Submitted 3 weeks ago by nikoo@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
If possible at all, of course.
It helps a lot that the assholes are not doing well. The Epstein thing has made it easier to breathe.
Going to protests helps too. The energy of the crowd really feels good and assures me that the people are on my side.
its all about setting your boundaries being able to say thats enough for today. being able to ask yourself if what you are listening to is new facts being relayed to you or is it speculation to fill air and stop listening if it’s the latter.
Activism, contributing to your community, making the world a better place. The crazy-making part is that you know it’s crap, and that you feel like you have no agency to make it better, right? Well, doing something to make the world better makes it feel more tolerable, even if the bit that you’re working on isn’t related to the specific badness that you’re paying attention to on the news right now.
And yeah, there’s always the possibility that what you’re doing backfires, or has no effect, but if you don’t do anything at all, then there’s no possibility of having a good effect. Also, obviously no one normal person can fix everything, you just pick a bit that seems suited for you and work on that.
Second the hell out of this. It can take a lot out of you emotionally, and you need to take breaks, but I feel so much better when I’m among others who are also working to make positive change.
I’m not. Homeless, trans, old, disabled. I am the fuckin news. I take my meds and do my best to keep an even keel but sanity is long gone. LOL @ DOOMSCROLLING wtf eat good and enjoy your pillow and hug your friends if you still got any. its not your fault. i love you. be safe everybody.
Because there’s always a possible path out of the forest…
Sometimes the path gets dark, sometimes it changes directions.
But there’s always a path thru it.
Sometimes you need an up-armored Komatsu D355A to cut that path through the forest.
Oh yeah, the Heemeyer variant model. Solid choice. Really solid choice.
That tracks
I ignore the news, because I’m probably dying withing a few years, so I’m just chillin’ and enjoying whatever’s left.
Don’t need to make depression worse, I’m not a politician, I can’t change anything.
I’m not a cis white dude (I’m Chinese-American), its not my fight. Like what am I supposed to do? Protest, get a lot of attention from the government, and then get labeled a “CCP Spy” get set to some gulag. Then they’ll raid Chinatown and pillage everything. Then some of the first-gen inmigrants are gonna go on wechat and blame me for “stirring the pot”. I mean, can you imagine if Thomas Matthew Crooks was a gay black guy? It would’ve been so much worse. So much scapegoating. If I do anything, they’ll just scapegoat everyone that looks like me.
So good luck y’all, my health is deteriorating, don’t have the brain energy to take action, and I’ve already accepted death, literally hurts my brain to think.
The news is primarily billionaire propaganda. It does not add value to your life. When it’s important you’ll hear about it, and then you can read up. You don’t have to be the first to know. Nothing bad will happen to you for being less informed.
Good news readers can help you get lots of the content you want with only a quick passing glance at the headlines so you can still carry a conversation/contemplate the inescapability of this planet
If somebody talks about world news or politics, I’d rather drop the conversation. Willful ignorance is about maintaining a good state of mind, and that includes not talking to some people about such topics.
I try to read an equal amount of theory and history as I do news. Context is everything. When you read about these bastards doing evil deeds, read too about Mussolini hanging from a bridge. I enjoy learning about coups perpetrated by the CIA last century (there’s 70 of them) and all the horrendous fallout it caused so that I can taunt nationalists with facts about the nature of the empire that they’re only just now recognizing.
News is only a part of the process. Theory, praxis, cadre, in equal parts.
That’s the neat part. I don’t. I’m depressed as fuck.
And how does keeping up with current world events help you in that situation?
If something like 911 happens again you’d find out anyway, just an hour later that you would now.
I’m not being paid to care about all that benign bullshit so I don’t anymore
Because I don’t think sticking my head in the sand is good either. Besides, it’s not just abstract far away things that are bothering me. A lot of what depresses me in my personal life is connected to the broader problems we face as a society. I kind of can’t ignore that if I want to make sense of my own life. That doesn’t stop it from feeling hopeless, but the alternative isn’t really an option even if I didn’t care about others.
I was depressed before I kept up on current and past events.
You don’t.
I read news once a week and this is it
Nihilism. Everything is terrible and there’s nothing you can do about it. Take care of yourself, enjoy what you can while you still can and don’t have kids.
I’ve figured that I can either be informed or happy. Not both.
Slow news. Literally nothing is “breaking” these days unless you’re juggling stocks and you dont really need to know news as soon as possible.
Check out www.slow-journalism.com
That’s a great idea, but quarterly bews is a bit too slow for my taste. Right now I’m mostly getting by on the sunday summaries.
I’m not sane I take my meds I only pay attention to non sensational news (Reuters,NPR,AP) I spend time with loved ones I have no interest in associating with conservatives.
One day at a time and knowing that at some point I will no longer exist.
It’s tough. Stick to AP, Reuters if you can afford it. The entire news environment is pretty crazy right now though. I think once the US gets through Trump the rest of the world might calm down some and we can all relax a little bit.
Thing is I look at start of obama to end and how long it takes to get back to where we could be and at this point it takes much longer than how long things were degrading. Biden did a crazy amount of stuff in his term and it still did not get through what trump messed up in his first term. Then take the lighning fast pace of destruction with all the federal agencies. Getting those to where they were is not going to be easy. So muhc lost institutional knowledge. Unless the right loses so much support it becomes completely inconsequential and we have a decade or more of relatively sensible policies I just don't see a relaxation point.
