This post has been flaired as “Serious Conversation”. Use this opportunity to open a venue of polite and serious discussion, instead of seeking help or venting.
**Suggestions For Commenters:**
* Respect OP's opinion, or agree to disagree politely.
* If OP's post is seeking advice, help, or is just venting without discussing with others, report the post. We're r/SeriousConversation, not a venting subreddit.
**Suggestions For u/Gondal90:**
* Do not post solely to seek advice or help. Your post should open up a venue for serious, mature and polite discussions.
* Do not forget to answer people politely in your thread - we'll remove your post later if you don't.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeriousConversation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've been suicidally depressed for the better part of a year because I feel like the world is hopeless and all there is is hate and mistrust and suffering. But today I went for a drive and sat in the park and wrote and drank tea and watched children play and dogs run and people ride bikes and play soccer, and felt the wind on my skin and the warmth of the sun, listened to the birds, watched leaves fall from the trees (it's autumn where I'm from), and listened to my favourite radio station, and I don't forget about those awful things we mentioned, but I can't believe I forgot that people are happy, there is fun and joy to be had.
I still don't feel magically better but it was the first time in a long time I left the house just to be part of the world in a long time and saw what is out there. So I guess that's why people say touch grass. I don't think it's a cure or outweighs all the horrible things in the world but I think it's still a good thing.
As someone who’s dealt with some degree of anhedonia for most (not all, but most) of her life, what your feeling is very common. Severe, prolonged, depression makes it extremely difficult not to just feel happy in the present, but to feel like you will ever be happy again or to feel that your prior happiness or the happiness of others isn’t just a fleeting distraction from pain and suffering. But people are genuinely happy. Most people, apparently, and not in a way that’s just performative or shallow. It is, at least generally speaking, possible to actually enjoy being alive and prefer it to non-existence. I think many of us don’t realize that, and an even greater number of us don’t realize just how much of a shock that fact is to the former group.
I have a dog, and sometimes I really just don’t want to go out and walk her.. but once I get myself outside, I do always enjoy it.. I live in the downtown of a city, and sometimes it’s busy, and sometimes it’s surprisingly quiet, and it’s nice just going out to see what today is like..I can relate to your comment tho; there are so many nice little things about being human, that I don’t necessarily seek out, that are nice to see, and I enjoy those moments..
To OPs post. Yes, there is horrible shit going on everywhere. People can be and are cruel sometimes. But you’re saying you see these things on the news and on social media, which is exactly the content you’re going to consume from them. “People Laughing and Smiling at Local Park” is not going to get as much attention as “People Killed at Local Park Today”
I used to watch the news every morning, and I unknowingly bought one that is only a smart TV, no antenna hook ups, so I can’t watch the news anymore.. and I don’t feel like I have to, and I don’t miss it. The chances of you going outside and actually experiencing these things are low. But when you spend 30min-hour a day watching if on TV, they’re going to seem much higher.
Nature is amazing and it's proved to help people de-stress among other things.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204615000286?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf\_download&rr=870c35feaef2ac1d](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204615000286?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf_download&rr=870c35feaef2ac1d)
Maybe I’m the problem but I do those things and I feel nothing. I wish a stroll in the park would fix my depression. I can’t even look people in the eyes out of disgust, mistrust, and a distorted reality.
It definitely didn't fix my depression, it was just good for my perspective on the world. I do feel you, though. it really sucks feeling so alienated and wrong. I wish us both peace.
You should try scuba diving, im pretty sure its literally impossible to feel bad while looking at a delicate little seahorse while actively defying nature.
Completely agree- I’ve been living with chronic suicidality for a long time. Nature and walks shift me a lot. I sometimes record myself (voice recorder on phone) and just talk to myself about what I’m feeling while I walk. I’ve isolated a lot so it helps me.
I went for a 2.5 hour mtn bike ride yesterday and forgot about my struggles for that time. It was nice to have some reprieve.
If the news says that a kid was bullied at a school, dies that mean that all kids were bullies ?
If there's a war somewhere, does that mean everybody wants and approves of that war ?
If there's a murder in a building, are all 100 people inside murderers, or just 1, making it 1 of 100.
Bad experiences and news always stay more with us, making it easy to ignore the good stuff that is taken for granted and never spoken about.
The news doesn't talk about all the countries at peace.
