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.
Learning more about socialism gave me hope for the future.
I sort of feel the opposite. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s only possible to fully achieve through violence and power, and I can’t morally support that happening, there are good people on both sides.
You can get a mix of socialism that helps band-aid the problems caused by capitalism, but the root of the problem is still there.
I don’t consider something like a general strike to be violent. It could definitely result in violence by the ruling class against the working class, especially when they bring cops into the mix, but then the working class will look even better in the public eye.
I like the MLK Jr. idiology.
I, too, find striking the balance between staying informed and protecting myself from negativity to be daunting, disheartening, and frequently unrealistic.
What helped me was my coincidental transition to services that have little or no “algorithmic” influence, such as switching to Lemmy/Mastodon. It requires me to be more intentional with my willing exposure to content, at the cost of being less convenient to find new content.
Like, I don’t get as many new songs in my playlists since I jumped out of Spotify. It means I need to get creative in order to try new artists, but I’m not hitting the skip button as much, either.
I’m perfectly happy with it being harder to find new content. Finding new content online usually just results in more scrolling and more consumption from me. If I try something new/expand my horizons into something that isn’t just trying a new game or watching a new video, if I do something new to me that isn’t just consumption, it’s usually as a result of talking with people in the real world. For me, finding new content online tends to give me zero benefits and more wasted time. I assume you are not the same and new content is actually useful for you?
I will say that Lemmy and the like aren’t the most useful unless you curate it, although this may vary per instance. I had to go out of my way to block Politics and similar communities here on Beehaw, and am about to go block the Technology community too. I usually spend more time rabbitholing into doom than I should as a result of what I see on Technology.
A lot of the news going on in the world doesn’t affect your life every day. That’s my reasoning. But it’s good to know what’s going on and file it away.
