I don't have outrage fatigue. Outrages are outrages and they are what they are. Are there many exaggerations and fake outrages? Sure. But things like the USA's current constitutional crisis are real.
What I struggle with isn't fatigue at outrage, it's knowing what to do about it.
I think violence is going to become more common, but I don't particularly think it will be effective.
So less so than outrage, it's the feeling that we're trapped in a real life doom loop with no clear off ramp that I struggle with.
I would like to do something... But what?
Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:
- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.
- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.
- It is not worth discussing with âswitched-onâ people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.
- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.
- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.
- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.
- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.
Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a whileâa couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.
> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if youâre experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.
I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.
Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind, everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time.
I've been an avid news consumer since ~2016 and early on I remember getting very outraged at articles, tweets and other pieces of news I read. Over time I realized that these articles want you to be outraged, and that the outrage is a form of control.
Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading. I'll be reading an article and I can usually pick up the "tricks" writers use to generate outrage. I often find myself reading an article and go "oh look you want me to feel outraged right now".
Nowdays when I try to be informed about a story I will read an NYT report, a CNN report, a Fox News or other right leaning report, and then maybe one from DailyWire of Bannon's War Room. Skimming every article I often see spots where the outlet is trying to outrage their readers. NYT will report something that will outrage the left and as you "go right" on the reports you will start to see outrage directed to the right.
I think "being informed" is very overrated in general. Often it means being informed about palace intrigue and intelligence service/corporate narratives. I would say that in general media consumption or "staying informed" should be seen as a vice not a virtue
I tried to solve this problem by making AI rank the stories by significance and rewriting the news titles in a boring, factual style.
I think it worked quite well, there's only about 10 headlines a day (out of 15k+) that get a significance rating higher than of 5.5 out of 10.
It also helps avoiding the overfocus on western issues and actually learn what's happening around the world.
One thing is read the article, not just the headline. Get the nuance, learn whatâs actually happening, see what people are doing to react. Youâll not feel as frozen if you understand that a fluid situation has many directions it can take and itâs not set in stone.
Isn't this something that marginalized groups have had to deal with since their existence? I mean, there's a reason why in the US black men die at higher rates from heart disease and stress-related illnesses. Is this getting attention now because white people are feeling it? I grew up in the 70's, and the hatred toward gays that erupted in the 80's due to Reagan was impossible to explain to someone born in 2000 who grew up seeing gay people everwhere. Not saying it doesn't need attention, but I think we could probably turned to marginalized groups for tips! (RIP my karma.)
I can recommend https://newsasfacts.com for at least having a news source that, thanks to its matter-of-fact tone and lack of imagery, is useful for staying informed without getting overwhelmed so easily.
It also puts things into a bit of a global perspective, when you realize how much stuff is going on around the world all the time. Though this of course also means you'll learn things that are on the news everywhere in your country only after they've become relevant enough to register on a global level.
I have a New Yorker (I think that's where it's from) cartoon on my wall. It's a man and woman walking down the street and she's saying "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane." It's a good daily reminder for me.
I've been very pleased with my own results by disconnecting from social media and anything with a short (eg 24 hours) news cycle. Weeklies (eg the economist) are still generally worth reading and filter to more important topics. On (geo)politics when I want more information I go to websites of the major think tanks of the relevant country. The bias is explicit and the authors are always deeply knowledgeable, writing for an educated and equally knowledgeable audience. For the Americans, I would recommend the council on foreign relations and RAND for a republican perspective, and center for strategic and international studies and Brookings for the Democrat side.
Hope this helps someone out there.
> Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You donât want to act, or even talk alone; you donât want to âgo out of your way to make trouble.â Why not?âWell, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty
> Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, âeveryoneâ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, âItâs not so badâ or âYouâre seeing thingsâ or âYouâre an alarmist.â
> But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. Thatâs the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shockedâif, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in â43 had come immediately after the âGerman Firmâ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in â33. But of course this isnât the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
- From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"Happiness is an inside job. Sitting with your emotions is very important. That's not to say we can tolerate an unlimited amount of information. But rather to highlight that we can become the observer of our emotions, rather than be consumed by them.
Why is it even important to stay informed? In virtually all cases, there's very little that I can do about anything, so I'm just wasting energy by looking at the news.
Scientific American used to be a great magazine and should get back to what made it so valuable: Covering important ideas in science without watering them down. Their website now describes it as "the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology". Blech.
Google's attack on RSS has been quite successful. Not a single mention here in the 150+ comments. I would think the HN crowd would be savvy enough to recommend it on this subject.
I'll share unpopular advice here: it would be wise to adopt a more Stoic approach to the present crisis.
