science

Oh, great… more bad news.

Your brain wasn't designed at all.

And the people who are in charge and doing evil things know this and are using it to their advantage.

My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.

Don’t tell me that then, you’re just making it worse.

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.

Switching from Reddit to Lemmy did wonders for my mental health. Less time doom scrolling, more time to engage with my hobbies

Title is true even without the last two words.

I am painfully aware.

Isn't this the thing we are doing by being on Lemmy? My mental state is better when I scroll the feed here, as opposed to scrolling reddit.

I do both still, but I'm nearing the phase where Lemmy gets more attention.

It's just fucked that I read too much so I might run out of content on Lemmy which pushes me to read the news then back to reddit untill I wake up again

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.

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'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.

Our brains were not evolved for any of this. The modern world is very alien compared to the mundane life of hunter gatherers.

Maybe if we stopped letting bad things happen, there wouldn't be so much bad news.

I just stopped following a lot of it. Even reputable places resort to hyperbole. I switched off for my own mental health. I still know what's going on. I do not discuss it on social media.

Ultimately, to handle the fact that things are going to shit, you either choose, despair, ignorance or indifference. The last was my choice.

In Soviet Russia, observing an event changes your outcomes.

I find my days to be much better overall when I don't spend a lot of time online over an extended period. I’m more productive, more creative, and less anxious. I still find out all the impactful stuff, anyway.

Its not like knowing the bad news as it happens helps me in any way, genuinely, so why bother wasting all my bandwidth on it?

My dumb monkey brain is meant to tell five kinds of poisonous berries from the one edible kind. What does it do with an international pedophile ring, climate collapse, and rising inequality? Shuts down is what it does.

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.

bad news, everyone: bad news is bad for you!