Pretty good start to my week, started talking to a girl on bumble on Saturday that is way outta my league that matched with me first, we’re gonna meet up on Sunday and walk my dog and chat.
She is so fucking adorable though it’s unbeliveable, she’s asexual however which may be an issue if we go into any actual relationship as sex is reasonably important to me (I think) but it depends on exactly what type of asexual person she is and her personal feelings/desires on it, I’m wondering when the best time to ask her that would be…
I brought it up and she’s totally asexual, not interested in anything of a sexual nature at all which sucks (and I feel bad for feeling that tbh since it’s just who she is), but I’m still interested in her enough to explore things with her despite that, and she is as well (i asked). Thankfully she is very open about it.
I still read the news and argue about it with people on the internet, which is what I’m recommending against doing. Don’t be me. Live your life. I’m seriously not sure I’m more off “informed” than if I were to just draw furry erotica all day.
For me, the key question is, What does being up to date help you? And my answer, as someone that is constantly up to date, is that it doesn’t.
Personally what I’ve found works for me is to focus on news that’s local to me, the more local the better. So I start with news about my municipality, then my province, then my country, and I try to keep it at that for the most part. Of course, world news slips through, especially American politics, but I try to keep it at bay as much as possible.
I honestly had a bit of a nervous breakdown around the start of the war in Ukraine, doomscrolling through articles and updates everyday. I realized I needed to dial back and tried to cut out all news, and that just ended up making me more anxious. Focusing on local news has been the Goldilocks zone for me. I’ll still consume stuff about world news occasionally, but it’s usually in a way that relates to my country, for example articles about Canada’s support of Israel on the world stage.
Some news sources are definitely more inflammatory than others. I’m also of the opinion that television news in general is a farce, to the extent that the best “journalists” on TV in recent memory have been comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
I’m francophone and queer living under a conservative provincial government that dislikes francophones and queers, I do like to be on top of what rights they’re trying to attack this week.
Apart from that, I guess a general sense that you need to know what’s wrong if you want to fix it. Am I aware that I’m ultimately powerless to fix societal woes? Yeah, that’s why I cut back on the news, but cutting it out completely feels like giving up any hope of fixing anything. That’s just too much of a downer for me.
I pay very little to no attention to the news at all and could honestly care less. And I feel as if I am better for it because I am not concerned about every little thing. Big news stories I will hear about through the grapevine, but the little things just pass me by and that’s okay.
I had to teach myself last year that you can be an informed voter and also not constantly not watch the news. With Ukraine I realized I was constantly in a rolling panic attack and I couldn’t get out of it. The news was sensationalized so much. (Not downplaying the events, but they also rolled out experts who talked about how likely nuclear annihilation was and I was not handling that well). I realized it was all to keep me glued to my screen and clicking, and that made me kind of disgusted with them. Here’s a war going on with actual people affected, and they’re worried about how many clicks they’re getting.
I stay informed, I know the issues, but that doesn’t mean I need to be subscribed to /c/news and have a constant feed. I vote in every election, and if there’s something I don’t know I look it up. But I don’t need it daily.
experts who talked about how likely nuclear annihilation was
If it helps, the actual likelihood is about 0%. There are not enough nukes to kill even 99% of the current world population, much less a 100%… they could be built, but it makes no sense, for now.
Unless you live in Russia. They’re all talk about nuclear strikes, but in reality Russia is the one who doesn’t seem to have effective anti-ICBM measures.
On the off chance that the world doesn’t end this week, let’s go ahead and keep living our lives
It was a joke but it stuck with me. Yeah it could all end. History says it won’t though. There are some real threats out there, but for my own measley self I should keep planning on tomorrow
For me, definitely. I’ll read the news before an election but even then it’s pretty targeted.
I realized that I trip up with anxiety with world and national news because there’s nothing I can do. Literally beyond voting there’s really no change I can make, so I don’t need to stay updated like I can do that.
Even our grandfather’s only had a daily newspaper to stay up to date. We humans just aren’t meant to consume that much, there’s no way our tiny soup brains can consume all of that and we stay mentally healthy
Unfortunately I’m considering to put an end to a new friendship. It’s like every time I’m around her I trigger her and it becomes a drama. I’ve already tried to adjust again and again but I have to face that I’m just a hedgehog to her and we’re not compatible.
The thing is I love using sarcasm and making slight jabs at people, it’s like second nature to me. Honestly it’s really not that extreme and I’ve asked all my friends and they say they enioy it. But to her these are real personal attacks and enough cause to ruin our time together.
It sucks cuz we had some really good laughs together. But also I’m done with stepping on mines, even when I am careful.
The main problem there is you then don’t get any nuance, and often have no idea what’s really going on. Well, as much as you possibly could know what’s really going on.
This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.
It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I can’t imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individual’s interpretation of it. The solution can’t be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.
Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editors’ biases, the advertisers’ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they aren’t covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.
It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We weren’t built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.
This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the author’s book? It seems reactionary for no reason.
A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.
Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then – later – investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.
I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.
Anyone try to click the link to the study on how ‘links are bad’ – the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, ‘magazine/’, I got a working link: www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/
Replying to myself: the last time the news mattered in my daily life was this week when I considered flying to Fairbanks, Alaska and discovered that prices are significantly higher than a year ago. I suspect the hike relates to the grounding of planes as seen from that video of the door plug failure and the FAAs subsequent grounding of that type of plane (and possibly a second type now, but last I heard that was not yet a hard grounding, but only inspection). This gives me a general idea that perhaps prices will drop when the planes are back in service and I’m better off waiting until then.
The car and bridge one, is an example of “human interest” news, which some reporters, and news channels, try very hard to push for (“after seeing your son ripped to shreds and your husband fall into a volcano… tell us, how did that make you feel?”). Call me a monster, but I don’t care about that. Or rather, I already know that they’ll feel devastated, no need to rub it in.
Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events?
Unfortunately, yes. There are whole news channels which, as soon as they get done with one emotional trigger news, they switch to the next one.
The article is oversensationalized, but it does hide a grain of truth: avoid that kind of sources, and you’ll be better off.
Funny, I was just thinking about posting this, even though it’s like ten years old! For anyone who’d like to read more on this topic from the article’s author, have a look here (PDF).
36 here too, two kids. I have been overwhelmed with fear the past few years that something like this will happen. I can only imagine that if I received the news you did, it would cripple me. Immediate shutdown.
I wish I had more to offer than my sympathy. I wish we could do better with cancer than we can…
About to board a plane so I can arrive at a boat for the first cruise I’ve ever been on. It’s called groove cruise and it’s 24/7 DJs and music/dancing. Hard to separate anxiety from excitement. It’ll be fun but I probably won’t sleep much!
After I freaked out during the last couple elections, I basically stopped most news. It’s pretty unclear what I could do with it anyway. The theoretical benefit was mostly around politics, but the vast masses just do it as a team sport, so my being “informed” by the news isn’t helping hold politicians accountable or affecting elections. Outside of politics, except for the information about COVID during the pandemic, most specifically the vaccines, I have a hard time thinking of any useful information.
Even local news usually isn’t too relevant. I guess the “avoid this intersection because of power out to lights, flooding, icing or whatever” could be helpful, but usually I don’t get it till it’s later on anyway.
chat
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.