I am so fatigued with so much negativity that happens in the world and in my personal life as well. I have become numb to the topics I used to care such as politics, equal rights, environment and so on: I just want my day to end and that’s it. I don’t think I’m depressed tho (I used to and I know what it is like).
I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.
Get off all social media you can.
On the social media you can’t, block anything politics and news related. They are designed to keep your attention with psychological triggers.
Start a hobby, reading is cheap to get into assuming you have a library. Drawing with pen and paper, colouring in books. Honestly anything that takes you away from a screen.Also start a physical hobby if you can. Exercise, besides the mental benefits, is going to be a more powerful distraction than anything intellectually adjacent IMO.
Ideally, outside, in nature. This too has been shown to have mental health benefits. Go walk in the woods.
Honestly nothing brings me back down to earth and resets (almost) all my stress and worries like spending time in a forest
Trees are awesome they deserve so much more respect, theyve been around for so much longer than us just chilling making oxygen and a habitat
Spotting wildlife is also entertaining
The sound is critical for me, pure nature noises, no human geberated crap like cars or yelling or construction or whatever
Nature is extremely unhurried which is so radically opposite of almost every aspect of modern life that it’s like finally get a breath of air to be able to immerse yourself in a setting that isn’t manically trying to get your attention.
Or take your money just for existing
I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey’s fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.
Get off all social media you can
This means Lemmy and the greater Fediverse too. It’s nice being part of a network of people that share similar views on things but damn this place can be depressing. Kind of just a byproduct from the state of the world but humans weren’t designed to be aware of every horrible thing happening on this planet
It’s better if you limit your feed to subscribed communities. Not perfect, but without that it’s like a hundred negativities per minute.
You can also set up word filters in a lot of the Lemmy apps. Filtering words like Trump for example will remove a lot of negative content from your feed, especially since people are bad to post about him in specifically non-political communities.
Today I was about to post on here about basically the same thing, and, well, I don’t know, I guess I want to talk or at least write it out. I’ve been blanket blocking politics and news ever since Trump got elected - as black and white as it gets. If a sub I see says “Trump”, it is blocked, and that is also applied everywhere else, including people I used to interact with. I completely left TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and mostly left Reddit, because I thought it would make me feel better. Between here and Reddit my blocklist probably has multiple hundreds of places that do nothing but wallow in misery or post about how everything sucks. Long story short I’m way less on social media now.
Anyway, it didn’t make it better. I’m still on here, occasionally, and now I’m finding that I also fucking hate it; everyone sounds miserable, no one is kind to themselves, there is a lot of hostility in general in relation to a bunch of severely inconsequential stuff—like serious heated arguments about which flavour of sponsored diarrhoea is less disgusting when consumed—I’ve even started noticing it in myself hanging out here. What I realised is that all the platforms I’ve left, I did so because they went to shit and lost any semblance of what I liked them for. It would’ve been fine if it was one facet, but it’s fucking everything, everywhere, and all at once, IRL and online.
Everything is invented, perfected, sometimes repeated and remembered, gentrified, commodified, sold for a profit, repackaged, dropshipped, consumed, regurgitated, optimised, dopamine fracked (shameless self promotion), ran through ChatGPT, summarised by Claude, and then I get to interact with it - maybe. If I subscribe for $9.99/wk. Just… so many things have become like that, it’s insufferable to ingest and even harder to create, because you have to meet that standard if you want the herd to see you, and for me creating for no audience at all is no fun, and empty proclamations of “just create!” help very little.
I have about a billion different hobbies (ADHD) and they don’t help or pay off at all, maybe just to distract myself and burn time faster, but there’s no enjoyment anymore. Everything kind of sucks there too.
And taking myself away from screens only serves to make me feel even worse - here a lot of my friends and a lot of my hobbies live one way or another; that’s why I used to love computers. Out there, people hate me for being gay, I have to mask constantly, and I faint from the summer heat. And now I can’t even love computers in peace at home, because even they have been mercilessly slopped by our sacreligious overlords.
