Comment by TeMPOraL
5 hours ago
I'll object to "no doomscrolling" a little bit. My first case of doomscrolling was on my PC, in high-school, in early years of Facebook. It happened not with social feeds, but with news. I had this stupid idea that I need to follow news to "stay informed", and it took me I think a good year before I noticed I'm constantly sad, depressed, angry at, or afraid for the world. When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing. Plus, I realized some time later that reading news doesn't make you more informed, but more disinformed.
I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
Why do you think reading news makes you more disinformed? Because it makes you aware of what you don't know enough?
The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.
Because:
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.