Is everything the worst?
Is everything the worst?
I'm 43, almost 44, years old and went through a bought of alcoholism during the early part of the pandemic. I went through treatment and have been fine since. However, I can't help but feel that all the news in the last few months is just the worst. Between the AI bullshit, the wars, the effects of capitalism, and the political situation in general it's just the worst. Is it just me or have other folks noticed the same trend?
Edit: I should have also mentioned the enshitification of everything tech related.
Edit 2: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. For some more context, yes I'm American and live in a state that's about to ban the wearing of masks in public. I haven't had a drink in over year and have been in therapy for 3 years. I don't watch any news sources and rarely read media websites. But yet, that information seeps into my life somehow. I donate blood, I make charitable donations, and try to live a good life. I have 2 amazing kids and a great wife. It's just hard to not end up in a doomer mindset at times. A Bitcoin company bought a power plant up here that has an existing lease to use a lake as cooling water, and it's heated up the lake to the point that it's killing fish.
Negativity and wedge issues sell. Keep your head up and don't let them play you out. It's all for money or power ...or both. I think people just never wanted to see how dark reality is and now it's showing how naive the common person is to the evil in the world.
It's like all the horrible things they played out to be history or entertainment are actually real and that we were just told it's all in the past so "tHeY" could keep us subservient with a false sense of security.
Every time I see people try to blame the media on this, I look at my medical bills, I look at my bank account, I look at the temperature, I look at the cost of housing, I look at the vacant seats where my coworkers sat before they were let go, I look at the election results, I look at my sister who had her right to an abortion stolen, I look at the hateful people that vandalized my trans partner's car...
And I think, damn..the media sure has some real reach, don't they? They're really going all out to make me miserable. I mean, this is some impressive commitment to a narrative. One day I'm gonna break free and live in this reality where "Everything is fine, actually" with the rest of you but first I gotta figure out how the media has me in the Truman Show situation.
the media sure has some real reach, don’t they?
I mean, yeah pretty much. It's been a few decades of sensationalism, anti-intellectualism, and capitalism-is-patriotism rhetoric, but we got here. It's not entirely the media, but the media definitely has a huge impact.
Yeah, I can't really put down all the bullshit in one post. When I say media that means the marketing companies that use it as tool as well. There's a lot more to everything. Everything is so intertwined and deeply engrained. There is no good sides. All sides have good and bad. Etc... idk it's paradox that can be investigated and thought over infinitely. ...it's life.
agreed, life is tough, but remember: we didn't start the fire!
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It doesn't help that news corps have found that we generally respond to the negative news much more than we do positive news.
its the fight/flight response. negative news gets people afraid.... literally gets their juices flowin. some people who have stopped watching faux news specifically mention the exhausting nature of the constant fear put forth by the 'network'.
That doesn't invalidate the negative news, though. I mean, what good news do you think they're not reporting that makes up for the actual shit going on in the world that has a real, tangible effect on people's lives?
"Your future is completely fucked, from finances, to freedoms, to democracy, to the damn climate itself.
But, hey, the bees are coming back. For now, at least."
I'm not saying it's social media, but it's social media. You're connected to negativity 24/7. The algorithm feeds on negativity because that is what makes us stay on there.
I've got something to change your thinking. At least it helped me 17 years ago.
Hans Rosling - The best stats you've ver seen
I don't want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we're living our best lives at the same time.
Rutger Bregman | Where do we go from here?
And hey! I'm 43 too. You have a whole life ahead of you. You still can go in any direction you want to go in.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Hans Rosling - The best stats you've ver seen
Rutger Bregman | Where do we go from here?
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I don't want to dismiss the facts. There are terrible things going on but overall we're living our best lives at the same time.
You are dismissing the facts, then.
You could only truly believe this if you're a financially stable, healthy, gainfully employed, cis white man. Because for everyone else in the States at least, life is getting harder. You can cite all the statistics you like about the globe, but that's not relevant to what people experience in their own lives.
And more importantly, the things that people are depressed about are the things that are getting worse, and on track to keep getting worse. A video about statistics in 2007 isn't accounting for what we know in 2024 is coming in the future. The outlook is far more grim now.
People have been saying this about social media and the news for a long long time, and every single time they fail to take the context into account. People said this in 2016, too. "Your anxiety is just the media riling you up". Then the anxiety ended up being a very accurate thing to feel, and in the years after, the real world events caused negative effects on people's lives.
The world is not a TV show. What happens in the news, what people talk about on social media, no matter how negative it skews, those things happen in real life, not a vacuum. Many of them affect you in ways you can't even comprehend, and many of them affect you in very obvious ways that some people just seem to want to overlook.
