3 ms·

This is why the related concept of "catastrophizing" comes up so much in the context of therapy: > Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts peopl

This is why the related concept of "catastrophizing" comes up so much in the context of therapy: > Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis. Anecdotally, many of the people I know with a tendency to "catastrophize" later suffer from clinical depression. The depression only exacerbates the problem. Even more anecdotally, catastrophizing seems heavily correlated to the usage of certain social media platforms in the young people I've worked with. I don't know which direction the causality flows, but I do know that people who consume a lot of Reddit and Twitter seem to think the world is ending and everything is terrible. They can tell me about every political scandal, every shooting, every tragedy, and every natural disaster that happened in the past week. Eventually they come to believe their news sources are representative of the entire world, forgetting that none of these things are happening to them personally. It's a weird doom loop spiral. Even weirder is that many of the people caught in it feel convinced that they "don't do social media" because they're not on Instagram or TikTok, yet they consume hours and hours of doom and gloom social media like Reddit all day.

SoftTalker 3y ago
This is why the news has always been bad, since way before social media. Disasters, war, scandal, and death have always been more engaging. Also why gossip is almost always negative. Our brains evolved to deal with what was happening in our immediate vicinity. This was usually fairly neutral to pleasant, with maybe some moments of sadness, loss, alarm and danger. We just aren't mentally equipped to process an unending stream of bad news and really keep the perspective that these things are not happening to me. It's best to just avoid sources of that. I stopped watching and reading the news a few years ago, and generally feel much less stressed about day to day living.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I think there also is a factor where good things move slowly. I always liked the thought experiment of imagining newspapers that are published at increasingly long intervals. What would the content be in a newspaper that's published every 50 or 100 years? Sure you'd cover major wars, but so much more space than we dedicate right now would go to phenomenal improvements that took a long time. Incredible advances of medical improvements, including eradication of entire diseases, much higher life expectancy and so many fewer famines, massively increased literacy rates. One could go on and on. Yet, few of these things, unless they are discreet events which is rare, ever go into a daily newspaper and certainly don't make headlines.
hifromLA 3y ago
Reddit is my Achilles heel for the very reason you outlined. I quit Reddit and I remember the exact day it happened. I found myself typing and deleting a reply to a comment that was overly negative on something that I was well versed in. I knew this person was incorrect and taking a knee jerk cynical approach. At some point I just said what the hell am I doing here I need to not be on this website anymore.

SoftTalker 3y ago

This is why the news has always been bad, since way before social media. Disasters, war, scandal, and death have always been more engaging. Also why gossip is almost always negative. Our brains evolved to deal with what was happening in our immediate vicinity. This was usually fairly neutral to pleasant, with maybe some moments of sadness, loss, alarm and danger. We just aren't mentally equipped to process an unending stream of bad news and really keep the perspective that these things are not happening to me. It's best to just avoid sources of that. I stopped watching and reading the news a few years ago, and generally feel much less stressed about day to day living.

ajmurmann 3y ago
I think there also is a factor where good things move slowly. I always liked the thought experiment of imagining newspapers that are published at increasingly long intervals. What would the content be in a newspaper that's published every 50 or 100 years? Sure you'd cover major wars, but so much more space than we dedicate right now would go to phenomenal improvements that took a long time. Incredible advances of medical improvements, including eradication of entire diseases, much higher life expectancy and so many fewer famines, massively increased literacy rates. One could go on and on. Yet, few of these things, unless they are discreet events which is rare, ever go into a daily newspaper and certainly don't make headlines.

hifromLA 3y ago

Reddit is my Achilles heel for the very reason you outlined. I quit Reddit and I remember the exact day it happened. I found myself typing and deleting a reply to a comment that was overly negative on something that I was well versed in. I knew this person was incorrect and taking a knee jerk cynical approach. At some point I just said what the hell am I doing here I need to not be on this website anymore.