Asklemmy

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!

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.

Only one thing can be the worst. Grammatically everything else is just bad.

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

The news is always like this. i recommend paying attention to the toilet instead

Not everything is the worst. Just the important things.

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.

"Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

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.

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.

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.

Saiga antelope populations are recovering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

It doesn't help that news corps have found that we generally respond to the negative news much more than we do positive news.