To put it bluntly, I’m a shit sleeper.
I’ve been an insomniac for over a decade, which is unsurprising given my family history of no one sleeping. As a teenager, I’d perfected the art of noiselessly removing the screen from my window so I could sit on our roof late at night, try to shimmy down the drain pipe when I was grounded. I thought that perhaps at the time of my birth, my dad was gifted some sort of super sonic hearing or clairvoyant sense that meant no matter where I was, he’d rise from REM, or maybe even the dead. It didn’t matter how silent I was, there he’d be. Turns out, he was just never really asleep.
My sibling sleeps with three white noise machines in a temperature-controlled room with two prescriptions. My mom, like me, gives up and over to the reality of her body. Sleep when your body falls asleep, be awake when it’s awake. So, I’ve been sleeping, on average, two or three hours a night for about four weeks. It’s not sustainable. My brain will atrophy or my heart will give out. Something like that.
Until then, here I’ll be. Scrolling.
I know, it’s not good for you, but trust me, I’ve done it all. I’ve slept with my phone on the other side of the room, in another room. I’ve taped over the faint glowing light on my TV. I’ve turned the wifi router off altogether. It doesn’t work. Don’t bother me with anecdotes or tips about sleep hygiene and meditation; it’s just insulting when you’ve stooped nearly as low as an Etsy witch who may have a sleep spell. There is nothing I haven’t tried.
So I acquiesce, and I treat night like day. Only, everyone is asleep, so there’s no texting or calling or shaking a partner awake. My brain isn’t awake enough to work or read in any real way. The house is clean. I’m fed and bathed. But I can scroll in perpetuity. Pinterest recipes, BlueSky, Twitter, YouTube debates and TikTok psychics.
I don’t think it’s bad for me because the blue light is delaying my melatonin release.
I think it’s bad for me because the algorithm is farming our fear.
Every few minutes, the feed reloads, a heartbeat pulsing out new things to fear. Fires, floods, death, famine, unrest, outrage. A headline written like a jump scare. A post that spikes your cortisol. And then we scroll, again, as if a little further down might be the part where it all makes sense, from a mother crying over the death of a child to a person on the street in New York modelling a new outfit in .2 seconds.
Discombobulating and disconcerting.
Fear isn’t a side-effect of the internet. It’s the business model.
The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re safe, informed, or fulfilled. It cares that you stay, and we are stayed by fear. Fear keeps us many places. It’s the oldest emotional technology, weaponized into a feedback loop that rewards panic and anger over nuance and regulation. Every notification is a whisper: Something’s happening and you’re missing it.
Attention used to be an earnest compliment. Now it’s currency.
Platforms measure value in time spent, not in truth gained or value acquired. The longer you hover, the more data you hand over. Fear happens to be a renewable fuel. Anger, panic, dread, these are high-engagement states.
Fear sharpens your focus just enough to click, but dulls it before you can question. That’s not an accident, that’s a feature. The entire structure of online news, political advertising, and social discourse runs on the same mechanism horror films perfected: tension without release. You never get the cathartic scream, the final fade-out. Just another cliffhanger, another outrage, another day.
Outrage has become the subscription model of democracy.
Because once you’re afraid, you keep paying attention. And once you’re paying attention, that attention is monetized.
We think of fear as an emotion. It’s also a form of management.
Politicians know this, and they always have. Fear consolidates power faster than any policy ever could. After 9/11, fear became a blank cheque for surveillance and war. Every new generation gets its own brand of fear. Migrants. AI. Inflation. Cancel culture. “Them,” whoever is other.
Horror has structure: there’s always an unseen threat, an eventual promise of safety, and a crowd willing to believe that with the right actions, there will be salvation. The difference is that in politics, the monster is always the other side.
The right sells fear of invasion. The left sells fear of collapse. Both understand that anxious people are easier to mobilize and easier to control. The specifics of the monster change, but the emotional choreography stays the same: identify a threat, heighten the panic, sell the cure.
The monster never dies. It polls too well.
If fear is profitable, it’s also contagious.
We absorb the anxiety of others through our screens. Each new horror compounds the last. The result is a learned vigilance, the feeling that if we stop checking, we might miss the thing that finally ruins us.
You don’t need a haunted house anymore, your phone will do. The push notification is the knock from inside the wall.
The algorithm amplifies fear because it learns from our micro-hesitations, the millisecond longer we linger on something alarming. It studies what spooks us and feeds us more of it, like a ghost in an attic working out its most startling moan for its new inhabitants.
Our beliefs become survival mechanisms. “If I’m outraged, I exist.” Political anger becomes a lifestyle.
We think we’re exorcising demons in the comments and the thinkpieces. Really, we’re feeding them. I’m probably doing it now.
Fear once kept us alive, now it keeps us online.
The attention economy thrives on alarm because alarm sells immediacy, products, parties, ideologies, distractions. Everyone, from the pundit to the wellness influencer, depends on your pulse and how it might stay elevated.
So I stay awake. Thumb to glass, heart to algorithm. The fear is ambient, and the feed is endless. It’s easy to believe I’m keeping watch of something valuable as my eyes grow heavier and darker.
But fear is the perfect insomniac’s drug. It keeps the mind jittering in place, too exhausted to think, too wired to rest. The same way a sleepless night wears down the body, constant alarm wears down a society, and both start mistaking vigilance for control.
My dad couldn’t sleep because he was listening for trouble. My mom gave up and made peace with wakefulness. I scroll because I’ve been trained to believe that awareness equals safety, and that if I keep my eyes open, I’ll see the monster coming around the corner and I’ll tuck my foot back inside the blankets just in time.
But the monster isn’t coming, not like that. It’s humming quietly in the light of every screen.
So tonight, maybe I’ll try again. Put the phone face down. Let the feed reload without me. The world will keep spinning, the fear and the joy will find each other falling in a ravine somewhere, and I might, if I’m lucky, get a few hours of sleep before the next apocalypse.