I don’t want to be totally uninformed about what’s going on, but I also don’t want to fall into doomscrolling.
I know that I could very easily just avoid any news sites and only find out about these things secondhand from people I talk to whether in real life or online. I also know that it’s not good to bury your head in the sand quite that far.
I could also very easily doomscroll different news sites and actively seek out more depressing news when I’m done scrolling one site. I’ve been doing more of this option lately, and as a reaction to that I’ve started doing total avoidance, which I know isn’t good.
So how and where did you strike a healthy balance between reading enough news to stay informed, but not enough to be in a constant state of anxiety about the world?
I’m looking for genuine advice here. I don’t want to be mean but I’m not too sure else how to say the following: I don’t want to come back to a lot of replies about “I didn’t find a balance lol I just doomscroll/stick my head in the sand” and “I feel this, same.” Not really sure if that’s going against the spirit of the chatting community, but seeing a lot of “same problem” and zero advice tends to make me feel more in despair. I already know this is a common problem, so what would usually be the correct social move of saying you relate in order to empathize and let the other know they’re not alone isn’t helpful for me in this particular instance.
I, too, find striking the balance between staying informed and protecting myself from negativity to be daunting, disheartening, and frequently unrealistic.
What helped me was my coincidental transition to services that have little or no “algorithmic” influence, such as switching to Lemmy/Mastodon. It requires me to be more intentional with my willing exposure to content, at the cost of being less convenient to find new content.
Like, I don’t get as many new songs in my playlists since I jumped out of Spotify. It means I need to get creative in order to try new artists, but I’m not hitting the skip button as much, either.
I’m perfectly happy with it being harder to find new content. Finding new content online usually just results in more scrolling and more consumption from me. If I try something new/expand my horizons into something that isn’t just trying a new game or watching a new video, if I do something new to me that isn’t just consumption, it’s usually as a result of talking with people in the real world. For me, finding new content online tends to give me zero benefits and more wasted time. I assume you are not the same and new content is actually useful for you?
I will say that Lemmy and the like aren’t the most useful unless you curate it, although this may vary per instance. I had to go out of my way to block Politics and similar communities here on Beehaw, and am about to go block the Technology community too. I usually spend more time rabbitholing into doom than I should as a result of what I see on Technology.