The events unfolding now are an expected progression of choices made years ago.
The choices made now will likewise determine the future. Not all of the current situation is under your control, however. Take whatever wise action you can, but beyond this, judge the outcome neither good nor bad. As hard as it may be -- because we love this country and the ideals for which it should stand, but this is precisely the mechanism which the forces of chaos are using against the system.
They're trying to fatigue you. Don't let them.
It makes sense to examine several likewise unpopular but nevertheless patently correct facts:
1) Every nation ceases to be. Every nation that ever was has fallen, merged, disappeared. This one cannot be different -- and that is OK, because this is what nations do. This does not at all mean you should do nothing. Quite the contrary. It does however mean refraining from placing superlative negative value judgements upon the events happening now. Work towards indifference in your mind, and act according to your wisdom and conscience.
2) You and all other individuals alive today will perish eventually. We all return to nature when our time comes. You were once purely of nature and not of human society -- you came into the world not knowing language, not knowing what nations are, what democracy is, why any of this matters. You were taught what it means to be a modern human. And we all return to the earth, to this mysterious and unfathomably ancient layer of living matter upon this world. So your efforts while you are alive are by nature limited, by necessity bounded. You can cause great change, and you should, according to what you are uniquely suited and drawn to do. Beyond this however, the rest of humanity -- which as a group, unlike individuals, may survive indefinitely -- will have responsibility over the rest.
Hope this perespetive benefits someone. It is the precise opposite of modern media, which wants you to feel outraged with every headline.
When Socrates was informed that his son had died, his response was:
"I knew that my son was mortal."
His mind was rational enough to accept such seemingly mundane but nevertheless consequential knowledge, at every level of his mind. And the effect? When disaster came, he did still suffer, but far less than most other people.
Because it was not a disaster. Merely an outcome of that which when examined closely, was to be expected based on knowledge of mortality.
I wish there was a modern "news wire" service to help with this problem.
I'm thinking tweet-sized news stories, a few per day at most, no threads, no images, no links, nothing but 140 characters of pure text. You could even deliver them as texts or unclickable push notifications.
That format heavily discourages clickbait (because there are no clicks to be had) and forces journalists to only include the information that actually matters, with no fluff about how they were sipping hot cocoa in a nice indie restaurant in Montana when talking to the subject of the story, a 38-year-old man wearing a polo shirt.
You could run an operation like this on a shoestring budget, with one or two individuals regurgitating news stories from mainstream sources in a much denser format, minus the outrage. Many, including me, would probably be willing to subscribe.
Just view a topic on Reddit then on X. You can't be outraged both ways and it should cancel out.
I have OCD and sadly one of the ways I've dealt with it is to drown it out by being on social media and, before that, just playing NPR nonstop all day. I basically chose a new, louder voice to drown out the other voices in my head.
Unfortunately, in this day and age it's like choosing between two different forms of torture. Social media is so toxic and fries the nervous system so much - it's awful. The news is awful. And being alone with OCD is awful. (And yes I've tried various treatments - so far, nothing's worked great. B12 shots did help a bit and so did prednisone accidentally, but I can't stay on that long term.)
I tried blocking all social media and news sites and instead subscribing to the print version of The Week. Honestly, it was great. But eventually the siren song of internet-fueled dopamine eventually lured me back...
This is not a good article. Shocked that it got so much attention here. It's full of garden variety common sense.
Saying "just quit social media" or something doesn't work. You have to have the mindset that you cannot control what happens in the vast majority of news stories. If the federal government does something I don't like, it's not worth my time to be angry and let it linger in my head for the day, which only hurts me. Outrage seems to come from a lack of control over a situation.
Shift your focus to things you can possibly control, e.g. the news that's happening in your local community where you have a say in how things are done.
After November I totally stopped looking at any and all news and social media with the exception of HN. My reasoning being that you are not actually getting informed by any of those sources. They are geared towards engagement which makes them entertainment. Also, I have absolutely no power to change anything happening right now so knowing about it is just going to make me upset. It's a lose lose IMO. A lot of folks have gotten upset with me about this which I find a bit baffling. Like, what does knowing every minute detail do for me?
The net effect of my news/social media fast has been fairly dramatic. I suddenly have an attention span again. When a persons opinion differs from mine, I generally don't immediately assume they are part of the third reich (although if they keep talking a while I might get there lol).
To be clear I absolutely despise whats happening in the US right now. Enough information makes it to me through friends and family (and HN) that I feel a deep sense of despair. I am just not sure what minute by minute updates on the fuckery happening right now gets me.
I basically just get my news from the onion now.
Optimism might be bland but I can't help it!
