I am so fatigued with so much negativity that happens in the world and in my personal life as well. I have become numb to the topics I used to care such as politics, equal rights, environment and so on: I just want my day to end and that’s it. I don’t think I’m depressed tho (I used to and I know what it is like).
I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.
if you’re going to stay on internet web forums, you need to start curating your subscription lists with only things you 100% enjoy. don’t subscribe to any news communities (tech, medical, political etc)
exercise. don’t have to lift weights, but taking yourself out for a quick 10 minute walk will do you wonders. you can up the amount of time you walk around once you start feeling better
and, of course, surround yourself with positive people. best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten was to never let anyone “outnice” me. the scumbags will, of course, take advantage, but they have shown their hand and you can alter your kindness to them accordingly. the genuinely good people, on the other hand, will reciprocate those acts and life gets better for both of you.
good luck and let me know if you have any other questions. you got this! 🙂
Gotta find your way back to this vibe. There’s a lot of good out there, a lot to be grateful for. And on a long term timescale the world is in many ways better than ever before on important stuff like infant mortality.
Find some creative outlets like coloring, clay work, paint. Heck just get a playlist to dance to. Find a little bit of light everyday to get off the devices and have some slow time.
Get off the internet. Truly. When it gets to be too much, put your device away and do something else. My go-tos, I either cook something, play music or go for a walk.
I find that 99% of the negativity is online. Interacting with people in person is way more pleasant and upbeat. And basically on youtube ignore all videos with clickbait titles like “We were Wrong about [whatever] - and it’s NOT GOOD!”, they’re all bullshit.
Hosting one or two regular game nights a week in my house has made a world of difference in my attitude.
I couldn’t agree more. Generally I’m only down on the world when I look at Reddit. It’s important to have a community of real people in rotation.
Moving to Lemmy helped because I only see what I subscribe to and there is no algorithm that is shoving politics in my face constantly.
I feel like Lemmy is like 90% snide remarks or sarcastic comments, not exactly upbeat here either. Depends on your subreddits (sublemmies?) of course
People have a psychological disposition to latch on to negative ideas faster than positive ones so it makes sense that negative ideas are more viral online
I wonder if that’s a survival mechanism - to dwell on negative events more because they’re more dangerous. My parents, raised during the Great Depression, were always thinking the next one could be right around the corner.
It has to be.
speak for yourself. i fine way more negatively, that is way more intense, in person than I do online.
at least online I can find a diversity of opinions, references to facts, and can ignore/block people without consequence.
and i largely share most of my political beliefs with my fellow IRL, I just don’t… share their vitriolic hate of people who are different than themselves. or their incessant need to ‘correct’ other people of their ‘ignorance’
god i can’t even like go to a cafe or a bar for a drink anymore without people around me incessantly going on about stuff like this, even if I’m not directly involved. the narcissism and nastiness is just everywhere in my community, but I do live in a very affluent place full of folks who have zero humility.
Yeah, type of crowd really matters. I mean, they all suck in some way, we’re only human. But not necessarily that exact way.
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“On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”
If you’re noticeably weird in some way, any way, IRL can be harsh. On the internet, there’s more hostility total, but it’s not usually directed at you.
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You can start by trying to stare at this painting for 10 minutes, and tell me what you experience.
Dickbutt? Loss? Come on, there must be something hiding in there…
The real horror starts when you notice the cross above the painting. Specifically, someone anointed it with oil, and it won’t go away from the walls anymmore.
of course anointed oil wouldn’t work it’s an oil painting. you need holy water because oil and water don’t mix
We had this priest draw crosses with holy oil, and it stayed om the walls. It reminds me of that game called Faith.
So, my parents are fundamentalist Orthodox nutjobs.
This is why I hike
To look at paintings?
Is mindfulness what you’re getting at?
I can’t do negative rn, might as well share something that brings peace?
Get off social media and avoid the negative people in your life as much as you can for a bit. Read some books. Play a chill video game. Make something. Just get away from it for a while so you can re-center yourself.
Things are bad and we should be worried about them but there’s only so much any of us can do about it. If you don’t take care of yourself and your mental health you’re not going to be able to do good for anyone else when the time comes.
I’ve radically cut my news intake and it’s helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what’s happening. There’s that famous quote about how “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy” and I try to hold on to it.
Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.
However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it’s just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I’ve no interest in.
Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.
I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk’s soon to be trillionaire status (don’t ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for ‘lefty tears’ and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I’d like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.
Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don’t consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there’s a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever have a government that has any real decency or compassion at it’s core.
Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengage from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that’s the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.
I’m in the acceptance stage of grief; the world is a shithole. Some people will tell you about all the good in the world, but that is just being dismissive of the bad. Good does not simply cancel out the bad, especially when the recipients of the good and bad are different.
Instead, I try to focus on the things that I actually can change. If you have the means, volunteer or donate to a cause that is important to you.
Focus on the micro rather than the macro, otherwise it gets overwhelming.
Stop reading the news. You rarely if ever get any information that will change your decisions anyway.
Get off any social media or other that feeds you negativity.
Stop reading the news.
And read Rolf Dobelli’s great essay about why this is such a good thing to do:
Coming off his tenth point (news as status)I’ve long suspected that news just functions as kind of salacious gossip on the whole. I’ve got a pet theory it’s something to do with propping up the petty bourgeoisie mindset to prop up the bourgeoisie on the whole… Something about how the breathless engagement with and production of said gossip encourages values like the hard work of staying informed, having an individualised curated intake, the dispassionate observation of it all…
A couple things:
- Use keyword and community filters in Lemmy to clean up what’s presented to you.
- Use the “Not Interested” and “Don’t Recommend Channel” options in Youtube to cull the trash from your algorithm feed.
It will make your life so much more peaceful. Don’t let the algos just blast their firehose of shit at you. Tap your own stream of customized content by interacting with these tools instead.
Touch grass. Leave your phone home and go outside and enjoy nature. Go on a hike. Stop reading the news, any news, for a while, you will be fine.
Same thing you do when anything else is fatigued, you rest. Take a break from all that stuff. You are not the savior of the world and everything will not fall apart because you stopped paying attention for a little while.
I’m sure you’ve had other hobbies, get back into those. Play some games, watch some movies, read a book (not about those topics), get some exercise if you aren’t already. If it creeps up in the back of your mind to go look at the news or whatever, that’s fine just ignore it, it’ll go away. Do stuff so that you’re enjoying your time and wanting more of it rather than just waiting for the day to end.
I know it really doesn’t help, but remember that this is how they want you to feel
