Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
What does being mentally ill have to do with anything? That’s a false dichotomy.
What the “constant negativity” should be doing is galvanizing you into action to try to fucking fix shit!
Should. But is it? I don’t think so. It’s just paralyzing and making us all feel miserable.
Hold the door open for a granny. Pick up a trash from the street. Look the cashier into eyes, smile and say thank you. Now you’ve already had a bigger positive impact in the world than a year worth of complaining and doomscrolling online does.
Speak for yourself. Outside of Lemmy, my biggest hobby is bike/ped/transit and zoning reform activism.
It is not a false dichotomy though.
Being mentally healthy and well integrated does not require you to live in a perfect, just and balanced universe. It requires you using all the cognitive, psychological and philosophical tools at your disposal to deal with the universe on its own terms.
Keeping yourself depressed for the sake of “not being deluded” is in itself a mental illness symptom, and only has negative consequences for everyone.