For millenials who have had it timed perfectly to get fucked over by the way of it all our entire life, and when the power is taken back it'll skip over and be the next generation that follows.. Sweet spot generation of pure fuck-assery after being promised an entirely different world. The revolution is coming... It had better. In my opiniom, the best you can do is focus on a more personally enriching life, and forget everyone else's bullshit.
Graduated in 07. Gave all of my savings to my parents in 08 so they wouldn't lose their house. Bumbled around for a decade and a half trying to get a degree and start my career only to get shit canned from an okay paying job mid-pandemic. Tripped over my own dick in to a great paying union job. Currently working too much overtime and saving every dime I can because I've seen enough shit.
There have been many times in history when things have been far worse, so no, it's not the worst. But many things are in decline right now. Democracy, digital privacy, trustworthiness of information, global peace, climate, the environment... humanity has to get back on track soon or the future looks pretty grim.
Go touch grass = just dont think about how the world is going to shit. lol great advice everyone
I was always rather politcally passive. I decided to join MERA25 this week (self proclaimed radical leftist group). Get active.
I normally avoid doomerism, but it starts feeling like the end-times here in Europe and I think it is worse at other places. Open fascists are about to take power in several federal states here in Germany this year.
Unless they pull off some kind of paramilitary overthrow of the German government (and last time I checked their co-leaders didn't have an army of brownshirts to do their bidding) I cannot see Alternative fur Deutschland taking power in Germany. They actually lost vote share and support from other far right European parties when they spouted borderline Nazi views recently.
Reassemblement National on the other hand... Macron was stupid to call a snap parliamentary election, and if Marine Le Pen can make it to 2027 without being driven out by political scandal, she'll probably be the next French President.
Think that the calculus is to stem the tide and activate the electorate in recognition that the EU Parliament outcomes were a surprise?
Nothing borderline about their views
I think a lot of the comments have really hit the nail on the head. Never hurts to take a step back and try to detox from the climate of negativity that inundates social media. Go out for a walk, go cycling, touch grass
Hmmm, yes. This grass... It feels very, grassy.
I'M HEALED!
I don't think anyone would claim that literally going outside is gonna fix anyone's life, or cure this broken-ass world we live in.
But the sentiment isn't wrong.
It means: Take some time for yourself. Enjoy the small things. Exercise. Feel the sun on your face. Leave your phone in your pocket, and stop doomscrolling. See the world in your own terms, not the terms others want to force upon you.
It helps. You can't change the whole world, but you can change yourself.
Hooray! 🙌🏻
I recommend not watching or reading the news. Spend your free time learning about hobbies or finding new ones, getting involved in local politics instead of national/global politics, improving yourself, and finding friends in communities around your hobby.
If you want some PC gaming friends that don't talk about politics all the time, DM me. We're in our late 20's through 40's.
i'm convinced that creating echo chamber cocoons are the reason why things are so fucked rn.
I'm not saying create an echo chamber, my advice excludes engaging with people who agree and disagree, at least when it comes to large scale politics. If someone wants to get involved in politics, I think they should avoid echo chambers and engage in good discussion. But for people who just want to or need to get away from it, disengaging entirely I think is the way to go. You can still get involved in local polics without engaging in larger politics. They often have direct impacts on your community and it varies wildly between different communities.
I think on a global scale we are all dealing with unresolved trauma from the pandemic, related catastrophes and the general economic roller coaster that we all live in every day. The severity of the pandemic lessened over time but there was no definite point where it ended and we all got to go "Wasn't that nuts? Is everyone doing okay?" Instead it was just a slow crawl back to business as usual. We feel like we shouldn't complain because it could be a lot worse but all of the other non-pandemic problems still exist and nothing seems to indicate that things will ever get better.
It's not just you that feels this way, but that doesn't mean things are hopeless. There are a lot of people out there fighting tooth and nail to build a better future in spite of all the challenges. Try to find a way to improve the world in your own small way. It really goes a long way to quieting those feelings of helplessness and despair.
I think you make a great point that we didn't really get to an ending point from the pandemic trauma. For some of us, our nervous systems are still in panic mode.
But we also have the threats of climate collapse, global food and water shortages, a shift to the right or alt-right in several governments around the world, and technology being weaponized against us at an increasing rate. These threats to us are real. There are too many to list here.
To OP, please know that you are not alone. There are a lot of us who look at the state of the world and recognize the severity and criticality of these problems. My advice would be to get involved in something --anything -- that helps or gives back to the community in some way. I started with donating blood. Will it change the world? No, but it helps someone, somewhere, and that helps my brain find peace.
