Once upon a time, I used to take breaks from the work I was doing to go on social media. I’d see some art, look a whatever had gone viral, post back and forth with some friends, maybe idly browse for a bit, and then return to whatever I’d been doing. It was fun. It was enjoyable. It was a small hit of happiness during my long, often-boring days. Nowdays, I feel like I do everything else in my life as a break from social media before I eventually have to return to doom scrolling so I can keep up with whatever hellacious, objectively evil thing has happened since I last looked. There is no joy to be found there and, more and more frequently, not even any escapism. All I can count on getting from the internet these days is at least a modicum of despair and yet my brain keeps telling me to go back and check again. After all, maybe this time I’ll actually get that little bit of serotonin I’m craving. Maybe this time I’ll just see some nice art or a funny joke or an announcement about something of interest to me and not spend an hour scrolling up and down the page as I trepidatiously follow whatever unfolding disaster has occurred (such as “law enforcement” of various types killing someone in what can only be reasonably described as an execution or the various media and government personal talking about just how reasonable it is for Trump to consider acquiring Greenland through whatever means he desires). Nothing I have seen on social media in the last year comes even close to making up for how much absolute misery I’ve experienced as a result of scrolling around and yet I can feel the need to scroll, to bear horrified witness to these unfolding tragedies, tugging at my attention despite not wanting to see yet another post about how surely, this time, they have gone too far.

I don’t know what the point of going to look at social media is, anymore. I know that I feel I need to do it so I can keep up with what is going on in the world around me, so I can stay apprised of what is going on in a more dependable matter than any modern news organization can provide me given how they’re contributing to the problem (by attacking trans people, by credibly repeating everything this administration baselessly claims, and by refusing to report in favor of being “balanced,” not to mention how many of them are being taken over by brain-rotting right-leaning politics and “thinkers”), but I’m pretty sure there are other ways to do that and it doesn’t account for how difficult it is to leave once I get there. Because that’s the problem: I struggle to leave. The worse I feel, the more difficult it is to close the app or browser and do literally anything else since there’s part of me–the part that remembers what it was like to be on the internet when the misery was minimal and not the point like it is today–that insists that if I just keep looking I will surely find something that will make it worth being exposed to all that human suffering and stress. Some small thing that will take me back to when the internet was more than just social media, when outrage was less common, when bad or anti-social behavior get you kicked out. The sort of small thing I will never find because that is nostalgia talking and there is no way to return to where you were, you can only get someplace you can live with again.

It contributes to a feeling I’ve been struggling against for most of my adult life: that my world is slowly narrowing around me. It feels like, the longer I live, the further I get down an ever-narrowing crevice as my world shrinks and shrinks, as my outlook on the future has less and less possibility and instead is removing opportunities for anything else to happen with every passing day. Sure, there is some truth to that as every choice you make necessarily cuts away all the other paths that branch out from that point until you’ve gone from the nigh-endless possibilities of everything you could to do the single path of everything you have done, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making choices so much as seeing potential choices or opportunities for choice disappearing ahead of me. Which feels incredibly matched to how my use of the internet is also dwindling as webcomics I once followed show their creators to be unworthy of my time, as some of the best burn out thanks to how much more difficult it has become to live as an artist of any kind, and as some just come to a natural end and I find nothing to replace them. Even attempting to find more websites, I struggle to keep them in mind and am so worn out by the work of living life that I’m not really up for the work of sifting through all the cruft to find the good stuff (especially since it is usually much more comforting to revisit something I’m familiar with than to take on the risk of trying something new).

It really feels like every part of life is shrinking around me, not just my future and the internet. Video games are more and more concentrated in fewer hands as more and more projects get cancelled because they’re not going to make a billion dollars and more studios are shuttered in the name of increasing profits for the shareholders. Movie studios are doing the same thing, as are animation studios. While there’s still an indie music scene, that’s getting more and more throttled by venture capital as every platform indie artists had to reach their audiences gets bought up by some corporation ready to strip it for parts. The economics of the day are killing the indie tabletop and board gaming scenes as the costs of international shipping skyrocket, to say nothing of how the geopolitic violence the US has begun to unleash on the world is putting any kind of successful trade and precedent for international business in the dirt so that everyone in this administration can live out their “what if I was a cool war guy” 12-year-old-child fantasies or think that they’re going to make the world forget about the information coming out, more and more every day, revealing all the heinous, unforgivable things they’ve done. Things are getting worse with every passing week and it’s impossible to ignore this without feeling like I’m burying my head in the sand or to pay attention without getting completely caught up in all the awfulness.

All of it means the future looks worse and worse with each passing day, more so than even the present since it is increasingly easy to extrapolate where this is all headed in some truly awful directions. So how am I supposed to escape or rest from all this when the only other things in my life are work where I’m to the left of all of my coworkers by a significant margin, video games which I can barely enjoy for a day or more without getting booted out because some people have decided that they want all of the playerbase for Final Fantasy 14 to be miserable, movies or TV which I can’t really enjoy since I’m boycotting all the streaming services I once enjoyed due to their awful choices, and books which often ask me to grapple with problems and ideas I just don’t have the energy to handle after the rest of my life has drained me. Even just trying to watch some silly little youtube videos won’t let me escape it because the problems are so pervasive at this point that every youtuber I give a crap about is mentioning some aspect of what is going on because it has made their life worse as well. It just never ends, there is no escape, and I’m not sure what I can do anymore other than just keep passing time…