Creative practice against doomscrolling

Source: A chaotic guide to making stuff instead of doomscrolling, struthless, 15:07, uploaded 2025-09-24.

When the news has removed agency and the blank page asks for a masterpiece, the useful move is a small, constrained act that begins before inspiration arrives.

Why making helps

The video begins with a hypothetical person who feels drained, overwhelmed, screen-addicted, and saturated by the worst parts of the news. The result is not necessarily action. It can be invalidation—nothing I make will change this—nihilism, or simple fatigue.

The argument for making has three parts. First, research following the Boston Marathon bombing found that prolonged media exposure could produce more acute stress than direct presence at the event. One proposed difference is agency: witnesses may act or seek support, while a distant viewer repeatedly receives the event without a coping mechanism.

Second, the relation between creativity and well-being appears to run in both directions. Happiness can support creativity, and creative activity can improve well-being. The video cites an increase of roughly twenty-eight percent without unpacking the underlying measure, so the number should be treated as the video’s summary rather than a general effect size.

Third, online environments contain organized computational propaganda. More than eighty countries have reportedly operated such programs, especially during periods of instability. Passive exposure is therefore not a neutral window onto the world. Some of the material is designed to produce fear, confusion, and helplessness.

Creative work changes the posture from reception to transformation. It gives the nervous system something finite to do with what arrived.

The claim is modest. A drawing does not repair the world. It can refill enough attention and agency for a person to re-enter it.

Ten starting points

1. Turn a mistake into art. Draw inside a coffee stain, sample an unwanted sound into techno, repair damaged clothing, or collage discarded material. The flawed starting point supplies a brief and weakens perfectionism. The first work after a dry period does not need to announce a triumphant return. Madeleine L’Engle’s useful line is that inspiration usually arrives during the work.
2. Transform a quotation. Sample it, embroider it, illustrate it, or build a small diorama around it. Selecting the line already requires immersion in someone else’s compressed thought; transforming it makes the borrowed language available to another person.
3. Write a letter. Send it to a friend, make the postcard yourself, or mail a note to your future self. The narrator describes someone who posts himself a card, receives it days later, and answers whatever worried the earlier version of him. It turns journaling into correspondence across a small delay.
4. Remake something you love. Change the medium, style, scale, or constraints of a familiar work. A childhood song can become lounge music, a novel can become a haiku, an album cover can be rebuilt from socks, or an entire iCarly episode can be recreated shot for shot by adults. Copying gets the body moving before originality is available.
5. Personify the resistance. Steven Pressfield’s “resistance” is the recurring force that produces a reason not to make the work. Turn it into a character sheet, puppet, song, comic, or antagonist. Writing what is currently known—including avoidance—makes the obstacle into material.
6. Use an exquisite corpse. Several people make the head, body, and feet of one figure without seeing the whole. Musicians can agree on key and tempo, create separate parts, and combine them later. Collaboration supplies a brief and guarantees surprise; the work is not expected to look polished.
7. Borrow a universal structure. Use the seasons, alphabet, tarot, deadly sins, weekdays, primary colours, nine circles of hell, fairy tales, or another known set as the container. The narrator uses this constantly. His book Doom and Bloom began with the probably bad idea of rewriting Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first structure was discarded after it produced the actual project.
8. Alter existing material. Remix, collage, cut, sew, or rearrange it until two things meet that were not meant to. Hunter S. Thompson reportedly typed an entire Fitzgerald novel to feel the act of writing it. Collage produces a lighter version of the same close reading because the source must be broken into usable parts.
9. Answer a fixed set of questions. The thirty-six questions associated with intimacy, Tim Ferriss’s eleven questions, or a repeated interview format move attention by supplying the next prompt. The person interviews themselves until thought gains momentum.
10. Run a constraint challenge. Pictionary suppresses procrastination through competition and a clock. A daily song, one tool, an external brief, or a short deadline recreates that momentum. Rapper Jarred Christmas’s advent project used twenty-five daily tracks; the narrator’s daughter supplies the smaller brief “draw daddy eating bubbles.”

The repeated mechanism is constraint. It turns “make something” into a next physical action. Inspiration usually appears inside the work, after the body has started.

The medium slows the message

The video itself uses an old Samsung camera. Its look is part of the argument. A contemporary high-resolution production about escaping optimized media would repeat the direction of travel that exhausted the narrator. The older device changes his headspace and asks the viewer to slow down.

The stated goal is unusually practical: this should be the last video watched that day, perhaps that week. The comment section is invited to become a list of actionable, odd prompts only so that a viewer untouched by the ten examples can find one final route into making and then leave.

Related: social media and short-form stories, dopamine and product use.