There are only about six news sources left. All the rest are simply trying to get a reaction out of you so they can sell you advertising.
There's very little you actually need to know. You don't need to know about what some pedo did to a kid. You don't need to know what some celebrity thinks about Hamas. You don't need to know which little kids got shot today because the yanks still think a 300 year old law is relevant.
Stop clicking the links.
If anything major happens, Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC and a few others will let you know the facts without any opinions or speculation.
The rest is just horseshit being spewed by people who don't have enough talent to be an actual writer, and there's an absolute fuckton of talentless cunts out there.
Start by blocking websites that have headlines containing the word "slams" and take it from there
Remember that there are biases at play here. There's the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about good things happening), and the media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:
News is about things that happen, not things that don't happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, "I'm reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out". (...) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.
Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.
Edit: typo and grammar
It's not worse today IMO, I mean the news, it's just we're constantly seing them, because of our smartphones & cetera.
In the nineties the toral nuclear war was also imminent and we'd not be able to live outside because of pollution @ year 2000.
To combat all that I'm getting my information myself, so I go to trusted sources and check out the state of the world in that specific matter (I have decided to follow certain topics, because I just can't take in everything) instead of being bombarded by random clickbait horror stories (remember, news outlets needs to capture your attention Every day even if nothing happens and also gore and hate sells more).
Cheers and good luck!
While you have a point, if you’re scared you keep watching/reading and that benefits the companies behind pumping the fear, there is also a pretty goddamn dire situation with climate change. Things are happening much faster than they seemed to expect. Remember it used to be “we won’t have an habitable world in a few hundred years at this rate” and then it was “our children’s children are going to have a tough time,” and then it was “ what kind of world are we leaving for the next generation” and now it’s “um…this is happening.”
Scientists aren’t interested in scaring you. They’re interested in what the data suggests. And the scientists are freaking the fuck out. This is bad. And we’re not moving at 1% of the speed we should be. That really can’t be downplayed. Is this the end of life as we were promised/told it would be? I don’t mean we’re nose to nose with a mad max reality, more that we are going to start feeling pretty intense effects weather-wise, seeing the global south start to emigrate, feel the effects of a capitalism squeezing the last of our money and labor out of us because even their predictions will see profits dip when people start rioting, dying off, etc. (what they plan on doing with those profits in a dead world, I don’t know. But that’s capitalist brain for you.)
I’m just saying. We need to really consider if what we’re doing with our time is how we’d want to spend it if it were our last chance in this structure. OP, that doesn’t mean you should dive down a bottle, though. I kinda got that from the subtext of this post.
Living in the US, I see on a daily basis the indifference to climate. It's been heavily politicized. One side cares a little, the other side does not care one bit. It's very sad to see.
I also lived in Europe for many years where climate is less politicized and more mainstream. Most people try to do their best to contribute regardless of their political preferences. It's a big difference to what I see in the US.
You're telling' me. The amount if "once in a lifetime" crises I've experienced is too damn high. I'm going to be 30 this year and I'll never be able to afford a house.
If it makes you feel any better I'm 40 and I'll never afford a house either. Millennials got screwed.
No it doesn't, you deserve a home.
"Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Saiga antelope populations are recovering.
Crime rates dropping in US, multiple companies working with NASA for ISS access, direct observation of gravitational waves, left reddit for Lemmy, multiple COVID vaccines in like a year from outbreak, more usage of renewable energy sources, etc. There are some obvious problems we need to get together and address as communities, countries, and species, but there are a bunch of improvements and advancements being made too.
Massive drop in maternal mortality over the past century
I find it easy to have this mindset too. Sometimes it's outright depressing.
But I think a lot of this is a result of the media having given up on reporting good news.
Try ignoring the news for a while and you may feel better.
I have to agree. It seems like media in general is trying to get as many views/ clicks as possible and sadly negative information tends to garner more attention.
In addition to ignoring the news, it also helps to sift through what type of content we consume.
But personally, I found that a key factor is balance - being physically active, while constraining media time down to an hour or less. I don't just mean exercise here, but rather anything physical, like doing the dishes or doing a puzzle as a hobby.
Anything analogue can clear your mind and improve your general mood.
It's the end of things being easy, that's for sure. But maybe that's okay.
Humanity is in for a wild ride with climate change coming. It will upend entire food chains, let alone nations.
Sure, there's definitely been worse and more unstable periods in history before, but what's coming is very likely going to make those look tame in comparison.
I fully expect Eco-Fascism to take hold at some and the very people who denied the existence of climate change will demand full control of the last vestiges of the planets resources because in their minds only they are smart and capable enough to dole out what's left to the plebeians.