Prior to social media, we all had incredibly conflicting views, just wasn't in our faces all the time to get outraged about! So the trick is to remember, by having these discussions/disagreements, we're actually making progress. We hear the loudest voices, but there's always smart and sincere people quietly reading and learning, which is a brilliant outcome!
If you find yourself getting outraged, be disciplined and switch activities (exercise, go for a walk, or turn off the source).
I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of it. Click on the good stuff!
There is no use in staying "informed" in the current societal environment, there is no propaganda-free information floating around anymore, if there ever was. As long as one is aware of that basic fact then things will fall into line more easily.
And, yes, I have been in the boat of "trying to stay informed" for almost 20 years now, as in I was actually paying money for The Economist and the Financial Times, but around a couple of years ago (in fact three, since the war in Ukraine started for good) I realized that they were as propaganda-infested as the rest of the media and that was the end of my journey of trying to remain "informed". No information gathering and receiving is neutral, none at all.
I gave up social media for this reason. EVERYTHING is so politicised and agenda-centric on all platforms and news sites.
It was effecting me really badly, to the point that I made the decision to leave the room when the news is playing, switch to a dumb phone, switch to an mp3 player, and get rid of all social media including reddit. So I donât use a smartphone, and donât carry it with me day-day.
On my laptop I even went as far as blacklisting all the typical sites.
Iâm only 30. Itâs very hard when it feels like youâre alone in acting this way. Itâs a very isolating life trying to have principals.
I also recently learnt I have adhd, so that may be why Iâm so sensitive to it.
But like i say, itâs an isolating feeling.
The way I see it, for a piece of news to hold value, it must have 2 properties:
1. Actionable: can this news inform how you go about your life in some way? 2. Primary Source: it must come straight from the source, to avoid manipulation of the original info
The vast majority of news doesn't have either quality, let alone both.
Just like how "staying fed" often amounts to people eating junk food rather than quality stuff that gives them the actual nourishment their body needs, "staying informed" amounts to people scratching their curiosity itch with global gossip, rather than with actionable information.
I just feel like there are a few recent things to actually be outraged about
I've always found sports to be moronic. People sit glued to their TV staring at big men in tights pass a pigskin around. All people who like sports talk about is how those men passed that ball around, or who they think is gonna pass the ball around next. Let's trade stats and figures about the big men in tights. Ooh, did you see what the big man in tights did?
Politics is now just sports where people in business suits pass moronic comments around. Same pointless drama, same fans commenting about the pointless action, glued to their TVs.
I quit all news the first time Trump was in office. I didn't miss anything. Important information filters through culture, you can't avoid it. But you'll notice soon you have absolutely no idea who it is people are talking about constantly. And it turns out, nothing in your life changes now that you're "uninformed", except you have more free time and you're less stressed out.
"No matter what you believe, Iâm willing to bet youâve been feeling a lot of outrage lately."
Is it true that most people are feeling lots of outrage? Why?
The vibe I get from the left is outrage. The vibe I get from the right is relief and happiness. And the vibe of the likely-majority (i.e., the non-political) is probably just a desire to get on with life.
I can see there being lots of anxiety (e.g., over AI, automation, China-US relations, etc...). But anxiety is different from outrage.
Scientific American: "It's so bad that we live in such polarised times."
Also Scientific American:
Science journal editor resigns after calling Gen X fascists over Trump win
Laura Helmuth leaves Scientific American following controversial social media posts in which she lashed out at âbigotedâ voters
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/11/15/laura-helmuth...
The irony of clicking a link to an article about âoutrage fatigueâ only to find itâs not even an article but a playboy style interview that goes on for several pages. Outrageous.
> And this just really has been accelerating, I guess, in the last few years because of our political polarization and other world events.
Feels like the causality might be the other way around.
This has been very difficult over the last couple weeks.
I mainly read Reuters now. It's refreshingly boring.
The best way is to make sure you are actually trading or making predictions where you lose if you are deeply wrong.
Outrage about "news" is usually from the kind of people who get upset about desriptions of reality and things like that. They usually read the NYT or the Atlantic and never trade or predict and they don't realize it is useless, wrong or just way to late.
Here's a ready-made idea for a high value AI app. Present to me the view of my favorite websites with all outrage clickbait hidden or re-worded in neutral, non-clickbait language. Better yet if you can also focus on the topics that I actually want to read about. Currently all the news apps without exception are the polar opposite of this, so I don't use them.
Funny this is a thing that people in some country need to work through. Personally, I have to fight the feeling of sadness and guilt every time I read about things going on around me that I should but do not do something to help. For the things that I am powerless against, honestly I have zero emotion, much less outrage.