Yes, 100%
But we have to get through it or the biggest power left in the world becomes a shithole country. We can’t get him out and just have to endure.
I’ll be here after Trump and I hope you are too.
This is exactly the problem and how we go into this mess in the first place. When we read terrible things are happening, instead of getting mad and doing something we choose to ignore it and pretend it’s not happening. That allows the terrible people to keep doing whatever they want.
Sure, it’s easier to ignore it now for your mental health, but when things get even worse, you’ll be worse off too. It’s worth some stress and pain now to prevent even more in the future.
If you don’t like what you read in the news, organize and take action. Don’t bury your head in the sand. It won’t get better on its own.
Are those who are well adjusted to a unjust world really the sane ones?
Realise u have no control over 99.999% of it and remember their is no point worrying about shit u can’t control.
Yes
There's a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I'll just dump some of that here.
First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn't part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.
When you feel you want to be more informed about what's currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you're not ready for it.
Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn't truly new to us, whether that's following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.
If you're reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you're reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you're consuming when you consume it.
A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn't matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you've never heard of. Sure, it's news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?
And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there's a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.
I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is "Action is the antidote to despair." Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren't changing.
You've done everything you can to know what's going on, and yet what's going on isn't getting any better. There's no point being informed if it doesn't help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you're able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don't agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.
I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I'd informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?
Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don't feel bad when you can't, we're all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.
And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we're aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don't beat yourself up over how little you're capable of doing as an individual. It's like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.
Don't doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don't beat yourself up when things don't change overnight. Just do what you can. You've got this.
Alcoholism.
I’ll cheers to that
Happy cake day! Celebrate with a drink
I block most news sources and get the jist of events via memes.
What has helped me is realizing that I could literally be a federal judge right now–hell, maybe even a Supreme Court justice, a Senator, whatever. And even if that were the case, there’s no guarantee I could single-handedly address any of the bullshit happening. It helps me feel better when I feel like I “need” to be trying to fix the entire world.
Sometimes its ok to skip a day off news. If I’m feeling beat up just from my normal day I might not have the endurance to take in the news too. So I skip it on those days.
I have a large broken chest freezer I climb into, I shut the lid and scream
So thats how ice cream is made!
This is crazy, but i read the news on paper. I have a couple of subscriptions to magazines with good reporting, but you could also hit up your library to read for free. For one thing, print journalism is a lot more in-depth and balanced than the outrage-mill crap i find online.
On Lemmy i read headlines only in case something happens that i stay current, but i rarely read a whole article. This contains my news consumption to a small portion of my day.
Plus, Trump says 64 stupid lthings a week. I read all 64 in 1 hour each week and get it over with, instead of poisoning myself with it several times a day.
My philosophy is: “if everyone behaved like I did, would we have any/this problem?” and if the answer is no, I’m fine.
The thing is that many people see injustice in the world and want to fix it now, which means forcing other people to not be assholes. But the problem with forcing other people to do/think something is that it doesn’t generally work, at least not without causing a massive amount of suffering in the other direction. Everyone generally thinks they’re the good guy of the story, no matter how much evil they do. They think the evil is necessary to stop other, more evil things.
Like for example, Israelis think that Muslims wanna wipe them out, and so it’s only good to wipe these evildoers out first… And exactly the same thoughts happen in the other direction. At this point, it doesn’t matter anymore who started it. Both sides wanna stop the other side from doing more evil, and this attempt to stop is creating more evil.
Doesn’t have to be so severe though. Could just be parents forcing their child to eat their veggies. Eating their veggies is good, and so you might think the parent is doing the right thing of forcing their child to eat it. But, most often, all that happens is that the child will forever hate eating veggies and as soon as it’s away from the parents, never eat veggies again. Until they turn adult and learn for themselves that eating veggies is good, and try to do it, but the trauma of being forced is hard to reverse.
And that example is our constant state of existence with basically everything.
Everyone wants to force everyone else to do/not do something, and even if one side is right, the action of forcefully trying to change someone else usually backfires in some way. Force doesn’t need to be physical force btw, shame (mental pain) is also a kind of force.
I’m not saying you should turn the other cheek to everything. That force should never be stopped with force. I’m just saying that most of the time, you can’t make other people change their ways. But you can always completely change your own ways. And if everyone did that, we’d actually have no problems anymore. But most of the time, people start trying to fix problems in others before they fixed their own, and that is almost a complete waste of energy.
Of course, that philosophy doesn’t stop injustices from happening right now. But it gives a peace of mind in some way. If you are truly convinced that if everyone was like you, the world would be a nice place, then you can be content, at least with yourself.
Honestly, this is only part of the answer, there is more to answering your question fully, but I don’t wanna write more right now. If you want to know more, let me know.
Yeah the more people who deal with their own stuff, the better everything gets. It’s the foundation for everything else.
Great point about trying to make other people do stuff by violence (right) and shame (left). Violence is far worse than shame; both are us trying to make other people do stuff instead of working on our own crap.
Well I for sure fuck ain’t
You can only decide what you yourself do. Yep that’s one of those truths that you only get once you experience it. The saying I personally use is that… drinking poison one.
But about kids though? Those you have to decide for. It’s hard to explain until you’ve had one. They have autonomy, yes, and it’s absolutely great to let them try and fail half an hour to put on shoes, but at several points throughout the day you absolutely need to decide what they do.
This makes many people slip into educational and fostering roles here and there. Many boomers got drunk with power when it was their turn, but overall they improved on the whole beating kids until they obey or whatever
Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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