4 ms·
Skipping the world news might be good for your mental these days
by tills13 2y ago
Skipping the world news might be good for your mental these days
- scruple 2y agoI've gone cold turkey over the holiday break and I literally felt the anxiety melting away.
- auc 2y agoYeah, I personally take the view that any really important news will find me anyways
- scruple 2y agoYep, I've adopted that mentality. Finally. I wish it hadn't taken me so, so long. My wife even commented that I'm much less on-edge, much less prone to find the negative in things. It's sort of like a switch inside of my brain has been welded permanently to the off position, it's pretty wild how it only takes 2-3 weeks for the brain to sort itself out after many years of being stuck in some cycle.
- Quinzel 2y agoI haven’t watched/read the news in years and I feel so liberated from it. When something worth knowing happens, I still hear about it. But not consuming news gives me the space I need to think independently about things from the influences of mass produced media. It’s beautiful
- califool 2y agoI am going on a year from watching. feels good.
- zeeed 2y agoSerious question: so to all posters above me in this thread, do you do HN regularly as a social but just avoid other sites?
- Quinzel 2y agoYeah, I don’t frequent many websites. I go on Facebook occasionally intermittently, but go through phases where I deactivate it. I also go on my university website for my online learning but I don’t go on many websites.
- auc 2y agoPretty much, yes. Reading WSJ/NYT is fun but not productive at all
- scruple 2y agoBasically, yeah. I find that the aggregation here is a dozen cuts above what I can find elsewhere and the "news" is tends to be things that are at least tech adjacent and when they're not they're genuinely "newsworthy."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- califool 2y agoyeah been off that as long as the news. reddit, HN, github, & usenet are my social now which is funny because only 1 or 2 actual friends probably even know about these sites. i am waiting for aim to make the big come back! I only go on socsh every blue moon for a couple friends that refuse to communicate on anything else and to see pictures of all my cousins and their families -usually around the holidays to spell check their names. haha.
- Breza 2y agoI recently dropped $99 to get the Financial Times delivered to my door six days a week. If something truly important happens, I'll have the chance to read about it. But I can't doomscroll for hours.
- Fischgericht 2y agoDoesn't work for me. I feel much safer tracking the disintegration of civilization in real-time, making predictions based on that information, and adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly. So I must newspapers from all around the world every morning, even if it's painful. I have to admit though: Yesterday I cheated. On new years morning I skipped all world news to beat 2025 to it, delaying the inevitable by a day. Worked well, as it turns out. And I wasn't too smelly due to it, either :)
- tills13 2y ago> adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly No offense but unless you have at least $1b or are incredibly lucky you're screwed no matter how prepared you are. Menial and positive stories aren't as engaging resulting in the "news" being nothing but a list of all the awful shit that happened recently. Enjoy life while you still have it. As another commenter already said, important stories will find you anyways.
- Fischgericht 2y agoVery off-topic here, but no, money is not the key when trying to find a spot on this planet that nobody does have on their radar when it comes to fucking up the planet on short notice :) Also: Different people, different coping strategies. I don't want to wait until the "Active Shooter!" cell broadcast message finds its way to my phone. :) For some people, potentially especially those on the spectrum, having as much information as possible to work with might bring mental security and stability. People are different, brains are diverse.
- nrr 2y agoI'm also on team Keep An Eye On Things™, and approximately none of it really feeds into an anxiety loop. (There's a tiny sliver of the pie that does, but it's easy enough to talk myself off that ledge and go engage in a Weltschmerzspaziergang[0].) I know it's stuff I can't control, and that's sort of the point. I want to know what I can't control so that I can know what I can control, if that makes sense. 0: Otherwise known as "touching grass."