I don’t feel depressed - I have a great job, friends, money, stuff, hobbies, social norms say I’m not really supposed to be depressed with all of that anyway. But I’m really struggling to actively enjoy anything anymore, and I’m honestly beginning to think it’s not me but everything else lol, as egotistical as that is. Except it’s not just me, it’s very prevalent - everyone knows everything sucks, and that’s another reason everything keeps sucking even harder. Oh well. I enjoyed writing this, a little, for a moment.
Sorry for rambling.
A similar option is to split your social media accounts in two. Keep everything political on one account, only dive into that account occasionally/rarely.
For your main account, keep it subscribed to all of your hobbies and unsubscribe from anything political. For this account switch your news feed into “uplifting news” feeds.
Gotta find your way back to this vibe. There’s a lot of good out there, a lot to be grateful for. And on a long term timescale the world is in many ways better than ever before on important stuff like infant mortality.
Stop reading the news. You rarely if ever get any information that will change your decisions anyway.
Get off any social media or other that feeds you negativity.
Stop reading the news.
And read Rolf Dobelli’s great essay about why this is such a good thing to do:
Coming off his tenth point (news as status)I’ve long suspected that news just functions as kind of salacious gossip on the whole. I’ve got a pet theory it’s something to do with propping up the petty bourgeoisie mindset to prop up the bourgeoisie on the whole… Something about how the breathless engagement with and production of said gossip encourages values like the hard work of staying informed, having an individualised curated intake, the dispassionate observation of it all…
I find that 99% of the negativity is online. Interacting with people in person is way more pleasant and upbeat. And basically on youtube ignore all videos with clickbait titles like “We were Wrong about [whatever] - and it’s NOT GOOD!”, they’re all bullshit.
Hosting one or two regular game nights a week in my house has made a world of difference in my attitude.
I couldn’t agree more. Generally I’m only down on the world when I look at Reddit. It’s important to have a community of real people in rotation.
Moving to Lemmy helped because I only see what I subscribe to and there is no algorithm that is shoving politics in my face constantly.
I feel like Lemmy is like 90% snide remarks or sarcastic comments, not exactly upbeat here either. Depends on your subreddits (sublemmies?) of course
People have a psychological disposition to latch on to negative ideas faster than positive ones so it makes sense that negative ideas are more viral online
I wonder if that’s a survival mechanism - to dwell on negative events more because they’re more dangerous. My parents, raised during the Great Depression, were always thinking the next one could be right around the corner.
It has to be.
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“On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”
If you’re noticeably weird in some way, any way, IRL can be harsh. On the internet, there’s more hostility total, but it’s not usually directed at you.
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speak for yourself. i fine way more negatively, that is way more intense, in person than I do online.
at least online I can find a diversity of opinions, references to facts, and can ignore/block people without consequence.
and i largely share most of my political beliefs with my fellow IRL, I just don’t… share their vitriolic hate of people who are different than themselves. or their incessant need to ‘correct’ other people of their ‘ignorance’
god i can’t even like go to a cafe or a bar for a drink anymore without people around me incessantly going on about stuff like this, even if I’m not directly involved. the narcissism and nastiness is just everywhere in my community, but I do live in a very affluent place full of folks who have zero humility.
Yeah, type of crowd really matters. I mean, they all suck in some way, we’re only human. But not necessarily that exact way.
I’ve radically cut my news intake and it’s helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what’s happening. There’s that famous quote about how “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy” and I try to hold on to it.
Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.
However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it’s just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I’ve no interest in.
Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.
I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk’s soon to be trillionaire status (don’t ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for ‘lefty tears’ and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I’d like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.
Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don’t consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there’s a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever have a government that has any real decency or compassion at it’s core.
Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengage from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that’s the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.
Go skate
Summertime is skate time, baby. Still kick flipping in my almost-forties! 🤝
Hell ye
I prefer dancing but the idea is the same
Some people call doing meth ice skating, and I support OP ice or roller skating rather than going and doing meth, but I support OP going and doing meth rather than continuing to doom scroll their devices.