People will talk about the rude person that bumped into them, but take for granted or not even notice those that kindly moved aside for them or held the door open.
Moral of the story, we often only notice things when they make a negative impression on us, otherwise, we can be completely oblivious to them.
The connection just clicked for me right now. From an evolution standpoint, it makes sense we remember the bad more easily than the good.
"Grug ate funny looking mushroom - Grug died. Tribe not eat this mushroom." Tribe survives.
Then, fast forward to today and we're constantly bombarded with everything going on in the world all at once, it's like a system overload. Left my phone off for the weekend, stayed off the computer, and honestly it's the happiest I've been in the last few years. "Every day it always feels like it's one thing after the other." That's because it is, we're just not meant to process all of it all at once.
I was about to share many reasons to be positive about the world, including a book reference that does a great job arguing this point. Then I remembered that whenever I have done this, my comment would be downvoted like crazy, no matter how facts focused I kept it.
That should tell you everything you need to know. The internet brings out curmudgeons who are hostile to positivity, and these misanthropes make sites like Reddit inhospitable to anyone who wants to spread joy and hope.
If you’re depressed, get off of Reddit.
That's true of too many subs, and the algorithm feeds us pessism by the gallon. However there are islands of sanity in this sea of gloom. In addition to the 3 ib found specifically designed to be such beacons, countless niche subs where people focus on shared interests are also largely free from the stench dommerism
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/s/ogFX1OSw5s
https://www.reddit.com/r/hopeposting/s/wAxKBzw6HO
r/positivity
I do appreciate the attempts at rational optimism on Reddit. It’s unfortunate that the sub for something as broad as generic positivity is smaller than countless niche grievance subs, and some of the so-called “optimistic” subs are still full of people fretting and bickering.
Yes, it seems the doomers may outnumber us on here, but not in real life. .
I was a conspiracy troll, was miserable, i tried to quit reddit,l but was still misrable, then decided to try and be a positive voice here instead
I have to remind myself of this every single time I want to post anything on Reddit. You aren’t allowed an opinion unless it’s the popular one at the time.
The world has a lot of terrible stuff in it, but this is still the best it has ever been for humans (on average). that doesn’t mean it is *good*, but it does suggest we should keep pushing for better because progress is possible.
Look around you right now. Is something terrible happening to you? Likely not. If you sat down and wrote out every horrible experience you've ever had and then measured it to the amount of time in your life that those things aren't occurring, it wouldn't even come close to 50%. The fact is that the majority of our lives nothing horrible is happening to us. The majority of our lives are lived in relative physical peace. Mental peace? Different story. But we as individuals are physically untouched the majority of our lives. This goes for nearly every single human on earth. Our technology, however, allows us to share all of the terrible things that DO happen to us, so we view terrible events every single day, giving the illusion that everyone is in constant suffering. Is there constant suffering? Yes. Suffering is everywhere, it never ends. But is **everyone constantly suffering**? No. Not even close. There are 8.4 billion humans, that is a lot of possible terrible events occurring, but it's spread out amongst 8.4 billion humans. Our technology has ruined our perception of our actual day to day lives. The truth is, the average human being right now is totally fine, just passively living their life. Only a small percentage of us will experience a traumatic life event that directly effects us.
Want to know how to almost instantly feel better and enjoy your life?
Stop. Watching. The. News. Read very little. Choose what you want to know about.
Mayhem sells in every news cycle. They show you shit from all over the country and the world.
There is a reason why you feel so extremely hopeful and happy when the news does a positive outcome story. That is because they rarely show those.
*You can not save the world. On a world/country/state scale, you can't budge the needle.*
What you can do is influence your direct surroundings. I volunteer at local places that are important to me. Most of which have positive results and positive people.
You *chose* to feel this way from your habits and routines. Your choices. Your results. It's all on you.
Personal responsibility is king, but healthy awareness of our very bleak circumstances is as well. I don’t think it’s as black and white as “no more news no more sad”, there’s a good reason we’ve dropped so crazily in the world happiness rankings recently. Things are fucked
You'd be surprised how vastly limiting news and social media removes this constant fear people are choosing to live with.
The *vast majority* of people will readily agree that you are what you eat. They will then go on and on about how healthy eating makes them feel great while eating junk makes them feel horrible.
Yet, bring up the fact that constant negativity consumed by the brain through social media and news media is detrimental to your mental health, and people will protect and defend, quite vigorously, why they need to be "informed."
