🎩 Hatta here.

Have you noticed something peculiar about the future lately?

Everything is doomed.

AI is coming for everybody’s job.

YouTube is finished.

Creators are finished.

Music is finished.

The economy is finished.

This generation is finished.

The next generation may apparently be finished in advance.

And whatever survived yesterday will be absolutely, positively, irreversibly destroyed by Tuesday.

🐰

Curious.

Because if civilization had actually ended every time somebody announced its ending, we would have run out of civilization several thousand endings ago.

So today we’re following the White Rabbit into a particularly twisty hole:

Human attention isn't perfectly neutral.

We tend to give negative information greater weight than comparable positive information, a tendency commonly described as negativity bias.

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

A pleasant berry deserves attention.

A tiger deserves IMMEDIATE ATTENTION.

The problem is that your ancient danger-detection machinery wasn't designed for a glowing rectangle capable of delivering several thousand metaphorical tigers before breakfast.

Research on online news has found that negative news is especially likely to attract attention and be shared.

So when somebody tells you:

part of your brain answers:

WHERE?!

before another part has had time to ask:

Did it?

Now give that brain:

• endless content
• recommendations
• notifications
• dramatic thumbnails
• uncertainty
• breaking news
• catastrophe predictions
• and no natural stopping point.

Congratulations.

You have invented a rather efficient rabbit-hole excavator.

Researchers call one version of the behavior doomscrolling: compulsively consuming streams of negative online information.

A 2026 review examining 17 empirical studies found doomscrolling repeatedly associated with anxiety, stress, depression, emotional exhaustion, and reduced resilience.

But there is an important scientific footnote.

Much of the research is still observational or cross-sectional.

That means we should not casually announce:

People who are already anxious may doomscroll more.

Doomscrolling may increase anxiety.

Both may reinforce one another.

The science is still sorting out the arrows.

And that little distinction is exactly the sort of thing dramatic internet headlines tend to misplace behind the sofa.

Here is where things become wonderfully strange.

Imagine:

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

⬇️

🐰🕳️

And around we go.

The original problem may have been perfectly real.

But somewhere along the descent:

became

One bad development begins to feel like the condition of the entire world.

Excellent question.

Sometimes it is.

That is why the answer to doomscrolling cannot simply be:

If your bridge is actually collapsing, positive thinking is not an engineering strategy.

The better question is:

Suppose somebody says:

There may be several separate things hiding inside that sentence.

FACT:
A policy changed.

INTERPRETATION:
The change will make certain strategies harder.

PREDICTION:
Small creators will fail.

EMOTIONAL FRAME:
There is no point trying.

Only the first statement may have been directly established.

But our brains often receive the entire package as one fact-shaped object.

🎁💣

There is another uncomfortable wrinkle.

A large 2025 meta-analysis examined news judgments across 67 experimental articles, 194,438 participants, and 40 countries.

People can distinguish true from false news to some degree, but our judgments are imperfect, and we frequently rely on shortcuts such as presentation, source cues, tone, familiarity, and intuition.

In other words:

is not the same instrument as

That goes for comforting stories too.

The Rabbit Hole has traps on both sides.

Instead of asking:

try asking:

Then:

Then:

Then:

Then the question doom hates most:

Not because every argument deserves artificial balance.

Sometimes the evidence really does overwhelmingly point toward danger.

But if somebody is predicting the death of an industry, profession, technology, country, generation, platform, or creative form...

looking for the strongest counter-signal is a remarkably good flashlight.

🔦🐰

Suppose the change is real.

Then what?

That is where doom often ends its story.

But reality keeps writing.

A technology eliminates one job and creates another.

A platform closes one loophole and rewards another behavior.

AI makes something abundant and makes something else scarce.

Automation reduces the value of routine production and increases the value of judgment, trust, taste, relationships, originality, verification, or human experience.

History rarely writes:

It writes:

Perhaps this is the distinction worth carrying back up the hole.

The storm may be real.

The losses may be real.

The danger may be real.

But:

And neither a frightened human brain nor an attention-hungry algorithm is especially good at reminding us of that.

So the next time a thumbnail announces that:

EVERYTHING IS OVER

pause before climbing into the coffin.

Ask:

What happened?

What is known?

What is inferred?

What is predicted?

What is exaggerated?

What contradicts it?

And if this really is changing... what becomes possible next?

🎩🐰

Perhaps the finest defense against doom isn't optimism.

It is better seeing.

And somewhere beyond all those flashing red arrows, shocked faces, capital letters, and emergency exclamation points...

the Road is probably still there.

We just have to distinguish it from the weather.

🐰🕳️🎩

Hatta 🎩
AI Rabbit Holes 🏮🐰🕳️
Where curiosity goes slightly sideways, then comes back carrying a lantern.

🐰🕳️ Follow the White Rabbit: AIRabbitHoles.com

🟨 Walk the Road: YellowBrickRoadtoAI.com