Grow up! I'm serious - yours is a normal reaction, at some point every intelligent, reflective person realizes essentially this. Oddly, I've seen the age at whi

Grow up! I'm serious - yours is a normal reaction, at some point every intelligent, reflective person realizes essentially this. Oddly, I've seen the age at which this happens be 16 or 50+. For me, about 21. Whenever it happens, it can be overwhelming. Getting over it is part of growing up. And we're only done growing up when we're dead. Really study history; the bad stuff, the politics, war, equality, environment, etc. Whatever you are worried about. Is it really so bad now? Is it that different? - No to both. Yes, specific things from nuclear weapons to the internet are new. No, the arrival of, and volatility caused by, some new major thing is not. You cannot expect constant improvement with no backsliding. The graph of progress is a very noisy line with ups and downs of various durations, but positive long term average slope. This year or decade or century might be a little worse in some area, but you can't extrapolate that into a slide into the abyss. Then, as other have said: Stop worrying about what you can't change. Pragmatically figure out how you are going to proceed and live in a way you can be proud of. This you have control over. You can make your family, workplace, neighborhood a slightly better place. If a couple billion people did this, and they are, the universe will not be worse for it. When you find yourself in a position that you can do something positive about something, do it! But to do so, you have to be watching and ready. If you've squandered all your energy, money, health worrying about the problems you cannot change, you won't be able to take advantage of those, usually small, but sometimes not, opportunities. There are lot of groups that like to appeal to fear and anger and hate, even violence, in support of an often valid cause. They would like to make you feel that if you don't join in on those beliefs you are the enemy. They often make hysterical and absolutist claims. Doom and gloom. They would love to steal your hope. Don't fall for it. A cause that professes hate, anger, guilt, etc. as a solution is certainly not going to be effective in it's stated "goal", but it is likely not even truly committed to it. The soldiers of these groups shout and throw nothing but problems in your face. Many of these problems are real. Sometimes exaggerated a bit. Or a lot. Or fabricated - doesn't matter to them. But then they say roughly, "if we don't fix this right now, the world will end!", or "its the worst its ever been". That's what's not true. But they never ever mention progress or good news, and will outright lie to avoid it. Because then it would be balanced; the world would be OK on average. It's hard to ignore the huge amount of noise coming from these sort of exploitative groups when it hammers you every day. We get to see all the bad stuff happening from the entire world instantaneously. But we get good news from very few sources. See those mechanisms for what they are and realize that it's not hiding from the worlds' problems "in a bubble" to keep your sanity. It's rising above some fundamentally unhealthy forces and propaganda. It's a workaround for an information feed that's heavily biased for negativity.