A couple things:

• Use keyword and community filters in Lemmy to clean up what’s presented to you.
• Use the “Not Interested” and “Don’t Recommend Channel” options in Youtube to cull the trash from your algorithm feed.

It will make your life so much more peaceful. Don’t let the algos just blast their firehose of shit at you. Tap your own stream of customized content by interacting with these tools instead.

Breaks are important. I think it’s good being interested in politics but too much can be exhausting. What I do is take a long walk preferably in nature. Music is a great outlet as well. And even though I think that you might not feel like doing sports, since I know that kind of fatigue you write about, I believe that this would help, too. And sometimes it’s sleep.

I encounter negativity when discussing politics online. Somehow quite a few people get insulting and expect me to change my view after. It’s irritating and hinders my will to be open minded when discussions are tinted with insults.

Anyway, I hope you find the things your mind needs to recover.

Gotta find your way back to this vibe. There’s a lot of good out there, a lot to be grateful for. And on a long term timescale the world is in many ways better than ever before on important stuff like infant mortality.

Anything outdoors. I like mountain biking and gardening, but you do you.

Touch grass. Leave your phone home and go outside and enjoy nature. Go on a hike. Stop reading the news, any news, for a while, you will be fine.

For me: it’s the total loss of faith in humanity.

Even the political views I used to associate with “the good people” - now I see their proponents as maniputive, self-serving, bullies.

So there’s no cause to support anymore: no good or evil. No point supporting the needy: because they’re terrible people just like everyone else - I’ll only be supporting their selfishness and the suffering they will create.

So all I’m left with is: getting from this moment of time until the time of my death as easily as possible.

I know it really doesn’t help, but remember that this is how they want you to feel

I find that 99% of the negativity is online. Interacting with people in person is way more pleasant and upbeat. And basically on youtube ignore all videos with clickbait titles like “We were Wrong about [whatever] - and it’s NOT GOOD!”, they’re all bullshit.

Hosting one or two regular game nights a week in my house has made a world of difference in my attitude.

Get off all social media you can.
On the social media you can’t, block anything politics and news related. They are designed to keep your attention with psychological triggers.
Start a hobby, reading is cheap to get into assuming you have a library. Drawing with pen and paper, colouring in books. Honestly anything that takes you away from a screen.

First and foremost I can suggest meditation. You don’t have to personally save the world, do what you can when you can and that’s enough, honestly more than enough. I can suggest figures like Pema Chodron and Ram Dass, they’ve been extremely helpful for me in extreme moments of life. I think Pema’s book Welcoming the Unwelcomed is pure gold.

Also don’t mind taking a break from it all. The world will keep on ticking. One day the sun will run out of fuel and vaporize the earth, one day the last star will go dark, one day the last black hole will evaporate. Nothing is forever besides change. That’s not to say it’s all pointless, more so to say enjoy it and if you can even enjoy the unpleasant things along with the pleasant ones.

I’ve radically cut my news intake and it’s helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what’s happening. There’s that famous quote about how “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy” and I try to hold on to it.

Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.

However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it’s just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I’ve no interest in.

Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.

I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk’s soon to be trillionaire status (don’t ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for ‘lefty tears’ and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I’d like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.

Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don’t consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there’s a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever have a government that has any real decency or compassion at it’s core.

Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengage from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that’s the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.

Stop reading the news. You rarely if ever get any information that will change your decisions anyway.

Get off any social media or other that feeds you negativity.

There’s always gonna be negativity, you’ve gotta strive for the positive. “Enjoy the little things” - Zombieland.

Lots of folks say to cut news intake (however it is happening). This is correct. Everyone suggesting you pick up other things, very wise.

If you are burned out of all these topics entirely, this is probably enough/right. If you still, for whatever reason, wish to engage with the unending crisis:

• Sit down and prioritize. Pick a narrow issue, find good sources on Precisely that, and read/engage with only things that fit. RSS feeds support keyword filters.
• Find longform content related to what you care about. Books, long podcasts, etc. Shortform only has time to make you panic. Longform can actually give nuance, solutions, and an honest accounting of the situation (it doesn’t always. But you have a chance.)

Time to ditch platforms, friends, hobbies, whatever allows that negativity in