I block most news sources and get the jist of events via memes.

This too shall pass. I take comfort that the pendulum of politics has always swung back and forth. This moment of insanity should swing back to rebuilding, and progressive changes.

When I was in college, we had “the midnight scream”. During finals, entire dorms would open their windows at midnight and just scream. It was very effective at venting frustration, allowing us all to refocus on studying. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now: we’re all just screaming in frustration.

This is crazy, but i read the news on paper. I have a couple of subscriptions to magazines with good reporting, but you could also hit up your library to read for free. For one thing, print journalism is a lot more in-depth and balanced than the outrage-mill crap i find online.

On Lemmy i read headlines only in case something happens that i stay current, but i rarely read a whole article. This contains my news consumption to a small portion of my day.

Plus, Trump says 64 stupid lthings a week. I read all 64 in 1 hour each week and get it over with, instead of poisoning myself with it several times a day.

It helps a lot that the assholes are not doing well. The Epstein thing has made it easier to breathe.

Going to protests helps too. The energy of the crowd really feels good and assures me that the people are on my side.

Are those who are well adjusted to a unjust world really the sane ones?

its all about setting your boundaries being able to say thats enough for today. being able to ask yourself if what you are listening to is new facts being relayed to you or is it speculation to fill air and stop listening if it’s the latter.

I block news from all social media. Then I chose 2 news networks I thought had decent reporting and wasn’t too bias. Every morning I read news from the 2 sources and that is ALL the news I consume for that day. That’s it.

If this is too overwhelming even you can try starting with 1 news source. I find that news is mostly still pretty boring (in a good way) if you only look at 1 source.

Insert Invincible ‘you don’t’ meme here

But seriously, you can’t. You either choose to be ignorant of 99.99% of the world or to be ignorant of 99.9% of the world and live in a perpetual scramble to absorb all the disparate information. Most news isn’t worth knowing in and of itself, only serving as data to construct deeper understanding, so unless you are going to actually connect the dots, it’s a better use of your time to let the world act as a filter and only pay attention to what hangs around long enough to get through to you.

Activism, contributing to your community, making the world a better place. The crazy-making part is that you know it’s crap, and that you feel like you have no agency to make it better, right? Well, doing something to make the world better makes it feel more tolerable, even if the bit that you’re working on isn’t related to the specific badness that you’re paying attention to on the news right now.

And yeah, there’s always the possibility that what you’re doing backfires, or has no effect, but if you don’t do anything at all, then there’s no possibility of having a good effect. Also, obviously no one normal person can fix everything, you just pick a bit that seems suited for you and work on that.

For me it’s just the knowledge that I have around 100 total years on this planet and a limited amount of reach in terms of geography, relationships, etc.

I can’t swing an election by myself, but with me and millions of my closest friends we can. But only if we all pull together. It’s like a paradox but not quite.

The news is primarily billionaire propaganda. It does not add value to your life. When it’s important you’ll hear about it, and then you can read up. You don’t have to be the first to know. Nothing bad will happen to you for being less informed.

I’ve figured that I can either be informed or happy. Not both.