I don’t consume mainstream media very much but I still have a serious doom feeling. And I think that doom is feeling is right, it’s just that it’s about my life sucking because of climate in 10 years or maybe more.
And short term I have a doom feeling from the obvious inequalities in society which will only worsen with climate change and which seems to push society towards fascism.
People will die, and are already dying, because of the broken system we are living in.
What I’m trying to get at is that I think that the problem with the media is not that it’s focusing on the negative, but that it’s focusing on the wrong negative.
They’re only showing the effects of the problems in our society, but not the problems themselves.
they show thieves and crime going up but not the poverty that causes that crime
they show people angry and protesting but not the oppression and the inequality they’re experiencing
they show people losing their homes and lives from floods and fires, but they don’t show the stats on climate change or who are the biggest polluters (except when they say China)
And I know why they do it this way - it’s cheaper. Capitalism ruins everything, including media. It doesn’t make fiscal sense to go the extra effort and do an investigation on the problem when you can just report on the bad stuff and focus on making it catchy/clickbaity. It’s as low effort as it gets because it that’s how it has to be in a capitalist world.
I feel like there’s a lot to unpack here. This impending sense of doom can be a very powerful emotion and has the nasty property of distorting our sense of reality so it can present itself as an objective state of the world/truth.
We all have certain emotional biases depending on our environment (like the social media, discussed in OP), the people we interact with the most, how we were raised, our genetics of course and probably a dozen other factors. All this things influence our perception of the world, none of them are objectively true. Looking at the same situation, from another perspective, could paint a completely different picture which is just as valid.
I completely agree with you on focusing on the causes, not on the effects. This is something that is done way too little, these days. But how we deal with the causes we found, is now entirely dependent on our
perception of the world. Many people feel helpless/depressed when opposed to “big” abstract ideas like you listed: Capitalism, Fascism, Climate Change [we need to differ between the term itself and the concrete effects], etc., because they perceive them as ubiquitous and omnipresent. But taking “a step back”, putting these things in another (maybe historic) perspective or breaking them down into small solvable problems, can help to form practical solutions, even when they are on a small scale, and escape this emotion of helplessness.
On a side note: My father was a historian with the early 20th century as his field of interest. Growing up, he often read to me from his textbooks, showed me the pictures from that time and visited with me museums and historic places all over Europe. All the hardships from just a hundred years ago, the wars, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the political uncertainty, are completely incomprehensible in our modern times. I often try to compare our problems today with the problems people had back then and I wouldn’t trade.
I don’t consume mainstream media very much but I still have a serious doom feeling. And I think that doom is feeling is right, it’s just that it’s about my life sucking because of climate in 10 years or maybe more.
And short term I have a doom feeling from the obvious inequalities in society which will only worsen with climate change and which seems to push society towards fascism.
People will die, and are already dying, because of the broken system we are living in.
What I’m trying to get at is that I think that the problem with the media is not that it’s focusing on the negative, but that it’s focusing on the wrong negative.
They’re only showing the effects of the problems in our society, but not the problems themselves.
And I know why they do it this way - it’s cheaper. Capitalism ruins everything, including media. It doesn’t make fiscal sense to go the extra effort and do an investigation on the problem when you can just report on the bad stuff and focus on making it catchy/clickbaity. It’s as low effort as it gets because it that’s how it has to be in a capitalist world.
I feel like there’s a lot to unpack here. This impending sense of doom can be a very powerful emotion and has the nasty property of distorting our sense of reality so it can present itself as an objective state of the world/truth.
We all have certain emotional biases depending on our environment (like the social media, discussed in OP), the people we interact with the most, how we were raised, our genetics of course and probably a dozen other factors. All this things influence our perception of the world, none of them are objectively true. Looking at the same situation, from another perspective, could paint a completely different picture which is just as valid.
I completely agree with you on focusing on the causes, not on the effects. This is something that is done way too little, these days. But how we deal with the causes we found, is now entirely dependent on our perception of the world. Many people feel helpless/depressed when opposed to “big” abstract ideas like you listed: Capitalism, Fascism, Climate Change [we need to differ between the term itself and the concrete effects], etc., because they perceive them as ubiquitous and omnipresent. But taking “a step back”, putting these things in another (maybe historic) perspective or breaking them down into small solvable problems, can help to form practical solutions, even when they are on a small scale, and escape this emotion of helplessness.
On a side note: My father was a historian with the early 20th century as his field of interest. Growing up, he often read to me from his textbooks, showed me the pictures from that time and visited with me museums and historic places all over Europe. All the hardships from just a hundred years ago, the wars, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the political uncertainty, are completely incomprehensible in our modern times. I often try to compare our problems today with the problems people had back then and I wouldn’t trade.