I don’t want to be totally uninformed about what’s going on, but I also don’t want to fall into doomscrolling.
I know that I could very easily just avoid any news sites and only find out about these things secondhand from people I talk to whether in real life or online. I also know that it’s not good to bury your head in the sand quite that far.
I could also very easily doomscroll different news sites and actively seek out more depressing news when I’m done scrolling one site. I’ve been doing more of this option lately, and as a reaction to that I’ve started doing total avoidance, which I know isn’t good.
So how and where did you strike a healthy balance between reading enough news to stay informed, but not enough to be in a constant state of anxiety about the world?
I’m looking for genuine advice here. I don’t want to be mean but I’m not too sure else how to say the following: I don’t want to come back to a lot of replies about “I didn’t find a balance lol I just doomscroll/stick my head in the sand” and “I feel this, same.” Not really sure if that’s going against the spirit of the chatting community, but seeing a lot of “same problem” and zero advice tends to make me feel more in despair. I already know this is a common problem, so what would usually be the correct social move of saying you relate in order to empathize and let the other know they’re not alone isn’t helpful for me in this particular instance.
Disclaimer: living in USA. I used to doom scroll a lot a few years ago… What helped me was initially leaving the feeds (head in the sand as you say), but this was not a good permanent solution. Since then, I have done a few things that have helped (your mileage may vary depending on what you’re trying to stay informed about). The first and easiest was to switch how I was getting my news. Now, I will get international news from different country’s sources (ie:https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int.html or https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world). I’ll swap up which one I go to each day normally. It’s interesting seeing world news from different perspectives. If I find a story that is particularly interesting, I’ll look more into it. Secondly, I believe it is often more important to be aware of your local news than anything. To that end, I follow quite a few local sources of news. Most are hinted with my interests (urbanist improvements, community meetings, local discord servers), but some are more general. Also, I listen to a few podcasts not aimed at news, but as a queer person consuming queer media I occasionally hear things I didn’t know. Promptly, I might look into it more. My motto is if something sounds really crazy, it’s probably being misconstrued. You’re never going to be informed on everything, but if you want to get less biased news, there are ways. Hope some of this helps in any way
Similarly to this, I mostly don’t read or engage with news feeds on social media and keep up to date by reading a local news site that’s curated by hand and the international version of the guardian website for the big stuff … although the Guardian is generally doom and gloom there are upbeat stories listed too and it’s not a never-ending list of depression like Facebook/reddit/some communities on Lemmy.
