI as an initial treatment for chronic insomnia. So I'd create a hard boundary around the night. No catastrophe, hunting in bed. No checking whether civilization survived the last 15 minutes. Give yourself a period before sleep in which nothing new is permitted to become your responsibility. And if the insomnia keeps going or the fear starts interfering significantly with work, concentration, relationships, or your ability to function, talk with a physician or mental health professional. Anxiety can include persistent worry, difficulty controlling it, feeling on edge, trouble concentrating, and disrupted sleep. There's another principle from my work that matters here in particular. Different states make different decisions. I'd add something for today. Different states make different forecasts. At 2 in the morning, exhausted and frightened, the mind can become a terrible futurist. Everything seems permanent. Every trend looks terminal, Every threat appears connected to every other threat. Don't ask an exhausted nervous system to predict civilization. Let morning have a vote and reconnect with people in physical space. Not comments, not reactions, not 10 simultaneous conversations conducted through fragments. Sit across from somebody, walk with somebody, eat something with another human being. Ask them how they're actually doing, then actually listen to what they say. Part of what you're describing as the world becoming disconnected may also be the experience of spending too much time observing humanity and not enough time participating in it. Those are extremely different activities. You don't need to solve the economy tonight. You don't need to resolve technology. You don't need to know whether civilization is entering a golden age, a dark age, or simply another Wednesday. You need your scale back. Your body, your room, your people, your next responsibility, your next hour, then tomorrow. The world may be unstable in ways worth taking seriously, but instability isn't the same thing as apocalypse. And awareness isn't improved by remaining frightened every waking minute. Sometimes the most responsible thing an informed person can do is close the feed long enough to recover the ability to distinguish. Distinguish signal from alarm. Richard, don't try to find your footing in the whole world. Nobody has feet that large. Find the ground beneath the two you already have. If this mailbag helped you recognize the difference between being informed and being continuously alarmed, make that known. Leave a rating or a review not for recognition, for signal. So a world viewed through a magnifying glass may finally return to a human scale. Until next time. Remember, you don't become what you feel, you become what you return to. And what you return to returns as you.