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- cross-posted to:
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Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world. Researchers say the answer isn’t to stop following current events—it’s to build healthier habits around how, when, and where we get our news.
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I use RSS now for news.
Its been so liberating. I can read offline, save articles for later, no ads or paywalls, no algorithms, no bullshit.
I highly recommend.
what’s your favourite rss aggravator?
I’ve been doing the same. The issue is finding high quality feeds with full articles. Most are just a snippet of the article with a link saying “read the full story at…” (The Verge, PBS, The Guardian). Others are even worse and just link directly to the shit-laden website (Ars Technica). The best quality news feeds I’ve found are Techdirt and The Intercept. Would you care to share some good RSS news feeds you’ve found?
My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.
“The human mind has not adapted to this level of bad news”
Sure it has, meet my brain’s healthy levels of bitter sarcasm and bitter cynicism!
Yet
I’m going to stare into the abyss until it blinks first
I feel like it kind of has.
Otherwise, people who are about 40+ years old would all be driven mad by now.
bro I just turned 40 and… it doesn’t seem far off
Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?
That and, you know, all the microplastics in there.
They make it run faster. What are computer chips made of? Duh.
/S
bad news, everyone: bad news is bad for you!
“where we get our news.”
And then they link to Reuters. LOLIn the past you didn’t get everything on earth reported to you. Now I think, “Do I really need to know 30 people died in a bus crash in Peru? What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?”
I think the bigger issue is actually more on the positive side than the negative. In a social media world, it is hard to gain esteem from realistically achievable effort.
I’ll use my hobby, woodworking, as an example. I’m a hobbiest woodworker. I’m a far better woodworker than all of my family and all except maybe one or two of my friends. But then again, all the others don’t do it as a hobby. They have their own pursuits that I can’t begin to match their skill in. I can show my works to those in my immediate circle and receive genuine admiration and praise for a job well done. My work is legitimately impressive to those around me.
But on social media? Suddenly I’m comparing myself to people who have done this all day everyday for 30 years as their profession. Or I’m comparing myself to people who present a very curated version of their work. I can’t do this full time. I have a day job. I will never be as good at this as someone who spent decades doing this and nothing but this. And if I compare myself to people like that, then it will make my own work feel less valuable.
We weren’t meant to compare ourselves to the most skilled people on Earth at every single activity and craft. We’re meant to produce things and to make things and do things that are legitimately impressive to those around us, but are still achievable with realistic effort. You shouldn’t have to spend decades doing something before you can achieve even a modicum of social esteem. That’s not how humans are evolved to exist. We’re met to live in and seek to impress relatively small groups of people.
I’d argue that it was never designed for this much stimulation full stop. All the constant noise and things competing for attention all the time around you. Bad news is just the nasty icing on the cake.
One of the reasons I LOATHE advertising. They are legitimately overstimulating all of society and manipulating their thoughts at the same time. They are in actual fact, driving the world into literal psychosis. These people are beyond evil.
I remember coming back from a long backpacking trip, totally disconnected from the media. When I got back I couldn’t stand TV, especially commercials, for a while.
The environment we have created is so fast-paced and complex that our brains are often in a constant state of overwhelm. We were never meant to be always available, always aware of everything and always caught in the belief that we have to react to everything at a time.
That should have prefaced that headline with “I hate to break it to you, but…”
I agree. Following the news is important, but it’s healthier to limit how much negative news we consume and choose reliable sources
Living the lie, by choice no less.
Its wild to see people type “this news isnt good for my mental health”. Like ignoring the planet dying is a price well paid for personal mental wellness. I guess we are doomed as a species. Its really humbling to learn our limits to change things.
The cognitive dissonance on display in this article is crazy. The idea that anyone should be concerned by the mental damaged caused by endless bad news before the impact of life in a world of bad news is just about the same as turning off smoke detectors in a fire to limit the stress they cause constantly going off (sorry I guess here it would be like asking people to build “healthier habits” about when they hear the alarm).