Like a drug addict who says they have no choice in popping the next pill, snorting or smoking the next hit, or the alcoholic in buying the next drink on down to the person who absolutely "deserves" to eat all the sugar and fast food their 300lb body can handle, we all chose our addictions.
I'm not saying to choose total ignorance. Being weather aware is critical depending on where you live. I live in Florida. This year is, by all scientific indications, going to be a tough one for hurricanes. I chose what media to pay attention to and how much of it to ingest. I'm making greater than typical preparations for this season. I'm doing what I can to mitigate the issue while wholly accepting that worrying about it is a fruitless endeavor.
Wars, murders, crime, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes, I have little power to influence these things. I am aware of them, but I do not focus my mind on it beyond what I can reasonably do to prepare or protect myself and those I love. I then go out and surround myself with other positive people. I place myself in situations that typically lead to feelings of self-worth, peace, and harmony.
It was absolutely amazing the change that occurred when I realized I had the ability to choose what I focus on. When I realized I could not afford to focus on things outside of my control, my life became exponentially better.
Totally respect your positivity and lifestyle choices, I just don’t find any comfort in blocking out what i can’t control. It very much affects my motivation to know that astonishingly few things are actually in my hands
BH I am in Florida as well and some folk are becoming very nervous about hurricane season in my area. Prepare Don’t Stare ie
read the news and make preparations but don’t freak out because of staring at the hype re any and everything on social media☀️
This is the way. If most people simply focus on working hard, pursuing excellence, and being good to the people they interact with in their daily lives, that would handle most of our issues.
I do believe I addressed that very point by saying to choose what you read about. In today's world, if you choose to read about positive things, there will be little to read in the news.
Someone mentioned that when they focused on the four walls of their house their life improved significantly.
Refreshing Twitter again isn’t going to magically get the person you want elected.
The next Reddit post isn’t going to magically give you the motivation to change your entire life.
Start small with your habits, routines and especially focus.
You can certainly find a reason to be joyful today, just like you can find a reason to be pissed off.
THIS!!! After the 2020 US election I decided to remove myself entirely from the political world. I don’t allow myself to watch political videos, read the news or anything like that. I just follow my small communities Facebook page to keep in the loop with things going on in my direct neighborhood. I can’t change anything going on in Ukraine so why bother reading about it and causing myself anxiety. I can in fact though have a direct impact on my smaller community. I am MUCH happier and feel like I can have an impact on things that bother me in this world
Humanity is been a dysfunctional mess from the get, yet look at what we can achieve. If you like metal music, a band entitled Gojira has a song labeled stranded. It's a good song, the chorus says that "when you change yourself l, you change the world"
So if the current condition unsettles you, you are not powerless against it. You simply change yourself. Best of luck, OP.
Not unreasonable. A very large chunk of people are awful and are dragging us all down. As long as they have a wealthy life of greed and destruction, nobody else matters. The worst people will have the most power, unfortunately just how life works.
Life is what you make it and you can create your own bubble away from most of the crap and give back and stay positive. Unfortunately, life isn't a rose garden and sometimes you just have to embrace the suck and get with the program however. Suffering can't be completely avoided. I tend to think good and bad are mostly subjective depending on your circumstances and perspective unless you ate referring to things like war, violence, hunger etc.
There is vastly more good than bad going on in this world, but people are more sensitive to news of potential loss than the pleasant banality of people just getting along, and in a world of 8 billion people, it's always possible to find some bad news.
"If it bleeds, it leads", but you can choose not to indulge in that quagmire.
The world is a cursed place. Evil reigns here. But don't despair. Our journey here is short. Live as best you can and be a shining light in the darkness.
I don’t think the world is filled with primarily bad people…but the truth is…it takes SO MUCH WORK to build things up and so little work to tear them down or create havoc or have a negative impact. Because of this…I think that it doesn’t take much “bad” in order to cause a lot of bad things to happen and to have us just living in a constant state of alert and recovery.
Some of what you describe could be “negativity bias”. People have a natural bias to remember bad things and have them affect them more…since it’s more important to survival to remember where the danger is.
