a gen z guide to fixing your doom-pilled brain

doomscrolled your way into a chronically shitty mood? read this

people often ask how i’ve turned out so positive despite spending my formative years watching every man-made horror on planet earth unfold in stunning quality six inches from my eyes. honestly, i’m also confused, so today i’m reverse-engineering the habits that got me here.

it feels weirdly scandalous to admit that i like life and feel hopeful for the future. anyone under thirty knows it’s better insurance to curate your online persona with a tasteful hint of despair — because if you’re not living life miserable, are you even paying attention? if you’re not on SSRIs because the knowledge of global suffering is too much to bear, are you even, like, ensouled?

snark aside, i really do believe gen z’s reflex to demand better is our generation’s greatest asset. when something feels unfair or illogical, like a policy, a workplace rule, or a societal norm, we refuse to shrug and accept “that’s just how things work.” we ask the right questions and we bully authority figures in their tiktok comments until we see change. that impulse is noble, truly.

the issue is that over the past few years, we seem to have overcorrected in a big way. we’ve gotten so fixated on spotting what’s broken that all we let ourselves see now are cracks. to make matters worse, we’ve turned this cynical hyper-vigilance into a status game — as if your ability to diagnose the hidden dysfunction in every situation is proof of some moral and intellectual depth.

my fear is that once enough of us accept the doom pill, we’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. i mean, who’s going to build the better future we keep demanding if everyone’s already decided we’re toast? once dread is the collective baseline, we’re bound to become passive viewers in our own lives. we’ll scroll and isolate and numb our minds with entertaining slop until we’ve morphed into the exact consumers tech companies pray for.

so, in the interest of not letting a few silicon valley nerds dictate our entire generation’s worldview, below are my tips for maintaining a positive outlook in a digital era that rewards the exact opposite. none of them will solve climate change or keep decrepit politicians’ paws off our future, but they might help in nudging your brain back toward its normal settings.

if you’d prefer to keep your place in the misery olympics, best of luck to you. feel free to dip here and fight me in my DMs. for everyone else, i present:

you’re allowed to be happy before we’ve fixed everything

i often find myself yearning for a simpler time in history. the feeling usually hits after engaging in one of modernity’s more spiritually corrosive rituals, like wasting forty minutes watching john pork prank videos, or letting a teenager pitch me her anti-aging skincare routine on tiktok live.

next thing i know, i’m lost in daydreams of a pre-technological paradise in which i spend my days prancing through uncorrupted landscapes and my nights hosting candle-lit soirées for all the girlies in my village. i’d never hear about sydney sweeney or check a linkedin job board ever again. I’D FINALLY BE FREE!

once this fantasy inevitably culminates in me damning mark zuckerberg and my parents and whoever made the industrial revolution happen, i force myself to think critically. would my life at any other point in history really have looked like a cottagecore pinterest board? or would it have more likely involved me marrying some crusty man twice my age, spending my hypest years as his domestic servant, then dying an excruciatingly painful death while birthing his child? suddenly my little life on the prairie doesn’t seem so charming :(

i know it’s so tempting to blame all our discontentment on iphones, capitalism, or some other giant, faceless villain. but as far as historians can tell, being alive has always been really fucking difficult — just in different flavors. yes, modern life can feel like a low-budget dystopian thriller at times, but it’s also objectively the best time to be alive if you’re into stuff like religious freedom, women’s rights, antibiotics, climate-controlled housing, and your situationship not randomly dying in war.

it’s also the first point in history that most people reading this have options. like, if you’re truly convinced modern society is a disease to all it touches, you can toss your phone over a bridge, move to the countryside, and spend your days churning butter. i grew up next to the amish. if they can stay committed to that bit, you can too.

in a hopefully-not-so-distant future, we’ll heavily regulate the advancements that are spiraling out of control and keep only what ensures us a more hospitable future. but in the meantime, you’re allowed to enjoy your existence before we’ve solved every issue plaguing humanity. otherwise, what’s the point of progress? who will ever get to enjoy it?