I think it would be more akin to your smoke detector going off anytime any other smoke detector in the world went off. Personally I probably would unplug my smoke detector if that’s how it operated. Just because it might one day alarm based on smoke in my house I’d have lost my mind and have no discernible way to tell beyond seeing or smelling the smoke myself at that point anyway.
We are talking about bad news in general. Nothing about this implys bad news world wide that does not effect a person but just bad news in general. So yes the alarm analogy still holds. This whole thing is just saying maybe putting ones head in the sand is better for your mental health, a statement that should be right from a dystopian sci fi novel.
I consciously unplug from the news for a week or two every few months when I can tell it’s getting to me, for my own mental well being. I don’t think that’s burying my head in the sand. I’m no use to anybody if I don’t take care of myself also. The bad news is magnified because it’s at everyone’s finger tips, from all over the world. When I was growing up you’d get most news from a newspaper and the weekend edition would contain more far reaching stuff but for the most part it was local happenings and major national events with the rare content talking about stuff going on around the globe. Now it’s a constant shot in the arm of everything going on everywhere all the time.
You shutting off is quite literally “putting your head in the sand”, but the thing is that is fine for things like a vacation or retreat. Here the idea is that you would control your head in the sand state continuously, effectively siloing your news to only things you want (unhealthy and dangerous) and making a lot of extra work (more stress) for you just to be less informed.
But the news isn’t really like that, though. Like, currently my news feed has multiple items on the aftermath of Trump’s Lincoln Reflecting Pool project. That is something on the other side of the continent with no impact on my life and which I cannot do anything about. Every local murder gets a news story, even though most individuals are much more at threat from other things. Apes together strong, but maybe not this together.
I’ve largely stopped actively following news because
- most of it is stuff we knew already
- I already find out all that I need to know and more involuntarily through occasional social media visits
I’d like to read summaries of a given week’s news on the world, EU, national, and maybe local level once a week, tho. I’ll check if there’s anything like this for the world and EU scale and report back here if there is.
News apps are the worst because the algorithms will shove more of the same articles at you. “You liked a financial article? Ok, here are 50 more that are virtually identical.” Then there is the constant click-bait. It has gotten to the point where I skip any dramatic or open ended headline because I know it is actually nothing.
- most of it doesn’t affect you directly
- you have almost no direct input on major world or regional events which become headline news
Shit’s happening in the world. You can do nothing to stop it from happening. This is in stark contrast to everything else going on in your life.
Yeah, and the small part of the the news that can affect me and/or I have input about is what the news summary should be about - thinks like Chat Control, climate change, or AI deepfakes.
This is a problem I struggle with philosophically. I have lived in the US with a degree of privilege and I feel the price for that should include knowing how the proverbial sausage is made, that is, knowing all the crap that is being done to allow me to live in (meager) comfort.
It’s Poor Things cranked up to eleven. The British empire is holding the beer of the American one. It’s just too much.
The continual rush of news, propelled by the addictive properties of the YouTube algo, have driven me quite mad, albeit, I suffer from behavioral health problems already. I haven’t found a balance to this.
I feel like, between starting to pay attention to politics in 2000 (also starting puberty), 9/11, the ensuing rise of authoritarianism, trump v1 and trump v2, I’ve achieved levels of depression and anxiety that have propelled me into a kind of nirvana.
Ultimately, I don’t want the human race to end, but the human race seems to. Why try fighting that?
Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.
But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.
In my experience, there are very few people who actually “don’t follow politics”.
In most cases, once I have convinced a person that I truly won’t judge them for their politics (I do, but I keep it to myself unless I think I can actually impact their way of thinking), they are usually happy to disclose their preferences and biases, which is usually plenty to determine their political leanings.
In all but a few cases, they “don’t follow politics” because they have problematic or hypocritical politics and don’t want to explain themselves.
A close-ish friend of the family is employed in data center design for in Social Media, and later Google. He is very progressive and aware of the issues that face lgbtq people in today’s age. Yet, he is completely incapable of accepting that their high paying job is contributing to the degradation of the world at large.
Long story short, if people’s livelihood is tied to fascism, they will make whatever excuses they need to to continue benefitting from that system.
