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'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle

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211–220 of 305 posts

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

#211
post #59

I deleted my Twitter a few months ago and my life is better for it. The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions. I’ve been reading a lot more long-form articles and books; I’ve finished reading three books in the last month or so. When my Twitter habit was strong I would often start a book and give up…

Twitter has been orders of magnitude more harmful to society than any *chan and Twitter bluechecks should be thought of and treated like Twitter bluechecks think of and treat chan users. All those articles about how scary chans and the ~~~dark web~~~ are and how they corrupt people's brains -- in a sane world they would be about twitter.

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

#212
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces. Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them. For books it…

The incentives on the web are skewed, and I believe the same is true for print. Nobody will be happy to pay the same price for a 50 page book as they would for a 200 page book, even if the information is the same, so if you have a 50 page book, you have every reason in the world to add fluff and stretch it to 200 pages. For many articles on the web I believe it's an issue because of Google. Google does punish short p…

Every time I come across a piece in that style I want to smash a screen. It could be a one-paragraph solution, but I have to scroll past three images and five paragraphs of worthless blather that assumes I'm a moron.

Unix man pages are amazing. Every technical help resource should be like that.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are gaslighting me by telling me resurgent Marxism isn’t a real thing, and yet here I am having people quote Marx at me to define capitalism.

No one is gaslighting [1] you. People are arguing that your interpretation of current events is in error. By calling that "gaslighting", you implicitly claim that disagreement with you is in itself an abusive act. Calling anyone who disagrees with you abusive seems like a pretty wild flex. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Well I guess it depends on what you mean that my stated concern is a “problem that doesn’t exist?”

Do you mean that Marxist ideas aren’t finding renewed currency? Nobody seems to deny that efforts to equate slavery with capitalism are critiques pioneered by Marx. Instead they seem to be arguing that Marx was correct. So the ideas do seem to be having renewed currency, in which case denying that fact is gaslighting.

If you’re arguing that it’s not a problem that Marxist ideas are being incorporated into schoolbooks, then in that case we just disagree.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read a really charming and escapist novel. Worst case, you end up staying up too late because the book is so good, but I haven't found anything more reliable for making me disconnect from the world and its churning. Substituting a book for Twitter for the hour before bed has markedly improved the overall quality of my life. To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important…

Any good book recommendations? I just finished Red Notice by Bill Browder which was fantastic.

If you're interested in Russia, Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes was really good. It's a (brief) history of the Soviet Union.

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

#215

Yeah reading hacker news since 4 hours and didn't even planned to open it. Now the world is more dangerous and don't know if people are commenting or GPT-3 bots. Any solutions to find sleep?

I listen to a Sci-fi/futurism Podcast. Dude has a very calm voice, content is interesting, but not too complicated to keep you awake. Works great.

I thought sleeping to a podcast was crazy until I found Sleep With Me, and I ended up putting it on pretty frequently, 2-3 nights/week. It's really calming. Guy incoherently recaps episodes of shows.

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

#216

There are a lot of suggestions for "long form" and "books" here. Are none of you keeping up with this pandemic and what your country/state/city recommended behaviours, laws and bylaws are?

This is actually a lot of what I use Twitter for. I follow some local people in the business community and local government officials to get news about what's going on here. I follow a few journalists I trust to get info about the world. And I follow some tech ppl to get cool tech stuff.

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

#217
post #96
post #59

I deleted my Twitter a few months ago and my life is better for it. The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions. I’ve been reading a lot more long-form articles and books; I’ve finished reading three books in the last month or so. When my Twitter habit was strong I would often start a book and give up…

The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces. Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them. For books it…

There are lots, and lots, and lots of books. With those that have been filtered by time and decades to centuries of fans and specialists, if you can’t get something out of them usually that’s your fault—which is fine and normal, since for most people getting acquainted enough with literature from a different place or era to enjoy it takes some deliberate effort, just like learning to appreciate new genres of music, or film of a style you didn’t grow up with, or a genre of video game that’s not immediately rewarding. And that’s just fiction!

Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.

[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.

One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.

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

#218
post #96
post #59

I deleted my Twitter a few months ago and my life is better for it. The need to be “in the know” was powerful, but I realized that I was consuming vast amounts of shallow information that resulted in shallow, uninformed opinions. I’ve been reading a lot more long-form articles and books; I’ve finished reading three books in the last month or so. When my Twitter habit was strong I would often start a book and give up…

The problem I've been facing recently is that long form also turns out to be a waste of time after you go through the most informational/influential pieces. Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them. For books it…

> For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

I assume you’re referring to fiction ... there’s actually a whole field of study around this rooted in psychology, they’re called Jungian Archetypes. There’s a really fantastic book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I’m not sure what the current state of study is, its been a few years since I personally studied the concepts. It might be a nice change from the mundanity you seem to be describing

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

#219

There are a lot of suggestions for "long form" and "books" here. Are none of you keeping up with this pandemic and what your country/state/city recommended behaviours, laws and bylaws are?

Of course I'm keeping up with it. It takes about 15 minutes a week to do so.

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

#220
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term “capitalist” was not coined by critics of capitalism. For example, David Ricardo used the term decades before Marx. Criticizing capitalism by linking it to slavery was pioneered by Marx, and accepting that point of view is Marxist rhetoric. It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist. By that logic, sl…

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