I stopped doomscrolling after the election. You should too.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more.” That’s the apparently immortal line from Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s acerbic Oscar-winning masterpiece from 1976. Deranged newsreader Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch in the movie, and Bryan Cranston in a theater version) urges his audience to scream it out of their windows, and his TV network capitalizes on the resulting outrage. Nearly 50 years later, Beale looks ever more the mad prophet — not just of the airwaves, but of social media. Indeed, Beale’s line might be the only unifying scream across both sides of the political gulf, one that opened ever wider online between the 2016 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections. We don’t even agree on basic facts any more. What we do agree on is that we’re mad as hell about the other side, and we’re not going to take this nonsense from them one minute longer. Let’s find someone being wrong on the internet and dunk on them! SEE ALSO: X rival Bluesky sees more than 700,000 new users after the U.S. election But in the wake of the 2024 election, it’s time to quit, even as we steel ourselves for the actual IRL fights that lie ahead. Because here’s the thing we forgot about being Howard Beale: It’s the opposite of being politically effective. It can leave you sad as hell, not to mention frazzled and sick, and you shouldn’t take it anymore. The newsreader ended up as a conspiracy-addled cypher, his…I stopped doomscrolling after the election. You should too.