The Escapism / Coping Loop
Why being lost in your phone or work all the time is normal
A new piece of information about the world hits you. Either in your thoughts or in the form of news delivered by a friend or family member. You sigh, maybe finish the conversation you’re having, then unlock your phone and open an app. Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, a book reading app, maybe a podcast listening app. Just something to take your mind away from yet another unsolvable piece of information you now have.
Some argue that most of us use our phones to not have to be alone with our thoughts. And I’d argue it’s not the thoughts or even the emotions, it’s the sheer amount of them we have nowadays. Even if social media had never been a thing, the digital increase in information about the world makes you feel too many things. No normal brain would want to sit with the emotions that brings day in and day out while having to function to either get good grades or to make money to survive.
Sure, you can do a meditation retreat where you just sit with yourself for a week and that is probably insanely cleansing to the mind and soul, but that isn’t something that fits into most people’s lives. So instead we try to find glimpses of hope, good news, a laugh and maybe even solutions to problems online. We snack on short-term nervous system regulation, sometimes through dopamine hits, sometimes through reading a calming book.
I find it particularly weird how much I and others shame ourselves for this. Everyone who has a concept of interpersonal trauma, intersectionality and the geopolitical net of the world, will currently be walking around with a permanent hurricane of thoughts and emotions in their head. I’d argue there is no way to process that in one lifetime unless the collective starts healing together. And let’s be real, that’s only happening in small ways in small pockets of society, unfortunately.
Is the alternative to your escapism as a coping tool the spiral into a depressive episode, or even thoughts of not wanting to be here? Yes? Then the escapism isn’t the horrible thing you think it is. You can’t fix the amount of depression that systemic problems bring. You can certainly learn to cope with it better and have the reminders that help you around you, but you can’t self-care yourself out of systemic financial instability and the fact that the country you live in funds human rights violations.
There are burdens we take on mentally, even if we know we’re not at fault and do everything we can to prevent the thing in question. Several therapists I’ve been to would have answered this thought process with “detach from things you cannot control” or something along those lines. While I think it’s unhealthy to think about things you can’t control all day, I also think it’s wild just how much the Western detachment model ignores our core humanity. You can’t turn off worrying about people dying because the taxes you pay are being sent to deliver weapons to a foreign country.
Our brains will either choose to become workaholics or to be on our phones a lot. The world will tell you the workaholic reaction is the better one when you want to escape from the reality of the world. I think that’s bullshit for two reasons. Reason One: Productivity isn’t an endless good we all have; it takes more energy than scrolling and therefore makes you more likely to get burnt out and become a scroller anyway. Reason Two: That workaholic glorification connects to people thinking that improving one’s own status and wealth will make the world seem less horrible. And honestly, maybe it cam, we should really study it more. — Multi-millionaires are definitely capable of putting values first, whereas the super-rich, aka billionaires, seem to lack the ability to put good morals over money. But I digress. —
My point is, staring at your phone in response to all this (I’m vaguely pointing at everything) is about as neutral as using the energy those emotions create to write another couple emails. Ideally, you’d mix up the coping escapism tools, so the loop doesn’t stay the same, but I fail to see where protecting yourself from a depressive thought spiral by staring at your phone is a failure in any way.
As someone who struggles with doing tasks that I don’t want to do (hi ADHD), I’ll do whatever I can to cope with the world I was put into. Sometimes, sitting down and meditating or journaling is simply not the thing I can do in that moment. I’m literally writing this piece right now because Twitter became a little too depressing to scroll through after I had a sensory overload this morning. Some days it’s easier to open the app that helps me do EFT tapping and then that’s the coping I’ll do instead, but not every day will be like that and that is normal.
If you want to replace your social media use with something else, definitely dive deep into the podcast world, online course world, and book app world. If I feel like social media isn’t adding anything to my life for a couple of days, I’ll usually start listening to podcasts that address real life. There are a couple of great ones out there and I’m actually currently about to launch one myself. My goal is to interview the very people you stare at on social media about the imperfections and struggles in their lives, because I absolutely hate the comparison trap. Let’s see how it goes, I’ll train my boldness muscle by escaping into socials in a way that makes me look into people I can invite. Switching it up a little. I’ll let you know once the podcast is having a fixed launch date, I’m shooting for mid July, but it might take a bit longer depending on scheduling.
I said to myself earlier: Life is really just a chain of refusing to give up while struggling. Doesn’t matter if that means feeling anxious or if that means that you overworked yourself into burnout.
You got this. I got this. We should both not give a damn if that screen time says however many hours, some of us need background noise all day (again, hi adhd, I recommend ADHD focus sounds videos on YouTube). Find alternatives to the endless scroll that are still on your phone if it really makes you feel like it affects you more negatively than positively. I somehow automatically stopped using Instagram privately over the months and years. I dive into YouTube way more nowadays, because who wouldn’t want to learn about airport squirrels and the crisis in cosmology?
Stay curious!
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