Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
I’m probably going to make a thread about this very topic some day. I find it curious how many people seem to be getting visibly angry when dealing with these topics and that’s interesting because it’s not how I feel at all. I’m not personally involved with most of these events. I can observe things from a distance, look at the available facts and then try and form an educated opinion on it. At no point do I feel any strong emotions about it and I don’t see why I should. It just clouds our judgement. If one is primed to get angry every time they encounter a certain topic then I wouldn’t put too much weight on their opinion about it because it comes from biased and emotionally loaded perspective. Doesn’t mean they’re wrong but I don’t trust the reasoning of that kind of person.
I think the reason I’ve gotten to this point is that I’ve been angry at things before and I’ve very strongly expressed an opinion that I later on found I disagreed with.
This is probably just an age thing, but I could only do that so many times before I stopped to think maybe it’s worth reevaluating how I look at things.