Anti-Doomscrolling

There’s #doomscrolling… but also there’s my passion for #nerdscrolling. […] — @[email protected]

Do you know this feeling when you discover a new word, that immediately resonates with you? That’s how I felt when I read the Toot above.

Finally, I have a word for these moments, where you just get lost in a random rabbit hole. You scroll through blogpost after blogpost, and your browser history suddenly looks like you’re doing some serious research.

I’ve begun to associate this kind of behaviour with me procrastinating “productively”. But the weird thing always was, that it didn’t feel like wasted time at all. I even remember writing down one evening in my journal in a side note, that I had taken a roundtrip down a rabbit hole that day (forgot the topic unfortunately), and that I felt delighted at that moment.

I don’t know about you, but discovering something new always sparks a precious feeling. Discovering something, that you haven’t come across yet during your time on this earth. Or that you now see in a different light than you used to. You immediately want to know everything about it. And you want to read other people’s opinions on it.

For me, it sometimes gets so intense, that I even contemplate taking this subject at uni for studying it on an academic level. For example, last year, I somehow got really invested in the works of Richard Feynman (the well-known physicist) and his ability to explain things in relatively simple terms. You might have heard about the Feynman Method for learning something new. That was him. Subsequently, I thought to myself a surprising number of times that I also want to study physics someday.

That’s the power of nerdscrolling, apparently.

And while I might not actually push through on that front, there’s something else I definitely want to do: Share more about what I discover during these sessions. Write about it, talk about it, have conversations. If it even inspires one other person, it was worth it.

So, thanks, David, for confirming that I’m not the only one who loves doing this. And for introducing me to a new word I can use to justify these moments, when I have an embarrassingly large amount of open tabs in my browser about Quantum Mechanics.

Let’s all nerdscroll a bit more!