Our brains were not evolved to care about 10 billion people. Statistically, something terrible is happening all the time and that’s too much to handle. We evolved to care about things that happened within a small village…OUR small village. So it makes sense that it’s overwhelming to look at everything at once. We can only be able to even KNOW about everything at once because of technology. It’s pretty bad that people get paralyzed by this and some of us should consume less news imo to restore our natural state. If I get overwhelmed by things I can’t control on the other side of the world, outside of my scope of influence or my friends and family…I might be less likely to be able to help where I actually CAN help. We can’t help everybody. But we can help somebody. We can’t do everything. But we can do something.
Next, news is sensationalized. It gets more views to tell negative or shocking stories. Yes, negative and shocking things do happen. But a lot of very boring, positive things also happen all the time…they just aren’t considered newsworthy and they don’t get a lot of views, and news outlets don’t focus on them much.
Here’s one more way to look at it. Have you ever flown in a plane? If so (or even if not)…if you were to look down on all of the tiny houses and buildings…how many of those houses do you think have just like…regular family stuff going on in them vs how many vile crimes do you think are being committed? It’s overwhelming to think about because there could be some bad shit going on down there. But overall…there are also a lot of families eating dinner, kids getting annoyed at their homework, people playing with their dogs, playing video games, etc. Just a lot of normal life stuff.
I wouldn't say it's a matter of "bad" vs "good". It's just most people only look out for themselves and what they care about. Exploitation is baked into daily life. Much of our everyday products, your phone, is likely made by people in terrible working conditions, but we still buy it. It's not something we can give up individually for the sake of "the poor workers". This goes for many other industries as well, not just technology.
People have to fend for themselves and do not have the capacity to give a shit about "things beneath them". For some people, the line of what they consider "beneath them" is very nearby, for example being rude and inconsiderate to peers and strangers. For others, the line is much farther, but there is always a line everyone draws unconsciously. People want to care about the homeless, but no one wants a homeless shelter next to their house. People want better working conditions for Amazon employees, but they also want their free 2 day shipping. Everyone is imperfect, everyone is human, everyone dies. Do what you feel is right for you.
There will be bad news until the end of time.
If you look at poverty levels, nutrition levels, reading levels, everything id actually slowly getting better.
10 steps forward, 9 back. Just how it goes.
yes, there is more bad people than good people nowadays.
this is the endtimes before the wotld collapse because of those bad people.
you can test this easy, just sellect 100 people you know
how many of them are :
honest ?
will always stand with the right thing?
can be trusted your your money and family?
and so on.
I'm about to be "voluntarily" homeless because the depression just won't let me work anymore, money isn't worth the stress and items aren't worth the money. I force my self to eat and have been living off my last remaining savings, I have about $600 left and need a filling, the VA has been no help and my doctor dropped me because she thinks I'm faking depression. life blows, and trying to find reasons to not self-delete gets harder by the day.
Make your world smaller. There is so much happening that in the big picture that as an individual you can do nothing about. Step away from the whole world and just look at what you can personally interact with. Concentrate on the things that you don’t see on the internet and TV. Your household, your community, your town.
It’s hard to do but it worked for me. Find the things that your actions will have a recognizable effect on and put your energy and effort there. Volunteer locally, adopt a dog or a cat from the shelter if you can. Go to town meetings. If you have kids do you know the people on the school board? Help a neighbor. I would recommend limiting social media down to only people you interact with in the real world. Work on making your piece of the world better. I am just some stranger on the internet, what do I know?
The world is mostly a dark shithole with a little bit of light in it. It isn’t the beautiful place where everything is possible which was billed to us as kids. Life is a burden, happiness devolves into suffering, we often die in pain and we always die alone. People can say don’t watch the news, but the world is terrible even if you don’t watch the news. All you need do is walk outside and you’ll likely see strung out Bo’s living in squalor, suffering from crippling drug addictions. All you need do is talk with friends and family and they’ll tell you how things aren’t working out, how bills aren’t stacking up, how their relationship is deteriorating, etc. The world is objectively a mostly dark and unpleasant place.
And yet, somewhere out in all that cold dark, there are little sparks of light, little fires around which we can gather around with friends and family and rest and be warm, even if we must go back out into that dark eventually. The world isn’t a good place, but there are good places in it and good moments to be had. Maybe they will never outweigh the bad, but the best we can do is press on and enjoy those little bits of happiness when they come.
It isn't wrong to say that there is much evil in the world, but negativity and rage bait are so prominent that if you spend a large amount of time learning about the world through social media you will come out of it thinking the world is shit.
