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.
As a cisgender, asexual Asian woman I don’t experience most of the oppression I’m “supposed” to and functionally share the experience of a cishet white guy. This is what everyone is supposed to have, a privileged experience, and yet I’ve managed to feel bad about not having more problems which is incredibly fucked up.
I’m not sure what the activists are doing that focuses on guilt-tripping you instead of actually helping the underserved and oppressed. The point is for those in a position to help to help others, not to tell the people in a position to help to feel bad about themselves for being well-off/unoppressed enough to be able to help. My sympathies that that happened to you. I always thought that was more online behavior that would disappear in real life, but I suppose I forgot that as much as people would like to think otherwise, nasty people online sometimes get off the keyboard and do things in the real world—they “touch grass” just as much as normal people.
