Looking through my media feeds, including Lemmy, YouTube, News Outlets (Reuters, Financial Times) as well as news related to my profession, I would estimate that 85% of what I see is doom and gloom, i.e. reports about something that’s going wrong in the world or might go wrong in the future.
I try to limit what I follow to educational and unopininated sources (as far as that’s possible anyways) and some satire or a meme here and there. I don’t like suggestion algorithms and don’t use social media, because I don’t want to be trapped in a self-reinforcing bubble. On YouTube for example, I use third party apps which show me only videos from channels I explicitly follow.
Still, it’s mostly depressing information: how bad the job market and economy is, geopolitical threats, AI risks, symptoms of late stage capitalism. I am aware, thanks. But I didn’t ask to hear these things over and over and over again, and it’s negatively affecting my outlook on life. I’ve given up on reading the news entirely because I just get triggered by the enshittification of society, politics, the environment and daily life where I live. At this point I’d rather not hear about it anymore.
What I want to ask is whether you are having the same experience? Am I doing something fundamentally wrong? I don’t want to be blind to what’s happening in my/the world, but I want to have a positive and optimistic outlook on the future. How can I make that happen? How can I get away from an engagement economy constantly bombarding me with bad news without giving up on learning about the things that I am interested in?
Stay away from echo chambering news sources. New Republic, HuffPost, Commondreams and the like. They’ll either go full outrage or tell you exactly what you’ve been waiting to hear.
Indy journalism can be solid, you just have to be careful.
I enjoy Heather Cox Richardson. She definitely leans left but everything is so steeped in the context of American History (she’s an American historian) it’s not doom and gloom so much as educational. Historical context adds depth and width to the present issues. Accessible. She’d be a good professor to attend classes with not a boring one.
she explicitly self-ids as a “lincoln republican” so no, that’s definitely not true
I will look into indy journalism, thanks for the recommendation! Never gave it much thought but it makes total sense. Is substack the best place to look or are there other places you can recommend?