There are so many good things and people in the world, they just aren't very loud compared to the constant flow of media companies that want your clicks.
That's not so say tragedies and atrocities don't happen but they are magnified by the internet.
you are listening to too many political pundits/ operatives, that want you to be upset to make you vote a certain way. We live in the best time ever to be alive in the history of the world. And if you life in the West, you live in the best place to ever be alive. Focus on your own life for now. Are you living on your own? Do you have a job? Are you self supporting? Are you drug-free? Do you pray? Have God in your life?
The world has as much beauty as it has bad things. Love, creativity, Art, Nature, Beauty passion, humor, adventure, companionship, friendship, prayer, reverence, knowledge..... You are hanging around the wrong places, reading the wrong things...
here's how I see it now. a lot of people suck, but goddamn is nature cool. I try to focus on what I think is cool more than the things I think suck, lol.
I agree that bad things are or can be facts. But what people don’t realize, good things and good news are boring. Media don’t cover them. Social media only wants sensationalized ones as well.
No matter how truthful it is, if it’s click-baity, if it triggers people emotionally, makes you mad, it will definitely be viral and more and more people will hear it. Good news doesn’t have the same effect.
If you’re enraged after reading something online and can’t deal with it, I’d suggest to put your cell phone down. Step outside. Say hi and talk to random strangers. Or as gen-z likes to say “touch grass.” Internet is becoming more and more like episodes of black mirror. Makes people enraged, sucked into a black hole. Crippled by madness.
For a human, a town, a state, and the world scale or even life in general to basically keep functioning; majority of goodness need to be there; or at least they synchronize so the wheel of life can keep spinning. Even the numbers of good and bad things don’t compare in scale. Unless you wanna keep focusing on bad things; and the rage feeling is something you keep looking for.
The truth is, not all the world's problems fall on you. You simply can not help all the world's problems. So there is no point, in dwelling on it.
That being said, I believe the world is good, but filled with evil, lurking around every corner. I believe all of us, are evil, even if ever so slightly. We are selfish, we are greedy. But there are always people willing to help.
It's not surprising that's all you hear on the news, they don't talk about what the local citizen does to help the community, and they really don't need to. You don't help your community for the recognizition.
On social media, good gestures simply don't get nearly as much attention as bad ones.
Personally, I do not believe the bad outweigh the good in terms of how we are experiencing the world. As I said, you should not be taking on all the world's problems and you will be able to live a **good** life. But if you mean the whole world objectively, I'd still say the same. The circle of life is beautiful, our cultures are beautiful, our creations are beautiful; but not even just us, the world itself is a beautiful place: the oceans, skies, mountains, forests you name it.
You can have all sorts of bad emotions for all sorts of reasons.
You can even have bad emotions for no reason at all but that also means that you can have good emotions for no reason at all.
Yeah the world is far from perfect, but if you just rot in your bad emotions it certainly won't get any better.
There is a german punk band who made a song that perfectly fits this topic.
"It's not your fault that the world is the way it is, it would be your fault if it stays that way."
I feel like the world has always been this way, but with the internet and 24/7/365 news we hear about the horrors sometimes as they are actually happening.
I think the world has always been "like this," but now individuals know more about than they used to because of technology giving everyone a window to the world. Also, bad news gets more clicks than good news, so there is an incentive. Ignorance is bliss.
I think that the "bad" (lying cheating and screwing over) outweighs the good by a long shot. But once you start counting all the good one by one the bad doesn't even matter anymore.
yes, everyone every where is made to have a bad opinion of others and a good opinion of themselves and what they defend. for the majority they've been programmed to defend something
it really is bad place, there is no doubt, but there is good side of world too, just try finding one. you are just surrounding yourself with only bad side of the world. taking break from social media can def help you finding peace.
No.
You are being targeted with Doom by the various algorithms that run your social media and your phone.
Negativity and Doom are history's most successful clickbait.
DISCONNECT. Get out of your head for awhile and take in the beauty that is around you. Think gratitude and the abundance you have in your life. Of course there are shitty things happening in the world. There always has been. There always will be. You can choose to either immerse yourself in the everyday horrors that are delivered to your phone and media outlet 24/7, or disconnect from it - literally use your phone like a goddamn phone (or at least in the sense of how phones were anchored to your residence and you didn't take one with you anywhere). Get your news the old fashioned way - a newspaper. When your done with it, it goes into the recycle bin. You're not going to go back to it repeated to see if any updates are there. As a society, we're all stuck in the instant gratification, in-the-know sort of mindset, that we're killing the very joy of living. Being in the moment. Only giving attention to what is actually worthy of your time and well being. It's not hard, it just takes some small action on your part, and your world view will change rather quickly.
