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A Guide to Healthy Doomscrolling
The Prevention of Existential Angst
It used to be that if you didn’t want to fall prey to existential angst, all you needed to do was avoid wearing black and hanging out in smoky French cafes. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. These days, the Abyss stalks you and pounces every time you look at the news. Whether it’s climate change, political polarization, global war, pandemics, or threats to democracy, it seems like the ground is giving way under our feet, as we all slide into a void. What makes it worse is that all fears are connected. Climate change, political polarization, global war, pandemics, and threats to democracy are braided together.
As a therapist, I’m often asked how to cope with it all. Luckily, I don’t need to think up an answer, I can just read a 1933 essay by a Norwegian lawyer, mountain climber, photographer, and philosopher, Peter Wessel Zapffe, and see what works for me.
In the essay, titled The Last Messiah, he argued that existential angst is the result of an overly evolved intellect. People can overcome it by limiting the content of consciousness. He compared humans to an ancient species of deer (he may have been referring to the Irish Elk) that went extinct because its antlers had grown too big. He wrote, “When one is depressed and anxious, the human mind is like such antlers, which in…
