Doomscrolling is taking away my ability to learn who I am. I no longer know whether any thought I have throughout the day is original, something I truly feel, something I actually believe, something I am genuinely passionate about, or just a culmination of hundreds of Reels floating around the stratosphere of my brain. I’m 20 years old. I’m an undergraduate student. I am quite literally still figuring everything out. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of who I am as a human being on this planet, and somehow, I already feel like I’m failing at it.
I don’t even know if my sense of style is my own: the clothes I wear, the jewelry I like, the things I find beautiful. Sometimes I don’t even know if my sense of right and wrong is entirely mine. Are my beliefs about the world things I have actually thought through or did my algorithm feed me 100 videos of different people regurgitating the same opinion in slightly different words until it started sounding like my own voice?
How am I only 20 and already convinced that I should have done and experienced everything? Probably because I just spent five hours in bed watching people who have already gotten married, finished college, gotten a master’s degree, landed their dream job, gotten fired from that job, found another one, gotten divorced, traveled the world, figured out their sexuality, moved across the country, and reinvented themselves. For ten seconds at a time, I get to feel like I am part of all of their lives. Meanwhile, I am still in bed.
That might be the strangest thing about doomscrolling: I can consume an entire lifetime without actually living a minute of my own. Sometimes I’ll see clips of characters from my favorite shows and sitcoms and realize I’m not even close to their first-season age. I have this enormous life ahead of me. I haven’t met people yet, been to places yet, or become versions of myself I haven’t become yet, and yet doomscrolling has somehow made me feel like my life is already over before it has even really begun. That is because my phone constantly asks me to decide who I am before I’ve had the chance to find out.
One moment, I want to be the girl who lives in a cottage in the woods with farm animals. The next, I want to be a corporate girl in New York, running around in heels and living out my Carrie Bradshaw fantasy. One day I want to wear floral dresses and bows and be unapologetically feminine. Then I see a girl wearing the chicest skirt, boots, and jacket I have ever seen, and suddenly I wonder if that is who I am supposed to be, who I want to be, or who I already am.
One moment, I want to be the girl who lives in a cottage in the woods with farm animals. Next, I want to be a corporate girl living in New York, running around in heels and living out my Carrie Bradshaw fantasy. One day I want to wear floral dresses and bows and be unapologetically feminine. Then I see a girl wearing the chicest skirt, boots, and jacket I have ever seen, and suddenly I wonder if that is who I am supposed to be, who I want to be, or who I already am.
One moment I want to love my body exactly as it is. The next, I’m mentally making a list of the fillers and Botox I’ll get the second I can afford them. But what if I don’t want to be put into a box? What if I don’t fit into one? What if there are phases of my life when I want to be all of those women, and phases when I want to be none of them? What if there is a year when I want to go out every weekend, wear tiny outfits and stay out until 3 a.m., and then six months when I want to wear sweats, read books and disappear into my room?
Maybe that’s just… being a person.
When I look at the women around me, my mom, my grandmother, my friends’ moms and grandmothers, and I see such dynamic, creative, different people. They have their own sense of style, opinions, strange little preferences and habits, and thoughts shaped over decades of friendships, heartbreaks, mistakes, work, marriage, motherhood, travel, arguments, books, movies, conversations, and ordinary days. When I look at them, I see this beautiful spectrum of what a human life can become. Then I look at myself and wonder: Is any of this actually mine?
When I look at my mom and grandmother’s generations, I think about how they could have phases without immediately turning them into identities. They could change their hair, their clothes, their hobbies, their opinions and their priorities because that was simply what they felt like doing at that point in their lives. There wasn’t an algorithm collecting millions of tiny pieces of information about what they lingered on, what they liked, and what they scrolled past, then feeding them a picture-perfect identity to aspire to. They got to become themselves slowly.
I want that.
As I enter my 20s, everyone keeps telling me that this is supposed to be such an exciting, fun decade, and I want it to be, but I don’t want to rush through it because I’m constantly watching everyone else’s life happen at once. I am ready to take all ten years of this decade to figure out who I am.
Recently, I’ve started reading and writing again. I genuinely loved them when I was younger, before everything I enjoyed had to be aesthetically pleasing enough to post. Sometimes I feel like I need to go backward to move forward. I need to go searching for the middle-school version of myself. She loved books, arts and crafts, making people’s birthdays special, writing, and spending hours doing things simply because they were fun. She didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought of her.
Okay, maybe I don’t need to recover everything about middle-school me. Some things can stay firmly in the past. The middle-school aesthetic was objectively a little questionable, but I want some of her back. I want to know what I like when no one is showing me what I should like. I want to know what I believe when no one is telling me what the correct opinion is. I want to know what I find beautiful before an algorithm tells me what beauty looks like. I want to know what I care about, what I stand for, what makes me angry, what makes me curious, and what makes me lose track of time.
I’m Saniaa, I’m addicted to doomscrolling, and I’m trying not to be because there is so much more I want to notice.
I recently saw an interview where Taylor Swift talked about feeling things intensely, noticing everything, and experiencing life in an incredibly detailed way between the ages of 18 and 22. That idea stuck with me because I realized I can’t do that if I’m doomscrolling. I can’t notice everything around me when I’m absorbing everything happening everywhere else.
There is so much to see, so much knowledge to consume that isn’t packaged into a 15-second video, so many books to read, so many people to talk to, so many things to make badly before I learn to make them well, so many places to walk around without photographing them, so many interests to pick up and abandon, so many opinions to form and change, so many versions of myself that I haven’t met yet.
Life is actually too beautiful and, yes, too “whimsical” for whimsy to just mean sticking plastic rhinestones onto face masks and phone cases because TikTok decided that was what a whimsical life looked like that week.
Most importantly, none of this is a race, so why does doomscrolling make me feel like I have just run one? I can spend hours lying completely still while my heart rate rises as though I have run a marathon, except I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve watched hundreds of people live hundreds of different lives and subconsciously asked myself to keep up with all of them. That feeling isn’t ambition; it’s anxiety.
I am 20. I don’t need to know exactly who I am yet. Figuring that out is supposed to take time. I am supposed to contradict myself; I am supposed to have phases; I am supposed to love something for six months and then never touch it again; I will be the cottage girl for a while and the New York corporate girl later, and maybe I’ll be both at the same time. Maybe I’ll become someone I can’t even imagine right now. I want those versions of me to come from living my life, not watching everyone else’s.
I have spent enough time consuming other people’s lives; I think I’m ready to get back to mine.