There’s so much doom on social media right now. The environment is collapsing. The economy will crash. Civil rights are ending. Democracy is dead.
What keeps you going? Why do you still get up and go do what needs to be done when the world seems to be ending around us?
I keep hoping that everything is exaggerated and it won’t be that bad. That he’ll be out in 4 years and not become a dictator with no more term limits.
Donald Trump will die (don’t care if from natural causes or not) at some point in the near future. Just want to be alive to celebrate.
Reasons you can get banned permanently from reddit for $1000.
I work in disability support. Some of the kids I am working with have gone over the last year from non speaking to using sign and are making real meaningful progress in their self care skills. They can keep going in the face of difficult times, so my problems don’t seem so hard.
Also, in Australia we have the NDIS, a system for funding disability supports in a socialised manner without restricting what options someone uses too much. While all governmental systems (or any systems with money) are susceptible to grift progress is being made on catching fraudsters and prosecuting them while also closing the loopholes they exploit. The NDIS will be around for a long time to come and will help Australians with disabilities determine their own futures and make them a reality. There are problems with it but honestly it has been a game changer and I think it is a model for the rest of the world to aspire to.
I don’t know what will happen. It is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for me, but that very same uncertainty is why I keep going.
There is this video that reminds me that there is no natural law that determines that things will only get better. Yet we have to find purpose. I am not hopeful, but I am happy for everyone that tries to do the right thing. We’re in this together even if everything goes to shit.
I’m sticking around to witness the collapse, in the hopes things go full mad max. Because that would be a better existence than the one I’m currently living in.
I’m not sure if I’m half joking or being entirely serious.
Over the past few weeks, I realized that I wasn’t reading the news to “stay informed,” I was reading it because I was bored. As a form of entertainment, it’s pretty awful. 99% of what I read will have no direct impact on me or my family, and just sitting there and worrying about it without doing anything to fix it serves nobody.
Also, I’ve learned to be skeptical of basically every headline good or bad. I saw a headline this week about how upset Trump supporters were with his cabinet picks. Comments in the thread were talking about leopards eating faces. The article was a collection of 8 tweets from supporters showing disapproval.
This news site was just preying on people’s hopes and making a story out of absolutely nothing.
So I started focusing on some personal hobbies and have tried to re-teach myself how to focus by reading some long form fiction.
This is so true. MY eyes are now a commodity and I’m going to choose who gets them more wisely.
Prozac.
Maybe it’s Sertraline.
Study of history.
People have been prophesying the end times for millennia now, for this reason or that reason. I think that ultimately they just don’t like the basic fact that change of some sort or another is inevitable in the world, it will not remain static and no system or institution will last forever. This does not result in any concrete end, however.
To quote Morpheus, “I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.”
There’s also a fair bit of profit-driven exaggeration in just how bad things really are in certain arenas. Bad news makes good clickbait, good/neutral news less so. So the ratio of bad to good news we receive is not actually representative of the full picture of what is happening in the world.
Personally, I turn to activism. I realized that regardless of how horrible the future will be, there’s good to do in this world.
The world is full of people who are as scared as you and I are. I can make their lives a tad more positive.
The environment is collapsing? Educate and organise, think about how to build mutual aid systems and how to sustain yourself small scale.
The economy will crash? Help others, people who got thrown to the curb by the social system, homeless people, orphans,…
Civil rights are ending? I’m trans and scared. And there’s so many other trans children that are counting on me to be the representation that I wish would have had when I was their age. I’m not going down without a fight.
Democracy is ending? Let’s focus on preserving what we can and try to rebuild. It won’t be over forever.
People being nice to and helping me often makes my day in an otherwise miserable time.I want to be that person for others.
Stop caring and all of the problems go away, as if by magic. The amount of emotional energy that people put into issues that they’re unlikely to ever face is unbelievably wasteful.
By avoiding social media and living my life through memes and video games.
There is a theory that natural human psychology wasn’t made to handle all of the world’s atrocities. People experience a “bad news burnout” because some of us constantly feel disappointed in humans as a race by hearing/seeing sociopathic behavior on an international level every day.
I think I just hit that wall. This thread is fucking depressing. There’s happiness and hope out there, but it seems you won’t find it on social media, I guess. Negativity bias seems more prevalent on Lemmy than others.
There’s a reason why it’s common for people to occasionally want to camp out in the middle of nowhere with no technology for a bit. If I read about some horrible news like a grandma getting shot picking olives on her own land I try to follow it up with something more lighthearted such as kittens hugging puppies. Like eating pickled ginger as a pallette cleanser between sushi.
Negativity drives more clicks so therefore is more profitable for reporting KPI.
I block any C that is news, local regional things, political, or US centric. That seems to kill off most negatively in a platform.
I think that is a lot of what perpetuates doom. Eyes = $$$$
Is this social media?
Not by my definition. I don’t friend people or follow people on here.
Oh I gave up like 15 years ago.
In general, humanity (at least in Europe?) developed positively over the past few centuries. There were of course setbacks, but they didn’t last too long and sometimes even lead to great progress. Nevertheless we must fight for progress and shouldn’t give up just because the world once again seems to get even worse. Even more important when it comes to problems we have just a tiny period of time to fight against like climate change, we need to act now and can’t waste ten years being (ruled by) facists.
That’s the crazy thing about all these echo chambers online. Everyone sits around convincing themselves that life is worse than it has ever been, when in reality it’s better in almost every way than it ever has been. Through constant struggle, our ancestors built us a world that is vastly easier to live in than ever before, yet many of us look at what is still left to improve and instead of facing that challenge, just complain loudly about the injustice of it all.
There’s still a bunch of kindness around. There’s good food to be eaten and culture to be consumed. There’s drinks to be had and friends to be made. Dances to learn and skills to master.
There’s a lot of things to be hopeful about, aside from the whole everything going to shit thing. And if you can brighten up people’s lives by doing it, you might even contribute to the world going slightly less to shit.
I think it’s time to recalibrate and focus more on the closer things. Doesn’t mean one should ignore the world, but we’re not fixing it by stressing out, doom-scrolling, and posting about it online either. We tried.
I agree. The thing that keeps me going is the idea of finding community again.
Not sure how many people in this thread are American, but we have a very independent point of view. The “optimal” way of living is leaving your parents, leaving your home, and building a new home somewhere else. We tend to be more independent overall and less likely to look to others for comfort, to our detriment. At least, that has been my experience.
So I think the best thing to do is go out there, find a community that DOES care. Because they DO exist. Look for hobby classes, look for new friends in your interests, look for a church (if that is your thing. I am UU so the people at those churches are often some of the nicest, most leftist people around).
I’m moving soon, and I think the thing that keeps me going is the idea of finding new community after I move. You can also affect meaningful change as a community when you can’t do it alone.
This is what I needed to hear. Thanks! Think local, act local to help the global.
