I’m 43, almost 44, years old and went through a bought of alcoholism during the early part of the pandemic. I went through treatment and have been fine since. However, I can’t help but feel that all the news in the last few months is just the worst. Between the AI bullshit, the wars, the effects of capitalism, and the political situation in general it’s just the worst. Is it just me or have other folks noticed the same trend?
Edit: I should have also mentioned the enshitification of everything tech related.
Edit 2: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. For some more context, yes I’m American and live in a state that’s about to ban the wearing of masks in public. I haven’t had a drink in over year and have been in therapy for 3 years. I don’t watch any news sources and rarely read media websites. But yet, that information seeps into my life somehow. I donate blood, I make charitable donations, and try to live a good life. I have 2 amazing kids and a great wife. It’s just hard to not end up in a doomer mindset at times. A Bitcoin company bought a power plant up here that has an existing lease to use a lake as cooling water, and it’s heated up the lake to the point that it’s killing fish.
Do you know how much better we would all be doing as a country if we had no access to “news”?
I’m sixty-two and I think one reason we feel so anxious and depressed all the time is because we have more information than we have ability to act.
Think of the myriad threats there are to the earth and humanity. If we ALL undertook to fix them together, there’s still the question of priority. We can’t do everything at once.
And most global problems require a unanimous response. Like the United Nations, if one country votes NO, you can’t make progress. So unless we plan on a global war over climate, or plastics, or AI, or humanitarian treatment of humans, it’s going nowhere.
We have elected officials who CAN effect the change that’s needed. They are trained. They have inside information that we don’t. They have access to technologies and resources we don’t. We absolutely have to make the best choices for our elected leaders that we can, and then trust them to do the right thing. But, after that, we can’t continue to let it eat us up.
I’m with Dory on this one. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.
I disagree. Back in maybe the 60s the public broadcast networks were not fully beholden to investors, did not have competition from the internet, and didn’t have to do 24 hours of news. As a result, they had time to do responsible reporting. The current power structure encourages news media to do whatever it takes to grab your attention and hold it, and the best way to do that is fear.
I have not fully cut out the news from my life. There are some channels on YouTube that do good reporting like Sir Swag and of course Phillip DeFranco.
Another thing to point out is that, assuming you are American, we are in an election year. News companies really ramp up the fear mongering on election years.
What part are you disagreeing with? We sound the same, kinda, to me.
I don’t think the amount of information is the problem, just the way it is presented to us.
IMHO, my mental health improved significantly after substituting Lemmy for Reddit and Mastodon for facebook/insta/etc. Or maybe I’ve just gotten better at being unattached to digital life and social pressure
Well, I’ll say this much.
You certainly know how to gling.
Thats a reference to a relatively famous linguistics study lol. A bunch of children were given questions such as “This is a man who knows how to gling. He is glinging. He did the same thing yesterday. Yesterday he _____.” or presenting them with a wug and then asking what the plural of wug is. The children had very consistent answers to these nonsense grammar questions, showing that grammar rules are mainly learned through experience instead of being memorized for each word.
Huh! I might have guessed that, but it’s always good to get a study to back up things.
So, “I have glinged”, or “I have glung?”