If possible at all, of course.
I realised long ago that the human brain is not capable of handling everything that’s happening all around the world, all the time. I’m selective about what media I consume and I make extensive use of blocklists for things that aren’t my fight.
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.
I went insane already in the early 2000s, when I realised nobody gave a shit about climate change and ecological destruction and nothing I could say or do made people understand or care. I had a good chuckle when the whole Greta-thing happened and suddenly more people cared, even though we’ve known this is happening for decades now. Too little, too late. There’s always war and genocide going, now we just know it’s happening in real time. Knowing changes nothing, we don’t learn from history, too few care and those who do get in power too rarely for any lasting change to happen.
I was about to kill myself for the first time in 2013 and honestly I should just have done it, it’s the decision I now regret the most in my life. I already died that day anyway, I have just been sort of lingering remnant after that, barely a person anymore. At least my parents could have had a decade to grieve me, now I’ve just dragged more people to care about me and will hurt them as well with my death. My suffering has just gotten worse and worse together with my physical and mental health; sometimes thing not only don’t get better, but just get worse. I don’t even know how I’m still here, probably just out of spite and lack of access to handguns. Eventually I’ll get to see what will manage to end me first, my body or my mind, I don’t even know which one is leading the race.
To conclude my insane and personal rant: not everyone can get a happy ending. Enjoy and do good if you still can
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 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.
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.
I gloat at the odd Epstein article but I don’t read everything. I don’t need to know all that. If you want to keep your sanity in times like these you gotta live in the moment. Enjoy every little thing like it’s the first time you’re experiencing it. Keep your worries to what you can control. And don’t try to control things you can’t. It’s actually easier to learn this while times are tough.
I don’t consume a lot of content from mainstream news sites, and that helps. Those agencies, like major social media sites, are designed to piss you off and keep your eyes glued to ads.
Most of my news exposure is through Lemmy or Mastodon, through which I can automate the curation of my feed and I don’t see things that are going to rile me up as much; and therefore, I only see things that might rile me up when it’s my intention to do so.
50% is recycling old garbage, 30% is things that don’t affect you in any way, 15% is nice to know but it wouldn’t change your life if you didn’t know, 3% is actually newsworthy and affects you, rest is weather.
There’s a lot of it you can just tune out
Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s not actually new.
“oh Israel is still doing its genocide. Yeah, they would, no one is bothering to stop them. Don’t give me details. Let me know if something CHANGES”
The “news” cycle has a way of always finding further details on what is actually very old information, and those details serve you, the reader, no purpose other than creating emotional distress.
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.
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.
By looking at it from a larger perspective. You can always get worked up about things but if you zoom out, you see that most of it is just a temporary trend. Some things trend well, some trend poorly, but these tend to be blips in the span of a lifetime.
Especially when comparing with the past you will see that things really aren’t all that bad in general.
That’s a great way to look at it if you’re coming from a place of privilege where it doesn’t affect you directly. The Palestinians don’t get to say “it’s just a trend”. It’s not just a trend for the immigrants being rounded up in concentration camps. Or for the homeless and mentally ill Trump has just declared will also be rounded up. And for the LGBTQ who are soon to follow.
And the destruction of the environment we all rely on to survive isn’t “just a trend”.
You’re only able to have the luxury of thinking it’s a trend because it hasn’t affected you. Yet.
Ok, sure. I do want to point out that I simply answered the question. I don’t deny my state of luxury yet also don’t feel that this bout of whataboutism is entirely warranted.
