There’s so much doom on social media right now. The environment is collapsing. The economy will crash. Civil rights are ending. Democracy is dead.
What keeps you going? Why do you still get up and go do what needs to be done when the world seems to be ending around us?
By avoiding social media and living my life through memes and video games.
There is a theory that natural human psychology wasn’t made to handle all of the world’s atrocities. People experience a “bad news burnout” because some of us constantly feel disappointed in humans as a race by hearing/seeing sociopathic behavior on an international level every day.
I think I just hit that wall. This thread is fucking depressing. There’s happiness and hope out there, but it seems you won’t find it on social media, I guess. Negativity bias seems more prevalent on Lemmy than others.
There’s a reason why it’s common for people to occasionally want to camp out in the middle of nowhere with no technology for a bit. If I read about some horrible news like a grandma getting shot picking olives on her own land I try to follow it up with something more lighthearted such as kittens hugging puppies. Like eating pickled ginger as a pallette cleanser between sushi.
Negativity drives more clicks so therefore is more profitable for reporting KPI.
I block any C that is news, local regional things, political, or US centric. That seems to kill off most negatively in a platform.
Running on hope isn’t sustainable in this world, you gotta run on spite!
Find a small corner of the world you can improve and focus on that. Can only effect what you can. Not worth worrying about the other stuff.
As hokey as it sounds 🤷♂️
Study of history.
People have been prophesying the end times for millennia now, for this reason or that reason. I think that ultimately they just don’t like the basic fact that change of some sort or another is inevitable in the world, it will not remain static and no system or institution will last forever. This does not result in any concrete end, however.
To quote Morpheus, “I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.”
There’s also a fair bit of profit-driven exaggeration in just how bad things really are in certain arenas. Bad news makes good clickbait, good/neutral news less so. So the ratio of bad to good news we receive is not actually representative of the full picture of what is happening in the world.
Over the past few weeks, I realized that I wasn’t reading the news to “stay informed,” I was reading it because I was bored. As a form of entertainment, it’s pretty awful. 99% of what I read will have no direct impact on me or my family, and just sitting there and worrying about it without doing anything to fix it serves nobody.
Also, I’ve learned to be skeptical of basically every headline good or bad. I saw a headline this week about how upset Trump supporters were with his cabinet picks. Comments in the thread were talking about leopards eating faces. The article was a collection of 8 tweets from supporters showing disapproval.
This news site was just preying on people’s hopes and making a story out of absolutely nothing.
So I started focusing on some personal hobbies and have tried to re-teach myself how to focus by reading some long form fiction.
