Cam Walker: Creativity is the best antidote to doom-scrolling

Warning: This story contains details of sexual abuse and suicide.

Ten years ago, Campbell Walker was an "edgelord" posting snarky comics online while hiding under 20 layers of irony.

Now he’s a suburban dad helping others get out of self-destructive mindsets by sharing his own story.

In his new book Doom and Bloom, the 35-year-old writer and illustrator guides readers away from endless hours of doom-scrolling and into their own creative adventures.

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Feeling overwhelmed is a normal reaction to spending 40 percent of one's life looking at an "incredibly psychologically manipulative piece of tech," Walker tells Saturday Morning.

To "win the war" against this kind of mental takeover, our strongest weapon isn't discipline, he says - it's creativity.

When he began writing Doom and Bloom - a poetic combination of psychology, ancient wisdom, off-the-wall imagery and left-field anecdotes - Walker was in a really dark place, reckoning with the suicide of one of his best friends.

With a book deadline but nothing written, Walker says he was living life on autopilot when he heard that his “wickedly creative” friend had died suddenly.

Although he doesn't believe every negative event has a “silver lining”, the shocking news did deliver "a rush of clarity" and also a sense of responsibility to carry on his late friend’s creative legacy.

“I just kept thinking about him and everything else and kept going. The next thing I knew I'd written a sentence, then a chapter.”

Creativity is the opposite of self-destruction, Walker says, and committing to it is the best method he knows for getting out of a doomed mindset.

At the beginning of Doom and Bloom, he dives into doom itself, then gives advice on laying the groundwork for a path out of it via creativity.

Like seeds, creative ideas can only sprout once we've done the “boring” work of creating the right foundation, Walker says. He says we must employ helpful habits, a redesigned environment, a renewed focus on everything that makes life feel a bit less hard and a whole lot less time looking at your phone.

In the third section of Doom and Bloom, Walker guides readers on how to "bloom", i.e. follow the path of creativity until eventually doom-scrolling starts to feel like a waste of time.

“When we completely lock into something and follow our curiosity and our passion, we haven't just removed a bad habit that might be dragging us down, we've actually replaced it with something that is adding to our lives.”

Walker's first book - the 2021 bestseller Your Head is a Houseboat - was sparked by an excruciating moment in which he learned about the cathartic power of creativity.

After posting an angry "rant" about the exoneration of an “obviously guilty” Australian cardinal for sex abuse crimes that he'd personally experienced as a victim, the illustrator felt very sick and crumpled to the floor.

"I was writhing almost in an exorcism-esque way, which I didn't expect. That was the reaction that I had - rolling around as some figurative demon left my body."

It's so hard when all you want to do is get under the covers and disappear while the whole world either pauses or forgets about you, Walker says.

To anyone feeling this way, his first recommendation is to do absolutely nothing - not in the sense of lying on the couch scrolling TikTok, but “putting absolutely nothing into your head and just having it there”.

This will feel painful at first, Walker says, but it helps to briefly "let all of those thoughts go loud," and then put them down in writing.

"A lot of the thoughts that we have, they feel so large when we're ruminating on them, and they feel so big and dramatic and world-ending when they're in our head. But once we get them on paper, they do look a bit trivial. They've got a beginning, a middle and an end, and sometimes they'll only take up one paragraph.

"By putting them somewhere, you're taking them out of your head and giving yourself a little bit more space, a little bit more room to breathe.

"You're sending a signal to yourself that you don't have to hold on to that rumination because you're not going to forget anything… and the clarity will hopefully begin to make itself at home.”