women fought tirelessly for my right to refuse a life of reproductive servitude, and scientists spent lifetimes figuring out how to keep me alive past twenty-four. does that mean sexism has been eradicated across the globe and all healthcare systems now run flawlessly? no! and it’s on our generation to continue fighting for progress, just like those before us did.

the unfortunate reality, however, is that a perfectly fair and suffering-free world is never coming. (unless every animal on earth is replaced by chill little robots). if we keep insisting on flawless conditions before letting ourselves appreciate anything, we’ll sulk our way through the only reality we’ll actually ever experience. it’s far from perfect, i’m aware, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most humans got.

notice the boring W’s

whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread.

our feeds are not neutral observers of reality. they’ve literally been engineered to serve us whatever cocktail of chaos and failure it takes to keep our threat-obsessed monkey brains hooked. these apps know we won’t click on a thumbnail titled “yay: every flight landed safely again today,” but will drop everything for “oh no: pilot shows up hammered, plane fckn explodes.” so we get fed a bottomless highlight reel of humanity’s biggest L’s until it feels like that’s just the norm.

most of us know on some level that social media is distorting our view of reality for the worse, but knowing doesn’t magically calm your nervous system. we’re up against millions of years of evolution fine-tuning our negativity bias, plus now a multi-trillion-dollar tech industry that only profits when we’re tweaking. unless we want to end up in permanent, algorithm-induced psychosis, however, we need to give our brains more unbiased inputs to work with.

i believe this begins, as most modern remedies do, with going outside. if we let our screens define reality for us, they’ll tell us quite assuredly that dysfunction is the rule, not the exception. luckily, we still have a whole world out there to remind us that’s not the full story. the annoying part is that our brains aren’t especially interested in all the boring, predictable stuff that goes right on an average day in real life.

your shower turns on, your bus shows up, your grocery store is stocked, the NPCs you interact with mostly follow the same rules and mind their business: this stuff feels like a given because it all happens so reliably. but when you pause to think about the insane amounts of competence, trust, and coordination required to make all these boring luxuries work so predictably, it starts to seem way less plausible that civilization is sprinting toward collapse.

our feeds will always remind us when there’s something to be anxious about, absolutely no worries there. what they won’t show us are all the unsexy, unclickable wins constantly happening in the background. if we want to see reality without the doom-colored glasses, we have to notice them on purpose.

shrink your world back to human size

if unlimited access to information made anyone a better person, the most chronically online mf’er you know would be out changing the world by now. but they’re not. they’re on twitter telling sixteen-year-olds, “um, it’s not my job to educate you.” if i had to take a stab at why, it’s because the more time you spend worrying about problems you can’t fix, the less capacity you have to do anything of actual impact.

i suppose the fantasy with “staying informed” is that if we know enough, we’ll be more responsible citizens. if we study every detail of every global conflict and keep a running dossier of which politician made what offensive comment this week, we’ll eventually have enough information to mobilize. the problem, however, is that most of what crosses our feeds doesn’t come with a call to action. it’s just an endless feed of ambient doom designed to spike our cortisol.

“woman brutally murdered in town you’ve never heard of”

“corruption scandal discovered in country you couldn’t locate on a map”

“goldman sachs just decided no one under forty will own a house EVER AGAIN!!!”

one of these notifications hits your lock screen before breakfast and you’re now moving through your day feeling like a powerless NPC in some rigged simulation — as if your fate has been predetermined by powerful villains who want to see you suffer. and, to be fair, that’s not entirely off base. neither you nor i can control if some greedy guys in suits decide to wage war or tank the economy. but it would also be untrue (and wildly unhelpful) to move through the world as if there’s no agency left for any of us.