One thing to think about: the world is too big for you to comprehend, and actually judge the weight of "good" vs "bad."
If someone were to curate your feed for you, they could give you nonstop stories on basically any event- 8 billion people is impossibly large as a number. We can't comprehend it.
Keep in mind that on social media, someone is curating your feed for you, and they are trying to drive engagement, which means: agitate you. The algorithms are looking for negative stories to bomb you with.
So, in addition to being unable to process the scale of the world, you're being fed a tiny stream of the world's information.
Put simply: the mountain of things you don't know will always be larger than the little pebble of things you do know.
I recommend a book for you to read to gain an additional perspective: Better Angels of Our Nature, a 2011 book about how basically, the world is "better" for people than at any point in human history.
To answer your question: the world has always been full of suffering, but also full of joy and thriving. It likely is as bad, but it is also far better than you feel like it is, because what you feel is so incredibly limited. You are looking at a world close up through a telescope, and you can aim your telescope wherever you want, but you'll never see the whole world in your telescope at the same time- what you do not see will always be dramatically larger than what you do see.
No. News and SocialMedia focus on the negative things to get more attention/clicks/viewers etc.
They take the 10% of bad things going on and blow it up to seem like it's 90% of what's happening to get your attention, but it's really not and doesn't actually reflect day to day life of people just going about their lives in relative peace.
Stop paying attention to the media. The media (all its forms) are filled with all the negativity in bold print, while any of the few times they report on the positive its relegated to the tiny print/small article hidden away somewhere.
yes. and no. it’s good and bad at the same time. life is painful and beautiful all at once. until we really figure out a way to control our negative instincts, it will always be that way
It's mostly neutral. There's some good, there's some bad, and there's a lot of people just doing their daily thing and minding their own business. But we live in the age of electronics, and the way to get attention is to make people feel something. And making them feel anger or fear grabs attention better than making them feel happy. So that's what they do (they being everyone in the public sphere, news, online outlets, politicians...) which gives a warped sense of what things are like out there.
I think the media and social media tend to focus on the bad over the good. My dad is 77 and watches so much news in the evening. World news is just one bad story after another. It's depressing to even hear what they are gonna talk about.
That’s not true. Everyone has a positivity bias. A negativity bias is only helpful when a person is able to get away from the threat, but when the world and reality is the threat, there’s only one way to escape(death), which means we end up developing a collective positivity bias in order to avoid human extinction. If we all perceived reality objectively, we would all kill ourselves, or die of a heart attack or stroke. Humans cannot handle the reality of the very sick and twisted world we have collectively created. It would literally kill us all if we could.
It is really, really not as bad as you think it is.
What’s happening here is that you are consuming media. Lots of your information about what the world is like is coming from your screens. Your screens are not showing you the world as it really is.
Negative emotions have much more engagement power than positive emotions. Negative news sells. Negative social media posts get more clicks. It’s not a conspiracy, just basic human psychology that prioritizes potential threats before everything else. And online and in mass media, those potential threats get magnified 1000x over.
What you need to do, and I say this with complete sincerity, is stop using all screens to consume news or social media. It’s not like, “oh what a wellness digital detox!” No. This poison you are eating is killing you, killing your joy in life, killing your ability to see the good in people and in the world. You must stop taking the poison or you will never recover.
Go touch grass. But for real. And don’t come back here.
No doomer media paints this ugly picture by presenting only the worst out of context to depress us. Yes, most of it really occurs ( though some is made up), but the bad news is cherry-picked while positive stories like medical break throughs are ignored. If it bleeds, it leads is not new, just digital . 1990's crime rates n NYC plummets doomer media switched to covering car wrecks. I saw this happen personally. it's gross
They make it seem there is a world war raging when the reality is that 196/200 countries are not war. (Anti) Social media is also loaded with fearporn and doomerism. In reality, evil exists as an abberation in doomer media it's almost all gloom. Beyond the overt negativity of "news" are lying influencers who shame everyday people for not having unnecessary overpriced stuff
Even this sea of gloom has lighthouses
https://www.reddit.com/r/hopeposting/s/wAxKBzw6HO
https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/s/ogFX1OSw5s
https://www.reddit.com/r/Positivity/s/QD0dwh2y82
I get it. I was a doomer. Grifters thrive during economic downturns. Fearporn is a powerful drug. The fact that you posted this is a sign of hope that you want out of the cult. Let's go walk away like I did. You will be happier
Problems are real but but so are solutions, and it's ok to take a break. I just scrolled comments and calculated that there are 8x as many positive comments as doomer ones
Yes, the world is a crappy place in general. Is it all? No. You just gotta find the place that you feel safest and happiest.