Consuming quality content over overconsumption is the key. Plus if you have already crossed multiple levels of outrage fatigue, then at that point you should be aware of it, hence becoming more calm in future. If you see what is in front of you and know you cannot change anything, why outrage? why fatigue? just move on.
> Feltman: Yeah, and what is it about outrage that helps misinformation spread?
> Lewis: So I think part of it is the fact that itâs more engaging. It, you know, activates your emotions, and so people are more primed to respond to that.
This is why upvote-style forums, like Hacker News, need to be treated with heavy scrutiny. They are hard-wired to bubble out of control when an opinion is the right combination of popular and passionate.
One way we can improve this situation, as contributors, is to try to stick to more logical, dispassionate responses. This is difficult to do because we all feel like what we are writing is the most important thing in the world and everyone else needs to read it.
Not exactly a social network but I am kind of addicted to the Google Home curated list of news - that thing on Android (maybe just Pixel?) when you swipe all the way to the left.
I read it every morning in bed.
It contains all the topics I'm interested in as it knows me probably better than I know myself.
If you're outraged by anything that does not directly impact your life you're doing life wrong. We all have limited time and energy. I have never been able to understand people who get emotional over things they read online that have no impact on their day to day life.
I think it's always worth keeping in mind that every single piece of media you consume was created primarily to benefit its creator and almost always the relationship is parasitic (you're the host). Only rarely does media engage in mutualism.
It will not lessen your outrage, but I recently built a news search engine that pulls from 200 selected sources for a more limited, spam-free experience. https://mozberg.com
This article just says to turn off the phone and go outside. Saved you 5 minutes
Been there, done that. I've tried to stay informed but not outraged for the last 8 years and it didn't make a damn bit of difference. I got involved in local issues, I phone banked, I tried to put my money where it would do the most good.
I'm out. I'm hiding away and hoping nothing affects me personally, and if it does I'm not going to think there's anything I could have done about it.
We're not in control anymore. Not unless there are any tech billionaires lurking on HN, and they don't give a shit about us.
Well while for the most folks which feel a fatigue now, we felt the fatigue the last years.
Now daily the old fatigue gets slayed away by the great president of the United States and we have joy.
Is your outrage changing anything? Is your outrage helping or hurting your mental health? Is your outrage helping or hurting your relationships?
Choose a different path
Personally, I fixed the problem by not bothering with "staying informed" at all. I ditched media outside of local news entirely, and just don't engage with things that I can't do anything about. It would boil down to "focus on things you can control." Sure, it's fun to be outraged together with your friends about "X leader in Y country does Z crazy thing" but.. can you do anything about it? Does your opinion matter? Is there value in engaging with it? Turns out the answer is almost always no (unless you're suffering from main-character-syndrome, of course), so what's the point?
Focus on you. What are you doing today? What do you need to reflect on from yesterday? What do you need to plan for tomorrow? Don't waste cycles on things that are out of your scope.
Simple, no ads, and with just the headlines it's enough.
Those who have outrage are the same people that think they are calm, reasonable, considerate and don't have outrage, at all.
> âŚlimiting yourself to checking the news a couple times a day instead of, like, every hour or, you know, getting those alerts on your phone all the time.
A couple times a day? Who needs to check the news that often? Iâve not checked the news at all this year and it hasnât negatively impacted me at all.
I highly recommend to install a browser extension that hides the social feed off of social media sites. Incredibly effective.
I just quit Twitter and changed to Bluesky and all the bots and spam and outrage just disappeared.
One thing I first started noticing in the 2000s on sites like kuro5hin were young conservatives.
Like I mean 20 year old's using conservative talking points, mostly in an absolutist aggressive sort of way. Many I guess were coming at it from Rand's 'philosophical' writings. (Basically an overly intellectual cover for being an asshole).
I remember asking them on that site with a post: "Why are you young guys conservative?" I mean they weren't religious, or at least none of them cited this as a motivation, they weren't rich so they had nothing to 'conserve'. I remember being like WTF?
Looking back on it now I think most of them were in it for the trolling. Conservative thought often skews insensitive and absolutist, so I guess these dudes were using it as a basis to troll more sensitive posters.
Now 25years later and we are living the consequences of a 4chan presidency.
From TFA: Thereâs actually a recent study by William Brady, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern Universityâs Kellogg School of Management. He and his colleagues found that outrage actually helps misinformation spread more widely, especially online on social media.
No specific study was linked from the transcript. Brady's works indexed by Google Scholar there is "Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online" by KL McLoughlin, WJ Brady, A Goolsbee, B Kaiser, K Klonick, MJ Crockett, published in Science 386 (6725), 991-996. [1] Two of moral outrage's properties are interestingly counter to one another. Expressions of outrage are often orthogonal to truth/falsity and expressing outrage imbues trustworthiness.
