I’m worried for the world. All I’ve been thinking about is WW3 and this shit makes me want to vomit. I can’t even smoke weed anymore without having a near panic attack. I feel unmotivated. I wake up and immediately just want to go back to bed. I’m not trying to spread fear but the Doomsday clock is 90 seconds till midnight, during the Cuban missile crisis, it was 7 minutes before midnight. Can we just have one day of fucking peace? Can everyone just stop for one day and enjoy one day of peace?
Log out. Find something you can do in physical space. I found that organizing with some people doing mutual aid really helped me feel better. Just refocusing away from things you can’t really do anything about, and towards things you can. In my case, it was helping feed and clothe vulnerable neighbors.
I found that reading The Zhuangzi really helped me get perspective on the state of the world.
I personally don’t thing we’re all fucked. I just take in life day by day and appreciate what I have. Let’s make today a day of peace. I’m probably gonna go for a walk and try to do something nice for someone.
Do yourself a favor and disconnect from news feeds, notifications and social media for 2 weeks and see how you feel.
Edit: also take a break from Lemmy. I swear I think the doomsaying here is worse than Reddit.
Really? I’ve found the opposite, the toxic positivity is just as bad as in reddit if not worse.
Damn. I thought it was me, but scrolling through Everything & Top Day is just filled with rage bait and doom news. I rarely find something uplifting. And I usually find myself more anxious after reading through them.
I really want Lemmy to thrive, that’s why I am here, but I used to be able to filter all that shit in reddit and still have a bunch of funny dumb simple happy posts. If I do that here I get no posts back…
Beehaw
If you ever find a good solution for filtering out those posts, please update us.
I tend to only view my subscribed community feed, but it would be nice to look at “All” to find new communities.
Block all politics communities.
I block communities as I come across them but I feel like I might be missing out on a few.
I block all news and politics communities. Also if Elon started rumbling again about annoying things I block the words Elon, musk and Elon musk.
It’s definitely not a complete nor perfect solution, but I’ve noticed that a number of accounts disproportionately post very negative news links. I’ve started blocking some of those users. It helps break it up a bit. I’m sure I’m missing some news now, but there’s only so many times I can see posts about the world burning up or genocide before browsing lemmy becomes stressful and nihilistic.
So if I see the same negative news story on multiple communities, I’ll click on the user and if they’re blasting negative stories everywhere I just block them. For example, I just blocked silence7@slrpnk.net, not because of any harassment or anything, it’s just that they almost exclusively post political and climate doomsday stuff.
Amen. OP, I promise the news still finds a way in, even if you swear it off. You won’t be able to escape it completely, but shutting it out by choice makes a huge and positive impact. You don’t need to be constantly pummeled with every bad thing that happens every day in order to still be plugged-in to what’s going on in the world.
Ignoring problems rarely works…
Ignoring problems you have literally no control over works indeed
On a micro level, sure.
But if 75% all choose to give a shit for a year straight, we could all ignore it safely after that.
You couldn’t get 75% of people to agree that water’s wet, so have fun with that
We were at 64% just a few years ago for climate change…
We’re real fucking close, which is why now is the absolute worst time to be telling people an ostrich is valid role model.
Lol I don’t think that link makes anyone more optimistic.
Policies had wide-ranging support, with the most popular being conserving forests and land (54% public support), more solar, wind and renewable power (53%), adopting climate-friendly farming techniques (52%) and investing more in green businesses and jobs (50%).
When you start breaking it down by actual ways to stop climate change and the highest yes vote they can get is 54%? And that’s a 54% for something I thought wouldn’t even be controversial.
I’m just saying it’s ok for someone to take a step back from the news if it’s gonna cause them to stress out. There’s not a whole lot people can actually do in their day to day and I don’t think fighting on a forum with ten people is helping anyone
That’s the neat things about global catastrophic events…
We don’t all need to address it the same way. As long as most of us are addressing it in a substantial way.
Yep. To expand on this if people still want to use social media, here’s what helped me. The constant doom scrolling is unhealthy and unhelpful.
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Block or mute news/doomsday communities/people on social media. Link aggregators and algorithm-driven social media just sucks for news across the board. Use Lemmy (or Reddit, etc) for memes, interesting discussions, cool pictures, whatever, but not news.
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Collect a list of news sources you trust and add them to an RSS reader. Ideally in a separate folder from other feeds so you can easily filter them out when you aren’t interested in world news. You only get one “post” per article, rather than seeing the same “everything sucks now” article reposted to 20 different communities, and it’s buried in good ol’ boring news. Everything is less exciting in this format, it’s great.
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All I know is Stardew Valley has a big update today, and there’s few better places to hang out when you’re feeling stressed.
Sounds like you need to lay down the weed and touch some grass bro
News and the media in general preys on fear. They want you to be terrified because it makes you watch the news and read the papers and their websites. They hype up anything that will scare you.
The whole COVID period proved that.
I can’t even smoke weed anymore without having a near panic attack.
Funny, it’s the exact opposite for me. I get panic attacks when I run out.
This sounds like you are depressed. My suggestion, stop consuming the type of information that is affecting your mental health. This is out of your control so stressing about it will only hurt you. You cannot control what is out of your control. Second, see a therapist and meditate. The world will go on for better or for worse.
Yes
I’d suggest getting therapy. Perhaps explore anxiety medication. Having anxiety over conflict across the world that you have no control over and have little effect on you is not healthy.
Getting high is not effective self-medication.
Only if therapy were cheap or something…
Some places are. I looked around until I found a community care clinic for people who don’t have insurance. It’s free. The university near me also offers free/low cost therapy. Years ago before we were married, my wife and I found couples counseling from an intern who was gaining experience at no cost to us.
I know everyone doesn’t have the same resources, but just wanted to point out that if someone gives up because they assume it’s expensive, they may not find the affordable options available to them.
If you have money to self-medicate, you have money for therapy and to get medication from a professional
Weed is orders of magnitude cheaper than therapy
Stop being a druggie.
I think it’s largely just news that is sensationalized to get additional advertising revenue. It’s there to get you worried so you constantly check for updates. IIRC this concept was started by CNN back in the 80s or 90s, when 24/7 news became a thing. Now that the Internet is around fear mongering is everywhere. It’s what makes money. And if you don’t pay for the news, you are the commodity. Frequently a conduit for advertising.
The best cure for this is to read more news about people. A healthy dislike for people in general makes you worry less about the future of humanity ;-)
Don’t worry about WW3. The more inevitable thing that will destroy us is climate change.
But seriously, why worry about stuff you can’t change? If they launch the nukes, then you’ll be dead and so it won’t matter if you worried about it or not. So you might as well just not worry.
Activism would help very little, but at least it isn’t fatalism.
I don’t think parent poster meant to espouse nihilism. Rather just acceptance. You can still find meaning in living day to day if worrying about the future becomes debilitating.
This. Seeing one person who you helped smile makes you happy, even if it may not solve all the worlds problems. Volunteering has always brought me much more joy and helped me deal with existential dread better than ignoring the news or any other change I can make
Public service announcement that the OG nihilists like Nietzsche were actually pretty hyped about the meaninglessness of the universe. The idea was that it gave you more freedom to live life and find your own meaning, like you said.
Because it will hurt the entire time you are dying lol
Worrying about it in advance doesn’t change how much it will hurt.