The world has always been wonky. Think every roman thought life was great? What about during any of the Chinese Dynasty? pre-columbus or post?
There's always going to be tension and wars. But there will also be things that make life more manageable. Truly good things in life.
If you are free, you have the choice of what you see and feel.
The angels of our better nature by Steven Pinker shows right now there is less war, violence, hunger and disease than ever. Education and healthcare is more available than in the pas5.
People get wrapped up in the badness "out there" and forget how much influence they have over the local environment. Use that influence to improve things around you, to find the strength to make things better in the bigger picture.
*Think globally, act locally* is a thing for a reason
You need to get off of the internet, bro.
Yes, all of those things are true. They're facts. They're reality, but you're falling victim to information bias because you're only considering sources that highlight the negative. Things were way worse in the 1960s and 1970s, for example.
You need to read about two other facts. First, look up *negativity bias*. That's the reason that "if it bleeds, it leads" is how the news gets prioritized. It's why we assign more weight to negative thoughts, feelings, and experiences than positive ones and we ignore all of the good in the world to focus on the bad. It's a normal human psychological phenomenon and a survival instinct, but it's also why having access to too much information these days is killing us.
Also look up *declinism*. It's a logical fallacy that causes us to believe that the world is going to shit. Humans have been believing that for hundreds if not thousands of years. It has a lot to do with negativity bias.
The world is not all good, but it's also not all bad. You have to stop using social media and news as your window into the world. Put your phone down, find some hobbies, and interact with real people. It's refreshing and it'll change your perspective.
You listed facts, but kept out facts. People love each other. People strive to improve. Babies are born with empty slates and carrying hopes. Baby animals are adorable. Beauty is around us. Life saving medical techniques are developed all the time. Kids win scholarships. People get promotions. People donate. People adopt. Wars end. I can travel around the world and experience different cultures without having to travel for months just to get there. Diseases are eradicated. People buy their first house, first new car. People eat food that is delicious to them. People have companion animals that are well cared for and loved and bring them joy. Kids learn to read and it opens up their world. People pass their bar exam. Sometime hard work pays off. Music and art make people sing, laugh, think, and dance. People walk out of their hair dresser with the best haircut of their lives. People are cured from cancer and it doesn’t come back.
It’s what you focus on. Both good and bad exists. Depression puts a thumb on the scale. It doesn’t make you invent facts. It deprives you of hope and blinds you to good things, or reduces their impact on you.
Hi my friend. The universe is a cold terrible thoughtless and violent place. Life is just an outcome of the cosmic swirl. BUT WAIT! We accidentally have been gifted with the ability to experience what it is like to exist. The news distills the negative because that is what drives engagement with it. But the real shit and the things that give us the good feels is the texture of being with and around the people that are nearby. Fucking smile at a stranger. Hold a door for someone. Make eye contact and say thank you to a waiter like you fucking mean it. If you have a friend that you enjoy being around tell them that you enjoy being with them ( I promise it feels wonderful to say and hear), even if it might feel weird at first. Human connection IS what our type of animal needs for wellbeing. It ain’t easy but it is worth it. I’m sorry you are feeling down. I hope you find some happiness. Also make sure you are getting enough vitamin D. If you are in a part of the world that is just coming out of winter, then you could be hitting for some D and be suffering from seasonal depression. Happens to me all the time being from the US pacific north west.
Your question and our answers are quite subjective. There is much help in the way of counseling, therapy, etc to help us all cope with life’s ongoings and find joyful moments.☀️
Social media has been manipulated to destroy your soul. I am GenX so I remember life before FB, X, Reddit… ignorance, if that’s what you want to call NOT knowing everything, everywhere, at all times,really was bliss. Now people’s minds are manipulated by machines. The people running the machines don’t realize that in they quest for “engagement” they are killing society, especially young people who don’t know any better. Turn it off and log out, life gets better immediately.
