We have little to no control over current events, yet we spend so much time breathing it in and getting outraged at every little controversy. It's a slow-moving trainwreck, and I can't look away.
I'm so envious of the people I know who just don't give a fuck.
I've tried more hobbies and entertaining distractions, but I'm left feeling empty and joyless. Meditation helps, but then I'm right back where I started.
Anyone got any tips?
Eh, for some people tuning out completely is healthy.
Especially if you have overdone it for years and years.
I do think that this is one of appeals of Chapo. They deal with modern politics very head on from a fairly cynical perspective, but their gallows humor makes it fun. That's generally how I manage to stay sane while following the election, every depressing bit of news about Biden's platform or Trump's insanity can be paired with a 'Listen, Jack' joke or something dumb to take the edge off.
Fuck it, I am largely powerless in these issues, but I'd still prefer to understand my lot, and I'd prefer to have fun with it where I can. I wasn't very conscious of politics five years ago, and I felt alienated and confused about the world. Being aware of how our social structure works has let me see my own world more clearly. Some of that has simply been because I'm older, but I see people my age who don't know a fucking thing about how the world really works and it bites them in the ass constantly. I wouldn't give my knowledge back, even if I could.
When everything else has me feeling doomy, that fucking officer down picture never fails to make me giggle
I think sometimes it can feel like we have to take on the burden of all the suffering we’re aware of.
But it doesn’t do anyone any good to become so plugged in that you start doomposting.
Taking care of yourself is important. You can’t take care of others until you take care of yourself first.
Remember that many people in these moments throughout history likely felt as hopeless as we do now. All we can do is endure
Ehh! It's me!
Seriously, though, I have really bad bipolar so I mostly stay home and hate myself. It's not like I've got many options between reading the news and being angry, and after you've done that for a few years you're so full of the toxins of society that it's hard to even enjoy normal things because you know which actresses in that movie were raped by directors or you know that the chocolate in that cake was produced by child slaves or you know that politician everyone likes bombed a medicine factory and murdered tens of thousands of people. You start to see all the blood soaked in to the foundations of your society and once you see it you can't go back or turn away.
Make concrete predictions, check news occasionally. If predictions are wrong, check news more often. If predictions are right, check news less often. If you can accurately predict something, it's not actually new information to you, so there's no reason to consume it unless you're getting some sort of value out of it. You probably don't actually enjoy the news, so anything past what it takes to calibrate your predictive ability is just self-harm.
Only make predictions on the level of detail you actually care about. Trump will say something outrageous and beyond the pale three times this week. Does it matter what? Of course not. Now you can just borrow my standing prediction on that and stop listening to that kind of news story on a regular basis.
Reading fiction, playing video games, and watching youtube content about games, books, movies, and TV those are my go-to escapisms.
I'm the one telling people who aren't as plugged in into politics and impressed by my knowledge of the subject matter, that they are better off that way.
Working out helps for me personally, just recently started running again after a 3 year break and it clears my head really nicely.
Or just go on a walk with some music on, or some comedy podcast.
Do bodyweight exercises, or buy a cheap kettlebell and work out without going to gym. Contrary to popular belief you don't need to spend days at a gym to get results either, hell just moving weights around will get gains if you've never done anything like it before.
Don't forget that you're not alone in this, even if it feels dire at times.
no. My personality is political. they're saying 'well maybe if you just changed your personality'. Im not gonna do that. That's not the correct answer for anybody else.
I can tell you from personal experience that if they are the types that sneer / turn their noses up at the word politics to the point they never engage with it, they probably don't understand why or how it is that they are getting fucked over it (politics). The longer you put it off the more painful it is to face it down. I feel like living in that unreality for long enough creates a scenario where having your world shattered is just too painful, and people get to a point where they just won't let it happen because facing it down would also mean basically the undoing of their entire life experience. It almost seems like breaking a worker down as much as our system does is like "housebreaking" a dog or "breaking" a horse. It may not be an absolute rule, but it sort of seems like the breaking cannot be reversed in most cases. I think this is why we get, for example, all those karens posing as black khive women on twitter, 'ruthkanda forever' girl, and those idiots that got the concentration camp-style tattoos of the hex code for the elizabeth warren campaign's shit ass green color on their wrists. idk
I think social media is fine as long as you mainly just follow all the fully socialist and communist accounts you can find (I would not recommend facebook though)
I would rather live with open eyes than under the veil where the helplessness and unknowing basically had me ready to "permanently exit. "
