As mentioned by other commentators, negative, emotional news sell the best and the news nearly perfected this method during the last couple of years. Yes, it isn’t as good as pre pandemic times, but it’s not the worst. For me it really helped to limit my news time to max. once a day (like in the past with the newspaper in the morning or a news show in the evening) and watching things called “good news”. In Germany some TV shows have this category so I never searched it on social media or YouTube, but I bet there are some channels/pages dedicated to good news (like there is a new treatment for disease XY or here is a good step in the fight against climate change, but sometimes just news like “the big panda isn’t as endangered as it was”.

Do you know how much better we would all be doing as a country if we had no access to “news”?

I’m sixty-two and I think one reason we feel so anxious and depressed all the time is because we have more information than we have ability to act.

Think of the myriad threats there are to the earth and humanity. If we ALL undertook to fix them together, there’s still the question of priority. We can’t do everything at once.

And most global problems require a unanimous response. Like the United Nations, if one country votes NO, you can’t make progress. So unless we plan on a global war over climate, or plastics, or AI, or humanitarian treatment of humans, it’s going nowhere.

We have elected officials who CAN effect the change that’s needed. They are trained. They have inside information that we don’t. They have access to technologies and resources we don’t. We absolutely have to make the best choices for our elected leaders that we can, and then trust them to do the right thing. But, after that, we can’t continue to let it eat us up.

I’m with Dory on this one. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.

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.

Saiga antelope populations are recovering.

Short answer. Yes.

Long answer: I’m 48. And while some of what we are feeling is certainly a sense of “back in my day” nostalgia, its certainly not the only cause.

We are from a strange generation who were old enough to remember a world before all of this, and young enough to adapt to all of it with relative ease. ( “this” being a transition to an online existence)

Even one generation before us just simply struggles with it. And just one generation after us, while still “born” before this all became a thing, were to young to truly experience it.

So we have a very unique and valuable perspective to offer; one that says "yes, things seemed better back then, and that is likely most certainly true for many things. But some things were likely just as fucked up back then and we simply didn’t have the internet screaming it at us 24-7. And perhaps right and left were not quite as polarized as they are today because of it.

Just my Gen-x take on it.

Hello fellow 1980 baby. Have you ever seen a chicken hatch? It’s a pretty destructive process. The chick is immediately exposed to a myriad of microorganisms, a sharp shell, embryonic fluid, and plenty of other potential hazards that it can easily kill itself on in the first 20 minutes of its life. However, if it can manage to make it through the hazards you end up with a cute fluffy yellow chick, for another day. They turn brown and dull way too quick for me, at least when I was 10. My point here is that humanity is also going through a transitory period currently. We have already technically reached post scarcity levels, and the proletariat is noticing that. There is bound to be a fair bit of bloodshed over the next couple decades as we strip the power from the ultra wealthy sociopaths that currently run the ship, but the upside is that fucktons of really smart people understand that the roadmap to world peace includes universal education for all, and the elimination of extremes of poverty and wealth.

I know you already got this but here is it again in my own words: don’t watch the news, don’t read social media, make personal connections one on one with people and judge your life by your vision and lens. Most people are judging it through a distorted news or social media centric set of glasses and it sounds hopeless. But when you look at your own family and friends you might just realise they’re better than you think, you’re able to find time to play and connect, you can still work and live with comfort, and your kids can grow up strong and healthy.

Start discarding that which is not truely part of your life, ignore the billionaires, the enshitification and all other forms of uncontrollable and frankly, barely affects you. These societal issues are always painted with someone else’s view point.

When you find something that does directly, without someone else telling you it does, affect you, and you’re in the mentally healthy place to take on that challenge, that’s when you Ave. If you think about it like that, and others did the same, most of our societal problems would be tasked by those who are in positions to do so.

I say this as someone who’s currently on 24/7 standby watching someone kind of like you, but going through depression, going through hopelessness, and going through addiction recovery (with all the slip ups). And their life right now is made, but they’re so busy fixated on issues they can’t either control nor have affects on them. They’ve got a house, it’s part paid off, they’ve got a well paying job, the owners of that job respect and offering pay rises to them, they’ve got a partner, who’s struggling their best to help them. In isolation they’re in luxury. But they get self worked up about other people’s business and societal or global issues. For what good? Stay grounded and self aware. Be thankful to yourself for making it so far already, and see the upward trends over the entire life and not the tiny problems of today.

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.

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.

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

It’s the end of things being easy, that’s for sure. But maybe that’s okay.

Humanity is in for a wild ride with climate change coming. It will upend entire food chains, let alone nations.

Sure, there’s definitely been worse and more unstable periods in history before, but what’s coming is very likely going to make those look tame in comparison.

I fully expect Eco-Fascism to take hold at some and the very people who denied the existence of climate change will demand full control of the last vestiges of the planets resources because in their minds only they are smart and capable enough to dole out what’s left to the plebeians.

In other words, things have been a hell of a lot worse and could get a hell of a lot worse. Instead of waiting in anticipation for the worst that may inevitably happen, do your best to lead a good, kind, and loving life with the people close to you. Things feel like they’re getting worse all the time, and hell, maybe they really are…

But well better to count your blessings now than to waste your life acting like it’s all already as bad as it can be or that the badness is just around the corner. Maybe it is just around the corner. Even more reason to savor the little joys of life while you still have them and to build connections in your community while there’s still time to build Mutual Aid networks. Those things alone can make a dark future easier to suffer, community and fond memories.

Go touch grass = just dont think about how the world is going to shit. lol great advice everyone

Touch grass

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.

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 geed things happening), and 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.