I tell certain types “I don’t follow politics” when I believe that my politics will be problematic to them and I don’t want to hear about it, but the other way around from what you’re describing. The people I have to deal with have started shouting at me when I simply give a different perspective and have no chance of budging in their views at a 5 minute conversation wont override the hours of fox news they watch everyday. I live is a somewhat small community, so not only do I need to worry about these types no longer patronizing my family’s business, I also have to worry about my truck getting vandalized. I’ve actually heard one of these types proudly proclaiming they want to get into a fist fight with climate scientists.
At this point in my life, if I catch a whiff that someone is anything other than a secular humanist, I’m done. I have zero interest in any continued interaction, nor in sanitizing my perspectives to make them comfortable. Unless I am forced by extenuating circumstances, I disconnect my existence from them in every possible way.
I’m tired of trying to change narrow-minded people.
Same, but these are professional relationships. Not friendships.
I’m not sure I understand what “build healthier habits around how, when and where we get our news” exactly means and how that would help. I mean if TACO drops bombs on little kids, I can’t think of how digesting this differently is going to be any healthier for me.
Spending an hour a day reading news from reputable sources is a lot healthier than doomscrolling questionable content for 8 hours on Reddit and Instagram.
One thing I see a lot is the same event repackaged repeatedly with various headlines from different angles to elicit despair and outrage. If you heard about it once already, that is probably enough.
It means that you are not in control of any of it. You can’t impact any of it meaningfully as a single force, at least in real time. People used to watch a “news hour” once a day. You could artificially recreate that, and then detatch for the other 23 hours using self control, muted phone notifications and browser filter extensions. And maybe your brain will thank you.
Of course you could have a separate rule for local alerts that may be more relevant, but local news is dying unfortunately, soo… You could probably just check in once a week to see how the surviving local paper verbatim reprints favorable press releases from the city’s PR person that they retain from the local municipal consultant group with a forgettable acronym.
What is the question here? You take kids to do your work?! Die! You even just slightly have sexual dreams about kids?! Die twice! Kids must be protected and sadly that doesn’t happen as much as you think. Anyhow.
Yooo, wtf?? Who the hell is having sexual dreams about kids? I mean if you are then it means you are probably sick and should get therapy for that. Help is available.
Oh, great… more bad news.
I want to read this in Marvin’s voice from HHTTG
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’ve got me delivering bad news.
Switching from Reddit to Lemmy did wonders for my mental health. Less time doom scrolling, more time to engage with my hobbies
I block the worst offenders from news feeds. Helps a lot.
I agree with you, but I also agree with people commenting. I think reddit and the other corporate social media have really got their algorithms tweaked in such a way to keep you addicted to scrolling their apps. And the addictive stimulation of doom scrolling part makes Lemmy better. But I also agree with the other posters. To paraphrase someone much smarter and funnier than me reality has a real downer bias to it lately.
I don’t engage with algorithmic content. I used Reddit through RSS and I browse Lemmy the same way.
The problem with doing that on Reddit is that there was so much trash in my feeds I ended up developing my own filter system to make scrolling through it manageable. It got to a point where it felt like I was spending more time blocking content than engaging with it. Lemmy’s smaller population means I’m spending less time reading and commenting, and spending more time doing other things with my life.
I feel the opposite, my feed is almost entirely people describing how the world is falling apart, how communism is good but not that communism, and Linux
You have control over what you see in your feeds. I was talking more about the volume in content on my feeds here. Could’ve worded my post better.
I’m spending more time away from social media.
Absolutely, lemmy has such a downer vibe to it, it’s not doing me any good using this platform lately.
Yup. Everything is horrible according to Lemmy.
We need more jokes around Lemmy, this is all communism this and that gays blahblahblah trump yapyapyap, holy cow. Sometimes I can’t help but doomscroll on Reddit, missing the community and the jokes and the friends I had there.
Voyager has the ability to filter anything you want, the moment you see some toxic bad news you can remove a keyword. The only reason I haven’t banned .world outright is because there are meme channels
The gaming communities here are somehow even more miserable than reddit. I need different hobbies clearly.