In other words, things have been a hell of a lot worse and could get a hell of a lot worse. Instead of waiting in anticipation for the worst that may inevitably happen, do your best to lead a good, kind, and loving life with the people close to you. Things feel like they're getting worse all the time, and hell, maybe they really are...
But well better to count your blessings now than to waste your life acting like it's all already as bad as it can be or that the badness is just around the corner. Maybe it is just around the corner. Even more reason to savor the little joys of life while you still have them and to build connections in your community while there's still time to build Mutual Aid networks. Those things alone can make a dark future easier to suffer, community and fond memories.
Came to say, touch grass. Get a job, get busy. Clean your home (I sure need to!), tidy up your corner of the world & exert positive control over things you can control. If you can't control it, please, don't worry about it.
exert positive control over things you can control
Came here to say this exact thing. Getting the initial drive to get up and do something can be hard, but taking charge on something is an effective cure to> feeling helpless on what you can't
Fuck caring about legitimate issues. Get busy for capital gainz and do not worry about the exploitation of people like yourself, ya pleb.
Only one thing can be the worst. Grammatically everything else is just bad.
Short answer. Yes.
Long answer: I'm 48. And while some of what we are feeling is certainly a sense of "back in my day" nostalgia, its certainly not the only cause.
We are from a strange generation who were old enough to remember a world before all of this, and young enough to adapt to all of it with relative ease. ( "this" being a transition to an online existence)
Even one generation before us just simply struggles with it. And just one generation after us, while still "born" before this all became a thing, were to young to truly experience it.
So we have a very unique and valuable perspective to offer; one that says "yes, things seemed better back then, and that is likely most certainly true for many things. But some things were likely just as fucked up back then and we simply didn't have the internet screaming it at us 24-7. And perhaps right and left were not quite as polarized as they are today because of it.
Just my Gen-x take on it.
Everything does suck. But it will suck whether you pay attention to it or not. Unplug whenever you need to. If you're in the US that goes double at least through the election. Also, something that really helped me out of a similar pit of despair, was finding ways to volunteer. Getting face to face with some problems you can actually do something about (i.e, feeding hungry people) is a good way to ground yourself. Good luck out there.
The news is always like this. i recommend paying attention to the toilet instead
Only thing that is worse in my mind is the "media" no longer news and "social media" both are largely negative and both are full of misinformation these days.
Housing costs may also be a negative..
Other than that MOST things seem better, we just can't enjoy anything since the media/social media keeps telling us what we should fear and hate.
Other than that MOST things seem better
This is obviously going to be a discussion that's going to vary greatly from place to place and region to region, but I honestly what to know what you think this.
This is going to be pretty American-centric, and even then pretty specific to my region, but that's certainly not the case here. Cost of living has skyrocketed, wages have hardly budged, and people are really, really struggling.
Now, we've obviously made some amazing progress in recent history. As fucked as it still is and as far as we still have to go, I think gay rights is probably one of the best examples of this. Even with all the bullshit we continue to see, we're miles ahead of 20 years ago.
But the overall trend, even internationally, is incredibly worrying. People's standards of living are decreasing, far right nationalistic populist movements are gaining momentum nearly everywhere you look, and we're actively watching multiple genocides happen in front of our eyes. Famines are already being massively exacerbated by climate change, you just don't hear about them because they're happening in poor countries. Everything points to all our previous warnings about climate change being incredibly conservative. I personally have next to zero hope in the world's government's to do a damn thing about it.
Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely still the possibility for a good ending. These are all problems than can be solved. We even know how to solve a good chunk of them. Just have to actually find the political to force it.
Cost of living has skyrocketed, wages have hardly budged, and people are really, really struggling.
True.. However it does appear to be slowing a bit for both the US and Canada
People’s standards of living are decreasing
Famines are already being massively exacerbated by climate change, you just don’t hear about them because they’re happening in poor countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
There is far less poverty in the world today than in the past.
Everything points to all our previous warnings about climate change being incredibly conservative.
Probably true, but we also appear to be on the edge of a massive move away from fossil fuels to renewables with the cost of solar dropping, grid level battery systems replacing old coal / natural gas peaker plants etc and the move is no longer just about the "environment" these technologies are in some ways superior or cheaper as well which will accelerate adoption
As mentioned by other commentators, negative, emotional news sell the best and the news nearly perfected this method during the last couple of years. Yes, it isn't as good as pre pandemic times, but it's not the worst. For me it really helped to limit my news time to max. once a day (like in the past with the newspaper in the morning or a news show in the evening) and watching things called "good news". In Germany some TV shows have this category so I never searched it on social media or YouTube, but I bet there are some channels/pages dedicated to good news (like there is a new treatment for disease XY or here is a good step in the fight against climate change, but sometimes just news like "the big panda isn't as endangered as it was".
