I’ll be honest, I don’t even want to read articles anymore. Its just crazy cabinet nominees every time. Wars happening. Nothing I can control. I just post something sarcastic or jokes in the comments. The only thing I care is if a hurricane is headed in my direction.
Y’all actually read all this shit? How does anyone have the energy?
Both. I first read the headline (while taking it with an immense grain of salt due to, by my experience, the commonplace usage of clickbait/misleading headlines) to see if the article may interest me, then, if so, I read the article to either effectively fact-check the article’s own headline, or to actually get more detail on what the headline summarized — though, it certainly feels like it is more often than not the former. Sometimes, however, the headline, on it’s own, is enough, but that seems rare — logically, it is in a news company’s best interest to get people to read the article (if it is assumed that they get income from people reading the article’s content) so they would be incentivized to make the headline as provoking or nebulous as possible to maximize the probability that one will click on it.
Personally, I believe that it’s, at the very least, important to be peripherally aware of what’s happening in the world, but one must be careful to recognize what they can and can’t control — what is worth fretting over and what isn’t. Inundating oneself with the knowledge of any number of horrible things that may have happened somewhere in the world in a given day is generally of no help to anyone and only serves to degrade one’s own mental state.
The most tiring thing, personally, is fact checking. It is tiring to feel like the majority of my interactions with news articles that are shared are that of dealing with misleading claims and misdirected or misinformed reactions. It certainly feels like the majority offloads the scrutiny of data onto the minority.