Fed up of looking at endless gloom on her phone, one writer decided to ‘joyscroll’ instead

George Resch loves two things in this world: “Making people think a little bit more positively, and making them laugh.” A former fence salesman from Long Island, New York, Resch is now the creator of the wildly popular (2.5 million followers) positive news outlet Tank’s Good News, set up in September 2017 after he saw a picture of an old woman being rescued from her living room in Texas during the floods caused by Hurricane Harvey. Inspired by the image’s portrayal of “triumph in the tragedy” – she was on the back of a jet ski doing a double thumbs up – Resch, 41, began posting similar images: a young woman food shopping for an elderly couple too scared to get out of their car during peak pandemic in Oregon, or the homecoming queen who gave her crown to a recently bereaved classmate. Resch believes the appeal of his posts is simple: “It’s a hit of dopamine when you’re scrolling through doom and gloom.” Every day, he is inundated with messages from people saying he has saved their life.

Speaking to Resch is an oddly emotional experience for me. Last year, Tank’s Good News became my lifeline. Desperate to find my way out of postnatal depression (PND) after the birth of my second child, I stopped reading the news, logged off social media and immersed myself in Tank’s stories of optimism. Before this, I had never been one to put up my blinkers. I thought it dangerous and foolish to ignore bad news. Like many journalists, “keeping informed” verged on compulsion, born out of professional obligation and fear of ignominy. But last summer I felt raw; fire-hosed by information and stimuli. I’d wake up feeling terrified, before indulging in a bout of doomscrolling (the excessive consumption of bad or anxiety-inducing news online). I would find myself lost in unverified stories and furious hot takes on social media, leaving me drained of energy, yet too jittery to sit still.

At first, I thought it was my long-term anxiety, diagnosed in my late 20s but present since childhood, merely dialled up. But after I explained the curious combination of lethargy and fury to a perinatal psychiatrist – “I’m not sad, I’m furious” – I received a diagnosis of PND. There had been warning signs that I ignored, of course. A sliver of a maternity leave, insomnia for years, a wobble when I’d had my first child the year before, a book deadline that hung over my newborn charge. Then my oldest friend lost her little boy and my trust in the world leaked away. I felt like a watered down person, with no conviction, or purpose. I was a book left in the sunshine too long: spine unglued and pages flying away. As I shrank smaller and smaller, the world loomed larger. I’ve always been sensitive to noise, but now I felt electric: a forest fire, burning with shame and fear. If anyone so much as brushed past me, I almost threw up. I was convinced I was being watched. I was ashamed to be feeling so furious, so lost, so shattered. I had a wonderful life, I thought (furiously). Why couldn’t I snap out of it? But it felt as if that life was trapped behind glass, and I was the taxidermied ferret, with a frozen rictus grin.

These were not ideal conditions in which to publicise a book. I have never felt more of a fraud than in those months when I made a cheery weekly podcast, or gabbed on a radio show about my new book. I knew I needed to find a way of shutting out the world as much as possible, while still being able to do my job. (As a freelance writer, taking a sabbatical or decent maternity leave never occurred to me.) The answer came to me suddenly, and all at once: banish bad news. I already switched off my phone regularly – installing a landline so that my mother could reach me instead of leaving me 48 voicemails in a row, at 10-minute intervals – but now I kept it turned off for days at a time, learning of “bad” news only when my husband or friends told me, or when I had to research something for work.

Instead, I sniffed out positive news platforms like a bloodhound, replacing the hours I had previously spent reading newspapers surfing them instead: the Happy Newspaper, the Good News Movement, Upworthy, the Good News Network, Positive News, the Guardian’s Upside. (Pleasingly, they all come as websites, too, meaning I didn’t have to go on social media.) It was not, I soon discovered, a matter of one or two outlets – this was an entire good news movement. As I dived into them, it occurred to me to question the idea that only bad news is newsworthy. What if “joyscrolling” – scrolling fervently through sites dedicated to uplifting or positive news – is just as important?