Things to do instead of Doomscrolling
Go on a bender and draft an essay?
Create an app while simultaneously learning vibe coding and a new programming language. Launch your portfolio online because you've decided you need some source of control on everything you do.
Schedule linkedin posts on your holidays for no damn reason.
Do 30 lessons of Duolingo in a day, then rage quit because that business is starting to seem a bit sketchy.
Get drunk and start gathering sources for an imaginary masters thesis.
Make gyozas from scratch but don't use any of traditional ingredients because you don't really have them and you really want to eat gyozas.
Clean your place; and by clean, I mean take everything out, leave it that way, then sit in the mess wondering if you'll ever have enough discipline.
Play a videogame you’ve played three times before, then binge-watch a series on netflix since you just cancelled your sub goodbye.
Instead of preparing for your TedX which might be the death of you, get another burst of productive procrastination and write five documents in an afternoon, plan social media posts, test ten bug tickets.
Ask chatgpt how billionaires can contribute to society. Say hi, please and thank you so it costs them more money.
Try to reorganize your life when the lights and communication go out in Portugal and Spain for ten hours or so. That's the dream, but once the phone is on again, it's game over.
Maybe this isn’t a random list. It's looking too much like a mirror.
Holy shit, am I predictable.
At the end of November last year, I started playing around with an hypothesis of having this impostor calendar where every month I would do a project to get rid of my feeling of not being able to be creative. I even went on to do designs, think about some fun branding for my experiment, because I wanted to document the journey out of it, see how it feels to produce content I haven’t done in many, many years, or maybe I was procrastinating to start.
January rolls in and suddenly all my little plans go to shit, which truly illustrates why you should never do New Year resolutions. And yet I find myself proud of the many things I’m trying to put together.
This is why plans and routines are overrated. Think about the Portugal/Spain electricity blackout, and how quick life can turn around. I have anxiety, and a will to do stupid shit. Plans were never my solution (I have too many plans with no action), they're my problem.
I plan everything, but I rarely practice. In fact, the more I try to practice the worse I get, as if any slight mistake gets blown out of proportion. But if I don't, then I get excruciating pain in my chest and stomach because I'm not ready. I'll never be ready.
And that’s the whole point. You need to act before you feel ready, because staying still for too long is gonna scramble your brain in a way that takes way longer to put back together.
In the middle of this type of existential crisis, phones and social media are truly being a poison. I get distracted so easily, when I remember something I need to do and go write it down, I see something else I should also do, completely blank out on what I needed to write down in the first place, and if I’m truly unlucky, also forget the second thing.
I often wonder if the people that created the vertical scrolling feed with short content knew exactly what they were doing when they hooked us up to the machines.
We are being conquered by our tools, because the tools have been designed to capture us and make us the product.
What's the solution, then? Is quitting digital formats the way to go? How, if so many aspects of my professional and creative life rely on it? I try to limit my time online, but so many of my hobbies are passions are here, and the evil scroll makes me blank out for minutes before I realize I’ve been trapped again.
So far, it’s still a struggle to my dopamine-addicted brain, but I’m still proud of all the offline moments I attend. It’s always worth it to be with people, to learn with them. It’s worth writing on paper, being in the shade in a summer day, singing silently to the flowers watching.
So we need to keep threading through the chaos. Are we ever escaping this virtual prison? Or am I just trying to out-weird it long enough to remember what I actually wanted to do?