Not everything is the worst. Just the important things.
Do you know how much better we would all be doing as a country if we had no access to "news"?
I'm sixty-two and I think one reason we feel so anxious and depressed all the time is because we have more information than we have ability to act.
Think of the myriad threats there are to the earth and humanity. If we ALL undertook to fix them together, there's still the question of priority. We can't do everything at once.
And most global problems require a unanimous response. Like the United Nations, if one country votes NO, you can't make progress. So unless we plan on a global war over climate, or plastics, or AI, or humanitarian treatment of humans, it's going nowhere.
We have elected officials who CAN effect the change that's needed. They are trained. They have inside information that we don't. They have access to technologies and resources we don't. We absolutely have to make the best choices for our elected leaders that we can, and then trust them to do the right thing. But, after that, we can't continue to let it eat us up.
I'm with Dory on this one. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.
I disagree. Back in maybe the 60s the public broadcast networks were not fully beholden to investors, did not have competition from the internet, and didn't have to do 24 hours of news. As a result, they had time to do responsible reporting. The current power structure encourages news media to do whatever it takes to grab your attention and hold it, and the best way to do that is fear.
I have not fully cut out the news from my life. There are some channels on YouTube that do good reporting like Sir Swag and of course Phillip DeFranco.
Another thing to point out is that, assuming you are American, we are in an election year. News companies really ramp up the fear mongering on election years.
I think if you focus on your friends, neighbours, hobbies, etc. You can find peace within the enshittification. But I think it's a bad idea to ignore the shit. Get mad about it. You should be mad. It's bullshit. But what then? We can wallow in the shit by ourselves, or we can find groups of people with similar interests. Who knows what happens after.
And by similar interests I mean this as an example: Are you pissed about genocide? Good! You should be! Others are too. Find them, and do something about it. You'll build relationships that will at least help carry you through the shit.
Hello fellow 1980 baby. Have you ever seen a chicken hatch? It's a pretty destructive process. The chick is immediately exposed to a myriad of microorganisms, a sharp shell, embryonic fluid, and plenty of other potential hazards that it can easily kill itself on in the first 20 minutes of its life. However, if it can manage to make it through the hazards you end up with a cute fluffy yellow chick, for another day. They turn brown and dull way too quick for me, at least when I was 10. My point here is that humanity is also going through a transitory period currently. We have already technically reached post scarcity levels, and the proletariat is noticing that. There is bound to be a fair bit of bloodshed over the next couple decades as we strip the power from the ultra wealthy sociopaths that currently run the ship, but the upside is that fucktons of really smart people understand that the roadmap to world peace includes universal education for all, and the elimination of extremes of poverty and wealth.
Yes.
Not as long as steak and titties still exist.
It's pretty bad right now, but it's not hopeless everywhere! There are some parts of the world that are getting developed for the first time though it's probably approaching the end for America
Yes, yes it has
I know you already got this but here is it again in my own words: don't watch the news, don't read social media, make personal connections one on one with people and judge your life by your vision and lens. Most people are judging it through a distorted news or social media centric set of glasses and it sounds hopeless. But when you look at your own family and friends you might just realise they're better than you think, you're able to find time to play and connect, you can still work and live with comfort, and your kids can grow up strong and healthy.
Start discarding that which is not truely part of your life, ignore the billionaires, the enshitification and all other forms of uncontrollable and frankly, barely affects you. These societal issues are always painted with someone else's view point.
When you find something that does directly, without someone else telling you it does, affect you, and you're in the mentally healthy place to take on that challenge, that's when you Ave. If you think about it like that, and others did the same, most of our societal problems would be tasked by those who are in positions to do so.
I say this as someone who's currently on 24/7 standby watching someone kind of like you, but going through depression, going through hopelessness, and going through addiction recovery (with all the slip ups). And their life right now is made, but they're so busy fixated on issues they can't either control nor have affects on them. They've got a house, it's part paid off, they've got a well paying job, the owners of that job respect and offering pay rises to them, they've got a partner, who's struggling their best to help them. In isolation they're in luxury. But they get self worked up about other people's business and societal or global issues. For what good? Stay grounded and self aware. Be thankful to yourself for making it so far already, and see the upward trends over the entire life and not the tiny problems of today.
It's all going to plan. It's why they prime us with movies about modern day civil wars, AI killer robots, and government overthrows.
