Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
The world is going to shit. The idea that you think all the “negativity” is bad and not the fact that the world is a horrible place and getting worse every single day is the reason the world is a horrible place and getting worse every single day. Denial of horrible practices, support for bad corporations, denial of science, logic, and reason, and all of this is what is making things bad, and every time I see someone try to inject some common sense into discussions about anything bad and how these people get downvoted and absolutely flamed is just another sign that there’s really little to no hope left in the world.
That’s quite unfair to suggest that not wanting to spend all day looking at negativity on the internet means one doesn’t care about it or even embraces it. There’s a healthy middle ground where you’re informed but not spending all day every day thinking about it. No matter how many articles like that you read every single day you’re still going to miss the vast majority of them. That’s a never ending battle that you’re never going to win. If you want to make the world a better place then be the change you want to see in it. Doomerism is just self-harm and making things worse.
But negativity is a way to ignore all that shit, by sitting around complaining about it.
Also being negative about the people working to solve the other things you’re negative about pits all that negative energy against itself and it’s super inefficient.