Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
Of course we’re fucking tired of the constant negativity! But that’s because the reality is negative, so WTF is the alternative? Are you suggesting we should be delusional instead?
Objectively the world is a much better place than it was even 30 years ago. Child mortality rate, global education, life expectancy, extreme poverty and many more are subjects that have seen drastic improvements and will continue to get better. The reality is, apart from a few cases, that the world is much better than it was and it will keep getting better. And unless a new world war comes in, nothing will stop this progress.
Most of those things were built on cheap oil and a stable climate, which means they were borrowed and now the bill is coming due.
We have to pivot to sustainable technologies ASAP – fighting the entrenched business interests all the way, mind you – or all of those advancements will be lost.
Climate change will destroy our civilisation unless we act quickly enough (and some of the damage is already baked in). So it’s simply not a given that society will continue to get better, that’s really up to governments and their people to make it happen.
He’s suggesting balancing the content. If all you read is terrible, outrage inducing news, yes, you’re life is far worse off. It’s outside our your sphere of influence and reading the same news for the third time won’t make you more informed.
The only thing it will do is make you feel angry, helpless, and less understanding of nuance. Keep it going for longer enough and, congratulations, you’ve radicalized yourself.
I don’t mind the idea of being radicalized, as long as I’m on the right side of history.
🤦♀️
💯👌⚡️
That’s some ironically-“negative” spin for “breaking you out of your complacency.”
You’re out of line pal !
Most things in the world are better than they ever have been and they are still constantly improving. Internet and social media just points a huge spotlight on the things we still need to work on and ironically social media itself is one of those things. We’ll never run out of negative things to pay attention to. Never. Doomscrolling to the point of mental exhaustion and sense of helplessnes is only making things worse. We all need to touch grass. The real world is not like social media tries to convince us.
This is mostly a you problem though. The world has always been fucked and will always be fucked. That’s life, but not your life. You need to worry more about you, your happiness, your mental well being. You need to let go of the thought that your happiness depends on the world. You could literally be living in a warzone and be happy. People do that. Sure there will be rough days, maybe more than happy days, but people will find happiness no matter what. They find it in themselves or in eachother or in the work they do. You need to find the things that matter to you.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw
Well yes, but you don’t have to feel shit while doing it, is what I’m trying to say. If you are capable of doing something to change the world, than that fits into the “you” perspective. If you aren’t capable to do anything, it doesn’t fit in the “you” perspective. But if you feel personally involved with the world problems and are not able to influence it. You need to change something so you either get some influence somehow or feel less involved, if not, you’re gonna feel a lot of shittyness for nothing.
And it foesn’t really matter which side you go. Both will have a positive effect on your wellbeing.
I don’t, though. Not everybody reacts to the negativity in the same way, in terms of letting it affect their mood.
A controversial character that shall remain unnamed once said:
being delusional is better than being mentally ill.
What does being mentally ill have to do with anything? That’s a false dichotomy.
What the “constant negativity” should be doing is galvanizing you into action to try to fucking fix shit!
Should. But is it? I don’t think so. It’s just paralyzing and making us all feel miserable.
Hold the door open for a granny. Pick up a trash from the street. Look the cashier into eyes, smile and say thank you. Now you’ve already had a bigger positive impact in the world than a year worth of complaining and doomscrolling online does.
Speak for yourself. Outside of Lemmy, my biggest hobby is bike/ped/transit and zoning reform activism.
It is not a false dichotomy though.
Being mentally healthy and well integrated does not require you to live in a perfect, just and balanced universe. It requires you using all the cognitive, psychological and philosophical tools at your disposal to deal with the universe on its own terms.
Keeping yourself depressed for the sake of “not being deluded” is in itself a mental illness symptom, and only has negative consequences for everyone.