Say No to Bad News: The Joys of Indiscriminate Scrolling
by Tania Runyan
Doom scrolling. Don’t pretend you don’t do it.
I’m talking about those times when you slide your finger up and down your phone searching out whatever distressing tidbits await your barnacles of anxiety. You probably don’t even intend to look for bad news, but your brain has trained itself to do so. Got an outdoor event planned on a cloudy day? Scroll through the hourly forecast, refresh, repeat, and await the lighting bolt icon. Election night? Fix your eyes on that online map and gird yourself for the doomsday march of states filling in with red or blue, whatever your preferred poison. Then there’s the other news, which you might check every ninety seconds or so when things aren’t right: did they apprehend the suspect? Has the hurricane struck land? Is the celebrity still clinging to life?
I know I can get stuck in those doom-scrolling cycles, whether I’m keeping an eye on world events, reading and rereading that awkward text exchange with a neighbor, or staring at Facebook notifications in tense anticipation of I don’t know what. But when I have enough self-awareness to catch myself, I can make a better choice. I can joy scroll through books with abandon.
Some of my least wasteful wasted time is spent window shopping — pun so very intended — books on Legible. I’m talking about wild, shameless, indiscriminate scrolling that gets me lost in colorful waves of book covers as I click on genres I normally avoid because why not? and play the delightful game of what if? when I click on a description for something outlandish, like Goats Giving Birth: What to Expect During Kidding Season, by Deborah Niemann. (I’m not, um, kidding. It looks interesting!)
There’s a time and place for seeking out the perfect book recommendation with whatever book club, librarian, friend, or algorithm is at your service. There is also a time to just let loose, scroll, and see what surprises the digital shelves have to offer. Who cares if you already have 729 books on your TBR list or whether you committed to reading a title starting with each letter of the alphabet by the end of March? Sometimes a book just needs to insinuate itself into your life, and the only way you’ll find it is by giving yourself the freedom to browse with no other goal but to pass the time in a way that adds hope and excitement to your day, not despair.
Case in point. I tend to prefer literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that doesn’t require an advanced science degree. But on a recent flight to California, where I’d be assisting my newly widowed dad with a move to a senior living community and helping him get his house on the market, I took a momentary break from my usual behaviors and responsibilities to relax and scroll through Legible’s recently added books. Here are a few unexpected titles I “hearted” along the way:
- The Art of Tinkering: Meet 150+ Makers Working at the Intersection of Art, Science & Technology, Karen Wilkinson, Mike Petrich
- The Naturalist’s Illustrated Guide to the Sierra Foothills and Central Valley, Derek Madden
- De-Bug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley, Raj Jayadev, Jean Melesaine
- Brother and the Dancer, Keenan Norris
- The Bakersfield Sound: How a Generation of Displaced Okies Revolutionized American Music, Robert E. Price
- The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World, Christina Crook
- Boo: The Life of the World’s Cutest Dog, J. H. Lee
Will I end up reading all of these? Time and moods will tell, of course, but I had such a fun and refreshing time checking out these books laid before me like unfamiliar candy bars. (Fascinatingly, many of these books happen to be about/set in California, my destination, and I wasn’t even trying for that!) I may discover a new favorite read or two from my indiscriminate scrolling, but even if I don’t, I will have experienced some well-earned joy in the process.