the most grounded, high-impact people i’ve met all have one thing in common: they shrink their world down to the parts they can actually touch. they don’t spend their nights reading vindictive thinkpieces or policing influencers’ political opinions. they’re out doing small but tangible stuff, like helping their friend find a job, mentoring a kid, picking up a new skill, cooking for their neighbor, or volunteering for a cause they’re especially passionate about. they’re aware they can’t fix a geopolitical crisis this week, but they can solve a handful of issues in their immediate orbit. so they go and do that.

our brains were simply not built to metabolize every instance of suffering and malfunction on this planet. evolution gifted us stress and anxiety to handle problems we could actually do something about. no food → go hunt. storm coming → find shelter. bear trying to eat mom → throw rock. now, cut to the safest, cushiest time in human history, and we’re even more frazzled than our cave-dwelling ancestors because we’re using that same ancient, hyper-local hardware to process global politics, gender discourse, and some rando’s ten-part exposé on her husband’s affair — all on top of navigating our already-confusing twentysomething years.

it’s awesome that we care about the world and want it to function better, but it also helps to remember what our brains were actually built to do, which is solve the problems we can see. deciding to mute news alerts for a bit isn’t an act of ignorance or some intellectual sin. it will help shrink your universe back down to human scale, where you can still make the plot move forward.

don’t let the internet build a worldview for you

crazy ironic coming from the girl who’s currently shoving her worldview down your throat, i know, but i really think we need to stop outsourcing our critical thinking to strangers on the internet. everyone loves to blame tiktok and instagram for poisoning our generation’s brains, but my real beef is with the platforms that pretend they’re more cerebral — basically anywhere you can spend hours reading semi-eloquent people’s takes on why everything is worse than you realized.

at least when i’m thumbs-deep in short form brainrot, i know i’m committing an act of self-harm. it feels like drunk-eating mcdonalds at three in the morning: cheap, naughty, zero nutritional value. these discourse-heavy apps are more like a salad from the cheesecake factory: marketed like the healthier option, but still absolutely going to ruin you.

my main gripe with the discourse™ is how easily it can sweep you out of your own reality and into a much heavier, more abstract one. i could spend the nicest night out surrounded by happy twentysomethings, but the second i get in bed and see some reputable journalist post about gen z’s loneliness epidemic, my nervous system assumes we’re in crisis. i might be hanging out with my boyfriend feeling totally safe and at peace, but if a writer i follow drops a piece called newsflash: good men don’t exist, i’m reflexively side-eyeing him across the couch.

sometimes it’s necessary to engage with ideas that challenge your beliefs or help you recognize bigger, darker truths about our world. but maybe, just maybe, spending half your day absorbing random people’s hot takes, conspiracies, grievances, and viral-ready theories on what’s really wrong with society isn’t the healthiest use of a barely-developed frontal lobe.

growing up with an iphone in hand means you barely got a chance to build a worldview of your own before social media force-fed you the most paranoid, hyper-critical version. relationships, jobs, politics, the future: every facet of life arrived annotated by an overwhelming number of strangers before you had enough real-world data to reach your own conclusions. it’s really hard to hear your own thoughts, let alone any hopeful ones, when your brain is flooded with this constant stream of commentary.

it helps to remember that a lot of the content we’re consuming has been carefully crafted by creators whose literal job is to diagnose and escalate as many issues as they can see. there’s just no monetary incentive in assuring the masses, “hey, maybe some stuff is chill actually.” even if they’re right, though, and there really is some new cultural crisis you could spend your evening spiraling over tonight, ‘tis not your duty to do so. you can simply scroll past the yapping, let your mind get quiet, and conserve your energy for the handful of problems that actually belong to you.

our attention is our most valuable resource, and wherever we spend it shapes the way our brains experience reality. we can hand it all over to our screens, where each scroll offers a neatly packaged interpretation of what’s broken, who’s to blame, and why we should brace for impact, or we can place our focus in what’s in front of us, which resists such tidy conclusions. real life is messier, harder to summarize, and it’s still ours to shape.