Me too! It’s exhausting, and the most frustrating part is that it’s contagious. Generally, this means it’s time for me to turn off my phone and go outside in the sunshine and watch a soccer game. I dunno what your “watch a soccer game” is, but things like riding a bike or walking in a park or dangling your legs in the ocean definitely qualify. Mostly, the idea is to remind myself there are good things too, and to remember that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
Get off social media and avoid the negative people in your life as much as you can for a bit. Read some books. Play a chill video game. Make something. Just get away from it for a while so you can re-center yourself.
Things are bad and we should be worried about them but there’s only so much any of us can do about it. If you don’t take care of yourself and your mental health you’re not going to be able to do good for anyone else when the time comes.
You can start by trying to stare at this painting for 10 minutes, and tell me what you experience.
Dickbutt? Loss? Come on, there must be something hiding in there…
The real horror starts when you notice the cross above the painting. Specifically, someone anointed it with oil, and it won’t go away from the walls anymmore.
of course anointed oil wouldn’t work it’s an oil painting. you need holy water because oil and water don’t mix
We had this priest draw crosses with holy oil, and it stayed om the walls. It reminds me of that game called Faith.
So, my parents are fundamentalist Orthodox nutjobs.
This is why I hike
To look at paintings?
Is mindfulness what you’re getting at?
I can’t do negative rn, might as well share something that brings peace?
Whenever someone asks me are you watching the news?
No fuck that shit.
But don’t you care?
I only care about shit I can control.
Same thing you do when anything else is fatigued, you rest. Take a break from all that stuff. You are not the savior of the world and everything will not fall apart because you stopped paying attention for a little while.
I’m sure you’ve had other hobbies, get back into those. Play some games, watch some movies, read a book (not about those topics), get some exercise if you aren’t already. If it creeps up in the back of your mind to go look at the news or whatever, that’s fine just ignore it, it’ll go away. Do stuff so that you’re enjoying your time and wanting more of it rather than just waiting for the day to end.
Touch grass. Leave your phone home and go outside and enjoy nature. Go on a hike. Stop reading the news, any news, for a while, you will be fine.
Figure out why you feel compelled to constantly look first because there’s a variety of reasons why we can be stuck in a rut. Mine was indoctrinated into me. 1990’s school and family taught me to feel shame for not keeping up with current events. My dad seemed to think it was his duty to watch cable news.
Your reason(s) could be different. I had to learn that disconnecting isn’t shameful and isn’t actually harmful. I’m a peasant with very minority progressive points of view in Alberta. I can’t really affect very much at all with knowledge not even through voting under a FPTP system. Nothing peaceful anyways and anything else is taboo still since things haven’t declined far enough yet. If my mood is particularly sour, I can disconnect entirely up until I have to make a potentially important decision. Then, I already know where to go looking to get caught up on relevant information immediately. You would too, I’m sure you’re well practiced.
I replaced corporate algorithms and content aggregators with RSS feeds for news. I replaced short form video content with nothing since I don’t think there’s a healthy form of it. I lost word of mouth information especially when it comes to entertainment and local activist information. That’s replaced with email newsletters. Took a lot of time to set up but I feel locally connected in a healthier way now.
I word filter Fediverse. Not always, just when I feel burn out. I can with this instance or I could use an app for Lemmy based instances lacking the feature. I have a separate browser extension called FilterBubble for platform agnostic filtering. Again, I toggle my lists on and off depending on my mood. I don’t sub to too many meme or news communities here, peace of mind. My RSS feeds are higher quality and match my tastes. I really don’t need to see anything posted by media owned by American billionaires or Post Media. Stuff like that.
I’ve started reading instead of scrolling in my phone. And it’s helped a lot tbh.
I’m in the acceptance stage of grief; the world is a shithole. Some people will tell you about all the good in the world, but that is just being dismissive of the bad. Good does not simply cancel out the bad, especially when the recipients of the good and bad are different.
Instead, I try to focus on the things that I actually can change. If you have the means, volunteer or donate to a cause that is important to you.
Focus on the micro rather than the macro, otherwise it gets overwhelming.
