There has been violent disorder on the streets of Southampton sparked by the murder of student Henry Nowak. Politicians and community leaders have called for calm amid fears that Nowak’s death will be used to whip up racial resentment against minority ethnic Britons. Lucy Hough speaks to community affairs correspondent Aamna Mohdin.

Name: Doomscrolling.

Age: The term first emerged in 2018, but took off in 2020 (when the doom got especially heavy).

Appearance: All-consuming.

Of course it’s all-consuming! Have you seen the horrors going on out there? War, climate collapse, AI … We need to stay informed: the robot apocalypse is coming, and I, for one, intend to be ready. Intentionally consuming news from reliable sources is one thing, but do you have any idea how much time you spend inadvertently making yourself scared and angry on your phone?

No, and I suspect this is not information I will enjoy learning. Definitely not. New survey data suggests people might spend up to five years of their waking lives doomscrolling.

What? That cannot be right – break it down for me. Well, a Virgin Media O2 survey of more than 6,000 people across the UK has found that 36% of our phone use is “unintentional”. That’s automatically flicking between apps and checking our phones out of habit, idly letting our thumbs show us all the most upsetting, frightening things out there (interspersed with adverts for protein powder and podcasts).

Mine are for Dubai and mindfulness apps, but go on. That’s an hour and 26 minutes a day, or 41,000 hours in a lifetime (for someone who gets a smartphone aged 10 and survives to the predicted average age of 88).

My doomscrolling suggests it’s unlikely any of us will be surviving to 88 soon. But that is shocking. It’s four years and eight months, somewhere between the lifespan of a feral pigeon and a ferret.

A weird way to put it, but OK. Fine. In four years and eight months, a human goes from a helpless larva to a fully fledged person with bladder control and opinions about Bluey.

Better. Just think what you could do in that time. You could do a PhD, you could go to veterinary school and find out how to extend feral pigeon lifespans, you could write 107 romance novels (if you match Barbara Cartland’s 1976 record of 23) … You could go to Jupiter (almost, theoretically)!

I could not do any of that. Maybe not, but you can certainly do better things with your one wild and precious life than “unintentionally” scrolling through infinite horrors on your phone because a bunch of irresponsible billionaires precision-engineered it that way. Study something fun, travel, volunteer …

You’re right, but how? As you say, the billionaires have stitched us up. In 2020, journalist Karen Ho created a Twitter “doomscrolling reminder bot” that issued helpful nightly reminders (“Hey, are you doomscrolling?”) to encourage people to stop. Surely now it would be easy to get AI to do something similar, but customised for each of us?

Are you saying this is something the technology my doomscrolling has made me terrified of could actually help with? Who knows, but stranger things have happened.

Do say: “Hey, are you doomscrolling?”

Don’t say: “You have 10 seconds to stop before your robot overlord administers your mandated punishment.”