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! 🙂
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.
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?
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.
This is a call that comes from inside the house.
The world’s the world. There’s always ugliness, corruption, darkness, deception. There’s always beauty, nobility, light, truth.
Watcha lookin’ at?
Pick a point of passion, prepare a plan, purge problems, and pursue progress. Proliferate possibilities and promote prosperity.
Know the four noble truths and follow the eightfold path.
Everybody gets the fuckits from time to time.
Breaks are important. I think it’s good being interested in politics but too much can be exhausting. What I do is take a long walk preferably in nature. Music is a great outlet as well. And even though I think that you might not feel like doing sports, since I know that kind of fatigue you write about, I believe that this would help, too. And sometimes it’s sleep.
I encounter negativity when discussing politics online. Somehow quite a few people get insulting and expect me to change my view after. It’s irritating and hinders my will to be open minded when discussions are tinted with insults.
Anyway, I hope you find the things your mind needs to recover.
I encounter negativity when discussing politics online. Somehow quite a few people get insulting and expect me to change my view after. It’s irritating and hinders my will to be open minded when discussions are tinted with insults.
In some cases, it has to be people that just get off on conflict. Trolls, but like a kind that pretends to be a normal community participant. In other cases it’s more like they’ve forgotten there’s someone real on the other side.
When you have a good conversation with someone you don’t agree with at all, that shit is fascinating, though.
When I was a teen, I wanted to be the hero who saves the world. That’s impossible. I still felt the desire but age has tempered it. I still wish I could make everything better, but it’s more of a dream than a constant urge. So, I’ve decided to repeat to myself: I can’t save the world, but I can make my corner a little nicer.
Once I started framing my life like that, it’s a bit easier to do small things to improve my life. I can pick up that piece of litter. I can return that shopping cart.
I can’t stop corrupt politicians from being corrupt and ruining the planet and killing other people half a world away. I can only save my friends and family. So I focus on them.
Additionally, I filter out the news that makes me sad (tons still gets thru).
Great job speed running the progressive to reactionary challenge! Most people wait until they’re 30-40 to start being selfish pricks, I’m glad you got it figured out in your early 20s!
Enjoy being numb and ignorant.
I don’t understand what you mean. Can you explain it?
I cannot explain particle physics to a particle.
I haven’t seen “look on the bright side” yet.
That’s frequently dumb, unhelpful advice, because it’s presented as a cure-all. But, the way anything negative gets amplified, it’s worth considering if you’re overlooking the good stuff.
Like, most Lemmings have flown on a plane, at near the speed of sound above all the clouds. Cavemen would have killed for that opportunity. When we look at the stars, we know what they actually are. We’re not having more and more kids unsustainably anymore.
Edit: Oh, never mind, I just missed it.
Maybe I’ll just add the abstract idea of hope, then. Things still could turn out okay even if they’re bad now.
Get off all social media you can.
On the social media you can’t, block anything politics and news related. They are designed to keep your attention with psychological triggers.
Start a hobby, reading is cheap to get into assuming you have a library. Drawing with pen and paper, colouring in books. Honestly anything that takes you away from a screen.Also start a physical hobby if you can. Exercise, besides the mental benefits, is going to be a more powerful distraction than anything intellectually adjacent IMO.
Ideally, outside, in nature. This too has been shown to have mental health benefits. Go walk in the woods.
Honestly nothing brings me back down to earth and resets (almost) all my stress and worries like spending time in a forest
Trees are awesome they deserve so much more respect, theyve been around for so much longer than us just chilling making oxygen and a habitat
Spotting wildlife is also entertaining
The sound is critical for me, pure nature noises, no human geberated crap like cars or yelling or construction or whatever
Nature is extremely unhurried which is so radically opposite of almost every aspect of modern life that it’s like finally get a breath of air to be able to immerse yourself in a setting that isn’t manically trying to get your attention.
Or take your money just for existing
I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey’s fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.
Get off all social media you can
This means Lemmy and the greater Fediverse too. It’s nice being part of a network of people that share similar views on things but damn this place can be depressing. Kind of just a byproduct from the state of the world but humans weren’t designed to be aware of every horrible thing happening on this planet
It’s better if you limit your feed to subscribed communities. Not perfect, but without that it’s like a hundred negativities per minute.
You can also set up word filters in a lot of the Lemmy apps. Filtering words like Trump for example will remove a lot of negative content from your feed, especially since people are bad to post about him in specifically non-political communities.
Today I was about to post on here about basically the same thing, and, well, I don’t know, I guess I want to talk or at least write it out. I’ve been blanket blocking politics and news ever since Trump got elected - as black and white as it gets. If a sub I see says “Trump”, it is blocked, and that is also applied everywhere else, including people I used to interact with. I completely left TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and mostly left Reddit, because I thought it would make me feel better. Between here and Reddit my blocklist probably has multiple hundreds of places that do nothing but wallow in misery or post about how everything sucks. Long story short I’m way less on social media now.
Anyway, it didn’t make it better. I’m still on here, occasionally, and now I’m finding that I also fucking hate it; everyone sounds miserable, no one is kind to themselves, there is a lot of hostility in general in relation to a bunch of severely inconsequential stuff—like serious heated arguments about which flavour of sponsored diarrhoea is less disgusting when consumed—I’ve even started noticing it in myself hanging out here. What I realised is that all the platforms I’ve left, I did so because they went to shit and lost any semblance of what I liked them for. It would’ve been fine if it was one facet, but it’s fucking everything, everywhere, and all at once, IRL and online.
Everything is invented, perfected, sometimes repeated and remembered, gentrified, commodified, sold for a profit, repackaged, dropshipped, consumed, regurgitated, optimised, dopamine fracked (shameless self promotion), ran through ChatGPT, summarised by Claude, and then I get to interact with it - maybe. If I subscribe for $9.99/wk. Just… so many things have become like that, it’s insufferable to ingest and even harder to create, because you have to meet that standard if you want the herd to see you, and for me creating for no audience at all is no fun, and empty proclamations of “just create!” help very little.
I have about a billion different hobbies (ADHD) and they don’t help or pay off at all, maybe just to distract myself and burn time faster, but there’s no enjoyment anymore. Everything kind of sucks there too.
And taking myself away from screens only serves to make me feel even worse - here a lot of my friends and a lot of my hobbies live one way or another; that’s why I used to love computers. Out there, people hate me for being gay, I have to mask constantly, and I faint from the summer heat. And now I can’t even love computers in peace at home, because even they have been mercilessly slopped by our sacreligious overlords.
I don’t feel depressed - I have a great job, friends, money, stuff, hobbies, social norms say I’m not really supposed to be depressed with all of that anyway. But I’m really struggling to actively enjoy anything anymore, and I’m honestly beginning to think it’s not me but everything else lol, as egotistical as that is. Except it’s not just me, it’s very prevalent - everyone knows everything sucks, and that’s another reason everything keeps sucking even harder. Oh well. I enjoyed writing this, a little, for a moment.
Sorry for rambling.
A similar option is to split your social media accounts in two. Keep everything political on one account, only dive into that account occasionally/rarely.
For your main account, keep it subscribed to all of your hobbies and unsubscribe from anything political. For this account switch your news feed into “uplifting news” feeds.
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.
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…
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.
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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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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.