[O]utrage expressions can serve communicative goals that do not depend on information accuracy, such as signaling loyalty to a political group or broadcasting a moral stance. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions such as fact-checking or accuracy prompts that assume users want to share accurate information.
[I]ndividuals who express outrage are seen as more trustworthy. This suggests that news sources might gain a credibility advantage by posting outrageous content.
0. https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ysiWkJMAAAAJ...
"Mute words" goes a long way. Every platform should have it.
If you truly need to know breaking news, one of the following is probably true:
- you have a team that will brief you on it
- you will get the news that apply to you from the source
You wonât get either of these from a news website.
As a civilian, you can stay completely up to date with a quick weekly / monthly headline scan.
"Pay less attention, otherwise you might become apathetic." Granted, mass media is generally slop (this article being no exception), but that's all the more reason one should observe and think carefully.
What is actually outrageous is that Scientific American publishes articles like this. It's an institution that, like so many, is destroying itself by getting into politics, especially the politics of outrage.
Active Balancing Habits. Reminders to self of thd things that as an indivual you/I are doing that offset the enshitification. Like I am now extra happy that I cant stand the taste of store bought eggs, and hope that others can get past thete outrage at the prices, and thrn evauate if they actualy feel better, just by not eating the sulferous nasty things. And more selfish, me time, personal care, foooood, foooood, yummy fooood. and pushing myself to work harder and use my creativity to overcome the inane obsticles to,..... everything finnishing all the things on my list having a lot of lists crumpling up, checked off lists, and useing the paper to light my stove, which heats my tea and so when I do face the shitstorm of events, I have the energy to take it, get mad and put that energy back into the things on my list, or one of the many random, oh.....that needs doing.....now!
The real challenge is rewiring our own habits
> "No matter what you believe, Iâm willing to bet youâve been feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels unavoidable: I canât look down at my phone or glance up at a TV without seeing something that makes me upset."
Umm no, I've not felt any outrage.
Not because I'm particularly satisfied with any recent political events, but because I've stopped consuming daily news from outlets where generating outrage has become a financial incentive.
I'm not on FB, my only use of social media is to help co-ordinate my kids' lives. I never watch TV, I've no idea what today's mainstream media clickbait stories are, I'm just not that interested.
I used to read SA to stay informed.
A good way to do this is to avoid reading Scientific American lest one become outraged how a once respected science magazine for lay audiences became overrun by Woke Warriors.
That transcription reads very much like a NotebookLM "podcast" summarising the actual article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/outrage-fatigue-i...
While limiting your exposure to "outrage" isn't bad advice, it's just more of the ignoring of the issues that she herself calls out in the beginning of the article.
She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion, gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own self-interest"...
GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of control then they'll have to move on (to something better hopefully, but probably not ;).
Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him, watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about the facts or morality or how he "lies".
>> It's been like what, only two weeks? This shit is exhausting already.
> It's meant to exhaust you.
* https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1886247034664964548
Ezra Klein:
> That is the tension at the heart of Trumpâs whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. [âŚ]
> What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself â that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Donât believe them.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
No matter what you believe, Iâm willing to bet youâve been feeling a lot of outrage lately.
No. I am in control of how I feel like. Nothing else.
TLDR Summary: limit your intake of social media and news.
"Lately"?
The genocide in Gaza has been going intensely for more than a year, dead and mutilated children streamed out pretty much every day. Now it has moved to the West Bank.
Similarly a genocidal process has been ongoing in Sudan, perpetrated by a proxy of the UAE, close partner to the US.
Do usians not see these images and only just now with the new administration's inauguration entered a mood of distress?
Why is it an axiom that we need to "stay informed"? The vast majority of news is things that don't affect you, and of the things that do affect you, the vast majority of that is things you can't do anything about. And if they do affect you you're sure to find out without following the news. The news is tailored to make you feel outraged so that you will consume more of it.
As far as social media goes, just don't follow accounts that are annoying. If some accounts are friends in real life but insufferable online, just mute them. Other than friends I follow accounts about food and pottery, I don't see any reason to get off social media, I love it.
Propagandists are now going to tell you to ignore what you're hearing and seeing. Just put the news away and relax! The same people spent the last four years telling you to be outraged about things that never happened. A man won the women's boxing at the olympics! Outrage!
One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. Iâm technically gen z and Iâve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldnât believe how great itâs been for my overall state of mind.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and Iâd argue that weâre all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. Thereâs a reason âbrain rotâ was word of the year.