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'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

npr.org

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Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#61

Post by dvtrn »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #54
dvtrn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?? What? Blood Meridian has dark moments in the narrative sure, but it’s a beautifully written book and very easy spaghetti western adventure to get lost in before bed. It’s not like you’re dozing off reading The Necronomicon, c’mon.

I never thought I’d hear someone call Blood Meridian a “spaghetti western adventure”. Makes it sound like The Magnificent Seven!

I meant to say spaghetti-ish, but edited it out to fix some grammar and forgot to put it back. So it goes

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#62

Post by xwdv »

Doomscrolling at least is passive. The active version I think would be “Doomsaying”, which I have become addicted to I feel.

Going through my comment history, I often find it littered with comments that give a sense of hopelessness and inevitable misery. Highly cynical, sometimes toxic, wouldn’t feel out of place among the lamentations of the undying. Not sure how I got this way, but probably came after a long history of doomscrolling.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#63

Post by pests »

dgzl wrote: post #58
sawaruna wrote: post #55

Maybe people should utilize social media for things they enjoy instead of solely sources of news. Of course people you follow will end up posting news anyway but it won’t be solely stream of ‘doom and gloom’.

I think news takes more of a front seat these days. Lots of history in the making.

History will always be in the making.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#64

Post by sawaruna »

dgzl wrote: post #58
sawaruna wrote: post #55

Maybe people should utilize social media for things they enjoy instead of solely sources of news. Of course people you follow will end up posting news anyway but it won’t be solely stream of ‘doom and gloom’.

I think news takes more of a front seat these days. Lots of history in the making.

It does and it's important and I'm not suggesting people purposely ignore it, I just don't know how you get to the point where it's saturated your social feeds so much that you get this kind of phenomenon. I get a lot of news or people posting political commentary, which I enjoy seeing, but it's also mixed in with a lot of music or design or game dev stuff or whatever.

Like another comment here mentioned, the diversity of content (and maybe slightly less political news) is why people like HN, so maybe I've just been lucky to be able to 'curate' my Twitter similarly.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#65

Post by notriddle »

ctdonath wrote: post #47
evan_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many people are explicitly and intentionally voting for the bad policies and actions though, can I blame them for that?

No. They think they're voting for the good policies and actions. We can legitimately disagree over the good/bad of policies and actions. Is instituting/increasing minimum wage: providing a livable income for those at the bottom? or denying jobs to those at the bottom (being unable to produce >= $MINWAGE)? Good/bad of the topic seems obvious, yet differing views are widely held.

You're talking about subtle economic issues, when the original point was about people dismissing the pandemic as a hoax.

One can be understood through the lense of conflict and mistake theory. The other requires a conspiracy.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#66

Post by evan_ »

ctdonath wrote: post #47
evan_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many people are explicitly and intentionally voting for the bad policies and actions though, can I blame them for that?

No. They think they're voting for the good policies and actions. We can legitimately disagree over the good/bad of policies and actions. Is instituting/increasing minimum wage: providing a livable income for those at the bottom? or denying jobs to those at the bottom (being unable to produce >= $MINWAGE)? Good/bad of the topic seems obvious, yet differing views are widely held.

We all agree that it would be wrong to poison the reservoir. We all agree it’s wrong to pool our money to hire someone to poison the reservoir.

If I vote for the mayoral candidate who promises to poison the reservoir, why should that suddenly be a completely morality-free decision on my part? Just because a lot of people made the same decision I did?

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#67

Post by rayiner »

throwanem wrote: post #43
rayiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the people doomscrolling are sitting up worried about a different set of things. The point of the article is that it’s not healthy for anyone. You’re not going to cut off resurgent Marxism by refreshing Newsmax in a loop in a loop. You’re also overlooking a very important fact of life. Overlooking other people’s suffering is an inherent human defense mechanism, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You invoke it…

I will say, it must be nice to spend so much time worrying about problems that don't exist instead of all the ones that actually do. Seems like it'd be a real comfort.

If you had told me 25 years ago that in my home country (Bangladesh) people were going to be demanding removal of a statue of lady justice from in front of the Supreme Court, and that the court would oblige, and that veiling women would go from being nearly non-existent to commonplace, and that secular journalists would be getting murdered, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Islamists got control of education, and all of those things happened.

So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry.

But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#68

Post by monoideism »

phs318u wrote: post #38
0xy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the journalistic malpractice of calling victims of being threatened with a firearm and having their vehicle attacked randomly "right-wing extremists", and then wiping the evidence of their false allegations from the internet without retracting or apologizing for it. The individuals who attacked the victims were charged by police. [1] [2] NPR is in the same class as the rest of the mainstream media who…

You're extrapolating from the evidence of one event to all (or most) events. What you're calling "journalistic malpractice" is possibly an editor with a story in need of a picture (everything has to be visual to sell the story), asking the photog pool for a suitable image. This happens all the time. Timing matters though. In the instance you quote, if the original story was published before the police charged the att…

No, they had a narrative they wanted to push: "right-wing attackers victimize noble protesters", and since there were only a few examples available, they had to pull stories and footage from the many instances of when protesters attacked vehicles.

I don't know you personally, but if you're like 99% of left-leaning urban professionals, you're not aware of those instances, because you're only exposed to a portion of what's happening. I'd suggest following a broad spectrum of people on social media from the left, center, and right. You'll be surprised what the mainstream left media leaves out.

Right-wing media does the same thing, by the way. You really have to watch both to give anything resembling reality. It's a big problem, and it's getting worse.

Even (decidedly left-wing) Brian Stelter featured this problem on this week's Reliable Sources on CNN. For example, mainstream media is happy to cover what they view as the malfeasance of the federal law enforcement officers in Portland, but they fail to show the acts of the rioters that played a role in their deployment (burning buildings, destruction of property, menacing cars, etc). To be clear, I personally think their deployment was probably unwise, and that politics played a large role. However, Portland's mayor has consistently refused to crack down on whatever label you want to put on the violent protesters wearing black. That adds significant complexity to the situation.

NPR was the most neutral of any major news organization up until the past 2-3 years, when they've undergone major changes and now put out mostly ideologically-driven pieces like other outlets on the left.

I do give credit to many local media outlets, who are often the only ones asking the hard questions, like this local outlet in Portland:

https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1218

https://youtu.be/2yAzRnfzgwk?t=1022

Re: 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

#69

Post by cameldrv »

creato wrote: post #23

I don't like the implication that mental health is just feeling good. Maybe if more people would read and understand the news, and feel bad about it , they'd be willing to do even trivial things like wear a mask. In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes…

If you were paying close attention to the news in Feb-April, you were being told not to wear a mask.
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