Stop Dumbscrolling. It's Bad for Your Mental Health.
It's even worse for society.
When I was five, I failed my first IQ test.
When I didn’t understand instructions, my kindergarten teacher bent down in my face and screamed. My parents called me names. At the time, it felt like they enjoyed making me feel stupid. Now I know why. Making someone else feel stupid is the easiest way to make yourself feel smart.
Later, when I tested into a gifted program, everything changed. Suddenly, everyone wanted to direct my attention to how stupid someone else was. Everyone wants to feel smart. These days, few of us want to earn it.
So we dumbscroll.
We scroll and scroll, looking for the dumbest stuff we can find. We go hunting for the ignorant, the clueless, the cruel, the inane, the hypocritical, the inflammatory. The less self-awareness it shows, the better. Arguably, we’ve been scrolling dumb longer than we’ve been scrolling doom. If we want to add this word to the urban dictionary, I’ll offer up the first definition.
Dumbscrolling: A deliberate, sometimes unconscious effor…