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.
I’m not saying it’s social media, but it’s social media. You’re connected to negativity 24/7. The algorithm feeds on negativity because that is what makes us stay on there.
I’ve got something to change your thinking. At least it helped me 17 years ago.
Hans Rosling - The best stats you’ve ver seen
I don’t want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we’re living our best lives at the same time.
Rutger Bregman | Where do we go from here?
And hey! I’m 43 too. You have a whole life ahead of you. You still can go in any direction you want to go in.
I don’t want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we’re living our best lives at the same time.
You are dismissing the facts, then.
You could only truly believe this if you’re a financially stable, healthy, gainfully employed, cis white man. Because for everyone else in the States at least, life is getting harder. You can cite all the statistics you like about the globe, but that’s not relevant to what people experience in their own lives.
And more importantly, the things that people are depressed about are the things that are getting worse, and on track to keep getting worse. A video about statistics in 2007 isn’t accounting for what we know in 2024 is coming in the future. The outlook is far more grim now.
People have been saying this about social media and the news for a long long time, and every single time they fail to take the context into account. People said this in 2016, too. “Your anxiety is just the media riling you up”. Then the anxiety ended up being a very accurate thing to feel, and in the years after, the real world events caused negative effects on people’s lives.
The world is not a TV show. What happens in the news, what people talk about on social media, no matter how negative it skews, those things happen in real life, not a vacuum. Many of them affect you in ways you can’t even comprehend, and many of them affect you in very obvious ways that some people just seem to want to overlook.
I was always rather politcally passive. I decided to join MERA25 this week (self proclaimed radical leftist group). Get active.
I normally avoid doomerism, but it starts feeling like the end-times here in Europe and I think it is worse at other places. Open fascists are about to take power in several federal states here in Germany this year.
Unless they pull off some kind of paramilitary overthrow of the German government (and last time I checked their co-leaders didn’t have an army of brownshirts to do their bidding) I cannot see Alternative fur Deutschland taking power in Germany. They actually lost vote share and support from other far right European parties when they spouted borderline Nazi views recently.
Reassemblement National on the other hand… Macron was stupid to call a snap parliamentary election, and if Marine Le Pen can make it to 2027 without being driven out by political scandal, she’ll probably be the next French President.
Think that the calculus is to stem the tide and activate the electorate in recognition that the EU Parliament outcomes were a surprise?
Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about good things happening), and the media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:
News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.
Edit: typo and grammar
Pinker is a neoliberal hack.
This is my first time(that I remember) hearing about this guy. How is he hack? Legitimately asking.
I see you never got a reply to your question. I am obviously biased in favour of Pinker, but my perception is that “liberal hack” (and other epithets) is a mindless insult that people throw at him when they don’t like to uplifting message that he’s communicating, but can’t find anything logically or factually wrong with his arguments or his presentation of data.
The closest I saw someone trying to have a legitimate case of showing Pinker misrepresenting reality, was the criticism of this passage (also from “Enlightenment Now”):
What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa.
(i.e. only 1% is at war)
Critics pointed out that, at the time of Pinker’s writing, the number of countries in Africa at war was X, and X divided by the number of all countries in Africa is much greater than the 1%, so clearly Pinker is lying. But firstly, the passage talks about ethnic neighbours, not countries, of which there is much more in Africa and the former Soviet Union, and secondly, there is almost always more neighbours than there is countries in any region. For example in Australia, there are 5 states, but 6 borders (pairs of neighbouring states), so if Queensland went to war with New South Wales, 60% of the states would be at peace, but 83% of pairs of neighbours would be at peace.
Edit: grammar
I mean, that’s a nice info drop, but it doesn’t really explain too much. Can you drop me a link to some of his stuff, so I can make my own mind up about it?
If you Google Steven Pinker, it should show you links to his websites, articles, and books.
I think a lot of the comments have really hit the nail on the head. Never hurts to take a step back and try to detox from the climate of negativity that inundates social media. Go out for a walk, go cycling, touch grass
I recommend not watching or reading the news. Spend your free time learning about hobbies or finding new ones, getting involved in local politics instead of national/global politics, improving yourself, and finding friends in communities around your hobby.
If you want some PC gaming friends that don’t talk about politics all the time, DM me. We’re in our late 20’s through 40’s.
i’m convinced that creating echo chamber cocoons are the reason why things are so fucked rn.
I’m not saying create an echo chamber, my advice excludes engaging with people who agree and disagree, at least when it comes to large scale politics. If someone wants to get involved in politics, I think they should avoid echo chambers and engage in good discussion. But for people who just want to or need to get away from it, disengaging entirely I think is the way to go. You can still get involved in local polics without engaging in larger politics. They often have direct impacts on your community and it varies wildly between different communities.
up until now i hated that people cocooned themselves up too much from other people’s plight; your comment made me realize that they’re merely overindulging in something pleasant, as i do.
It’s not worse today IMO, I mean the news, it’s just we’re constantly seing them, because of our smartphones & cetera.
In the nineties the toral nuclear war was also imminent and we’d not be able to live outside because of pollution @ year 2000.
To combat all that I’m getting my information myself, so I go to trusted sources and check out the state of the world in that specific matter (I have decided to follow certain topics, because I just can’t take in everything) instead of being bombarded by random clickbait horror stories (remember, news outlets needs to capture your attention Every day even if nothing happens and also gore and hate sells more).
Cheers and good luck!
You’re telling’ me. The amount if “once in a lifetime” crises I’ve experienced is too damn high. I’m going to be 30 this year and I’ll never be able to afford a house.
If it makes you feel any better I’m 40 and I’ll never afford a house either. Millennials got screwed.
No it doesn’t, you deserve a home.
Came to say, touch grass. Get a job, get busy. Clean your home (I sure need to!), tidy up your corner of the world & exert positive control over things you can control. If you can’t control it, please, don’t worry about it.
exert positive control over things you can control
Came here to say this exact thing. Getting the initial drive to get up and do something can be hard, but taking charge on something is an effective cure to> feeling helpless on what you can’t
Fuck caring about legitimate issues. Get busy for capital gainz and do not worry about the exploitation of people like yourself, ya pleb.
"Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Saiga antelope populations are recovering.
Crime rates dropping in US, multiple companies working with NASA for ISS access, direct observation of gravitational waves, left reddit for Lemmy, multiple COVID vaccines in like a year from outbreak, more usage of renewable energy sources, etc. There are some obvious problems we need to get together and address as communities, countries, and species, but there are a bunch of improvements and advancements being made too.
Everything does suck. But it will suck whether you pay attention to it or not. Unplug whenever you need to. If you’re in the US that goes double at least through the election. Also, something that really helped me out of a similar pit of despair, was finding ways to volunteer. Getting face to face with some problems you can actually do something about (i.e, feeding hungry people) is a good way to ground yourself. Good luck out there.
The news is always like this. i recommend paying attention to the toilet instead
Not everything is the worst. Just the important things.
I think if you focus on your friends, neighbours, hobbies, etc. You can find peace within the enshittification. But I think it’s a bad idea to ignore the shit. Get mad about it. You should be mad. It’s bullshit. But what then? We can wallow in the shit by ourselves, or we can find groups of people with similar interests. Who knows what happens after.
And by similar interests I mean this as an example: Are you pissed about genocide? Good! You should be! Others are too. Find them, and do something about it. You’ll build relationships that will at least help carry you through the shit.
Yes, yes it has
