June 20, 2026
Doomscrolling ate my homework
Your brain was never designed for this much bad news
People are rage-quitting the news, and the comments say their brains are done
TLDR: Researchers say our brains are wired to obsess over danger, which helps explain why news avoidance is soaring as phones dump global crises on us nonstop. In the comments, people split between “just read local news and protect your peace” and “maybe the world is harsh and you need thicker skin.”
The big mood here is basically: it’s not you, it’s the apocalypse app in your pocket. The article says humans are built to notice danger first, which worked great when the threat was a tiger in a bush and works terribly when your phone serves up war, climate disaster, crime, and economic panic before breakfast. No wonder 69 percent of Canadians say they sometimes avoid the news, while people worldwide are doing the same in record numbers. The science-y label is “problematic news consumption,” but the comments translated it into plain English: my brain is cooked.
And wow, the community had opinions. One camp wants a proximity filter for doom: rank stories by how close they are and how much they actually affect your life. Local evacuation order? Important. Random misery thousands of miles away? Maybe not at 7 a.m. Another commenter basically said they already live this way and it rules: only read local news, stress drops instantly. Then came the cultural critics, dragging the modern internet as a giant noise machine of X, Reddit, AI slop, doomscrolling, and endless group chats. But not everyone was sympathetic: one hotter take argued people are stressed because they expect the world to be neater than it is.
The funniest bit? A commenter revived Neil Postman’s old “Peekaboo World” idea: we’re bombarded with giant global problems we can’t fix, then expected to just... go to work. The crowd’s verdict: maybe the real breaking news was the nervous system we broke along the way.
Key Points
- •The article says 69 percent of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news, and 40 percent globally sometimes or often do so, according to Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report.
- •It argues that news fatigue reflects how human threat-detection systems respond to constant exposure to negative information rather than a decline in civic interest.
- •The article links this reaction to negativity bias, a well-established finding in cognitive science showing that negative information gets more attention and is remembered longer.
- •A study cited from Nature Human Behaviour found that more negative words in news headlines increased click-through rates, while positive words reduced them.
- •The article cites 2022 research on Problematic News Consumption showing severe PNC in 17 percent of American adults and higher rates of feeling unwell among that group.