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.
Negativity and wedge issues sell. Keep your head up and don’t let them play you out. It’s all for money or power …or both. I think people just never wanted to see how dark reality is and now it’s showing how naive the common person is to the evil in the world.
It’s like all the horrible things they played out to be history or entertainment are actually real and that we were just told it’s all in the past so “tHeY” could keep us subservient with a false sense of security.
Every time I see people try to blame the media on this, I look at my medical bills, I look at my bank account, I look at the temperature, I look at the cost of housing, I look at the vacant seats where my coworkers sat before they were let go, I look at the election results, I look at my sister who had her right to an abortion stolen, I look at the hateful people that vandalized my trans partner’s car…
And I think, damn…the media sure has some real reach, don’t they? They’re really going all out to make me miserable. I mean, this is some impressive commitment to a narrative. One day I’m gonna break free and live in this reality where “Everything is fine, actually” with the rest of you but first I gotta figure out how the media has me in the Truman Show situation.
the media sure has some real reach, don’t they?
I mean, yeah pretty much. It’s been a few decades of sensationalism, anti-intellectualism, and capitalism-is-patriotism rhetoric, but we got here. It’s not entirely the media, but the media definitely has a huge impact.
Yeah, I can’t really put down all the bullshit in one post. When I say media that means the marketing companies that use it as tool as well. There’s a lot more to everything. Everything is so intertwined and deeply engrained. There is no good sides. All sides have good and bad. Etc… idk it’s paradox that can be investigated and thought over infinitely. …it’s life.
agreed, life is tough, but remember: we didn’t start the fire!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It doesn’t help that news corps have found that we generally respond to the negative news much more than we do positive news.
its the fight/flight response. negative news gets people afraid… literally gets their juices flowin. some people who have stopped watching faux news specifically mention the exhausting nature of the constant fear put forth by the ‘network’.
That doesn’t invalidate the negative news, though. I mean, what good news do you think they’re not reporting that makes up for the actual shit going on in the world that has a real, tangible effect on people’s lives?
"Your future is completely fucked, from finances, to freedoms, to democracy, to the damn climate itself.
But, hey, the bees are coming back. For now, at least."
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Hans Rosling - The best stats you’ve ver seen
Rutger Bregman | Where do we go from here?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
For millenials who have had it timed perfectly to get fucked over by the way of it all our entire life, and when the power is taken back it’ll skip over and be the next generation that follows… Sweet spot generation of pure fuck-assery after being promised an entirely different world. The revolution is coming… It had better. In my opiniom, the best you can do is focus on a more personally enriching life, and forget everyone else’s bullshit.
Graduated in 07. Gave all of my savings to my parents in 08 so they wouldn’t lose their house. Bumbled around for a decade and a half trying to get a degree and start my career only to get shit canned from an okay paying job mid-pandemic. Tripped over my own dick in to a great paying union job. Currently working too much overtime and saving every dime I can because I’ve seen enough shit.
There have been many times in history when things have been far worse, so no, it’s not the worst. But many things are in decline right now. Democracy, digital privacy, trustworthiness of information, global peace, climate, the environment… humanity has to get back on track soon or the future looks pretty grim.
Go touch grass = just dont think about how the world is going to shit. lol great advice everyone
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?
Nothing borderline about their views
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
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I don’t think anyone would claim that literally going outside is gonna fix anyone’s life, or cure this broken-ass world we live in.
But the sentiment isn’t wrong.
It means: Take some time for yourself. Enjoy the small things. Exercise. Feel the sun on your face. Leave your phone in your pocket, and stop doomscrolling. See the world in your own terms, not the terms others want to force upon you.
It helps. You can’t change the whole world, but you can change yourself.
I live in Scotland, I haven’t seen the sun since I went on vacation over a year ago!
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Hooray! 🙌🏻
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.
I think on a global scale we are all dealing with unresolved trauma from the pandemic, related catastrophes and the general economic roller coaster that we all live in every day. The severity of the pandemic lessened over time but there was no definite point where it ended and we all got to go “Wasn’t that nuts? Is everyone doing okay?” Instead it was just a slow crawl back to business as usual. We feel like we shouldn’t complain because it could be a lot worse but all of the other non-pandemic problems still exist and nothing seems to indicate that things will ever get better.
It’s not just you that feels this way, but that doesn’t mean things are hopeless. There are a lot of people out there fighting tooth and nail to build a better future in spite of all the challenges. Try to find a way to improve the world in your own small way. It really goes a long way to quieting those feelings of helplessness and despair.
I think you make a great point that we didn’t really get to an ending point from the pandemic trauma. For some of us, our nervous systems are still in panic mode.
But we also have the threats of climate collapse, global food and water shortages, a shift to the right or alt-right in several governments around the world, and technology being weaponized against us at an increasing rate. These threats to us are real. There are too many to list here.
To OP, please know that you are not alone. There are a lot of us who look at the state of the world and recognize the severity and criticality of these problems. My advice would be to get involved in something --anything – that helps or gives back to the community in some way. I started with donating blood. Will it change the world? No, but it helps someone, somewhere, and that helps my brain find peace.
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.
Is the statement they’re quoting incorrect?
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.
There are only about six news sources left. All the rest are simply trying to get a reaction out of you so they can sell you advertising.
There’s very little you actually need to know. You don’t need to know about what some pedo did to a kid. You don’t need to know what some celebrity thinks about Hamas. You don’t need to know which little kids got shot today because the yanks still think a 300 year old law is relevant.
Stop clicking the links.
If anything major happens, Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and a few others will let you know the facts without any opinions or speculation.
The rest is just horseshit being spewed by people who don’t have enough talent to be an actual writer, and there’s an absolute fuckton of talentless cunts out there.
Start by blocking websites that have headlines containing the word “slams” and take it from there
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!
While you have a point, if you’re scared you keep watching/reading and that benefits the companies behind pumping the fear, there is also a pretty goddamn dire situation with climate change. Things are happening much faster than they seemed to expect. Remember it used to be “we won’t have an habitable world in a few hundred years at this rate” and then it was “our children’s children are going to have a tough time,” and then it was “ what kind of world are we leaving for the next generation” and now it’s “um…this is happening.”
Scientists aren’t interested in scaring you. They’re interested in what the data suggests. And the scientists are freaking the fuck out. This is bad. And we’re not moving at 1% of the speed we should be. That really can’t be downplayed. Is this the end of life as we were promised/told it would be? I don’t mean we’re nose to nose with a mad max reality, more that we are going to start feeling pretty intense effects weather-wise, seeing the global south start to emigrate, feel the effects of a capitalism squeezing the last of our money and labor out of us because even their predictions will see profits dip when people start rioting, dying off, etc. (what they plan on doing with those profits in a dead world, I don’t know. But that’s capitalist brain for you.)
I’m just saying. We need to really consider if what we’re doing with our time is how we’d want to spend it if it were our last chance in this structure. OP, that doesn’t mean you should dive down a bottle, though. I kinda got that from the subtext of this post.
Living in the US, I see on a daily basis the indifference to climate. It’s been heavily politicized. One side cares a little, the other side does not care one bit. It’s very sad to see.
I also lived in Europe for many years where climate is less politicized and more mainstream. Most people try to do their best to contribute regardless of their political preferences. It’s a big difference to what I see in the US.
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.
"Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
