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.
“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.