I never could understand how misinformation gets spread so easily via social media, until the pandemic. My friend basically had a slow breakdown, getting more a

I never could understand how misinformation gets spread so easily via social media, until the pandemic. My friend basically had a slow breakdown, getting more and more scared and angry and upset. She'd be hooked to the social feeds, and re-share the scary ones that sounded plausible, but often they were fallacious, misleading, exaggerated. She was just trying to cope, and she thought she was helping other people by re-sharing them. Eventually she had to quit socials entirely, and it took a while for her to emotionally recover, but she's better now. I know this is just one example, but it feels very much like an endemic problem I call "media sickness". The media [in all its forms] is set up to make us ill. It scares us, misleads us. It invents and inflates controversy, focusing on things that don't really matter, yet making them seem imminent and life-threatening. It shows us only what we want to see, or what we want to believe. Or what someone else wants us to see, the way they want it seen. And then it tells us to buy things, which is the ultimate goal of all of this manipulation. And we do, because the movies, podcasts, Doritos, and sneakers from Amazon, are the only things that soothe our frazzled nerves and distract us before the next media blitz. Our whole American culture today has an epidemic of media sickness. It's worse than the obesity and opioid epidemics, because it's even infecting the halls of power and changing geopolitics. It crosses every class and infects every home. I think the only solution is to go cold turkey. Cut the social media, the TV, the news. Live your life free of influence. You might find that it's especially hard to do that, to live without the consumption, without the constant presence of advertiser-driven content. Even here on HN, we are subjected to the manipulation machine. It's so hard to get free of it.