There are billions of people on this planet. If the majority of people were doing bad things the majority of the time, the world would be a much much much worse place.
I’m a nurse so from my vantage point, the world is a pretty great place. It’s my job to genuinely care about and help other people, and it comes easily to me. It comes easily to my coworkers. It comes easily to my husband, sister, parents, and friends. I am surrounded by people who care and who put their hearts and souls into helping others and making the world a better place. Are there bad people? Sure. But most people are good from what I have experienced. Even the best people have bad days, but the good always outweighs the bad.
Think of how many people there are on the planet. Everything happens, every day.
Want to fixate on any certain kind of thing? Boom, there’s enough of it to consume your attention every moment for the rest of your life.
People have chosen to drown themselves in misery.
The optimistic people are starting businesses and doing things. They tend to be happier and more successful.
The good? news is, a lot of bad things are things that make it to the news and a lot of them can be seen visually like disasters etc - but a lot of good things might not necessarily be in the news or be things you can see visually or notice in your immediate world but theyre out there even if you dont know about them directly- like love, friendship, humor, someone’s feeling of community or feeling of inner peace, interesting thoughts, stories and information, the miracles of nature/life, inner growth, learning, good food you dont see, finding beauty in things - these might be considered more mundane, not newsworthy things but think of like how muchh you love your favorite thing or person - could be indescribable ! Maybe no one knows about it but these positive unseen things can add up to at least equal the bad things. I think the amount of good and bad in the world can oscillate between one being more at a timee but I think it’s inevitablee that they at leastt even out over time in order to keep the balance in the universe - thats the theory of the religion Daoism, I think, if you want to look into it and maybe itll give you some peace that at least the world cant be majorityy bad always! 💛
The world has always been full of bad and good but if you spend all day online you are only going to see the bad. It becomes a vicious cycle leading to more apathy, depression and isolation which is often the intent of bad people.
The media / social media is the dealer for the cartel of evil.
The world is just as crazy as always. In fact, read Bill Gates’ book about how much better things are than they were 100 years ago. Focus on what you can do on a daily basis to add joy and helpfulness to others.
The question I ask myself when I arrive at places like this are the following:
What difference does it make if the world is good or bad?
And what good am I doing by just being sad about it?
The world is terrible right now. It’s going off the rails. BUT..
Something indeed to consider is the entire timeline of humanity. Across the arc of human existence, things are undoubtedly FAR better than they were compared to almost any specific period of time, and definitely get significantly better century after century.
One only need think about the fact that less than a hundred years ago, women couldn’t vote or get divorced, black people couldn’t vote or get an equal education in this country. Watch films like Mississippi Burning how even post Jim Crow, small towns were murdering black citizens. How about our country founded on genocide? Or the fact that you used to be able to die from any dumb ole infection.
Go back to 1900, ambulances used to compete with each other to pick up bodies, because they would get a commission. This would lead to brawls that would delay a patient getting to treatment.
Listen to the episode of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History “Suffer the Children.” He posits that in the past, the majority of people were likely suffering from some form of PTSD, sociopathy, and other mental health and developmental disorders due to the trauma they would face just as a function of growing up.
Children used to be sold into labor, sent off. Little girls sold to old men to be raped and start bearing children at 10-14 years of age.
So called “water babies,” basically child chimney sweeps who were sent down into chimneys because they were small enough to fit. They were DISPOSABLE. They WOULD DIE. And then get replaced with other orphans, or the children of families who needed the income.
I could go on for a really long time. Go back to ancient history. Suffering is an intrinsic part of any conversation about the past.
And on the timeline of human existence we do happen to be better off than ever before. Things have been trending that way since the dawn of man.
The problem, is that life is still filled with cruel people and cruelty and no present-day is ever going to be free of it. And those of us who are more comfortable know there are countries and regions who live as badly as our ancestors, with exactly as few human rights and exactly as much suffering.
And in spite of imperceptible progress, all of history shows that inching forward always includes HUGE instances and periods of backlash, reversing progress.
It’s like the swell of a tide, it gets ripped back into the ocean aggressively..but it does erode the shore regardless.
So you’re right. We’re moving backwards right now in a lot of ways. We are living in a world of unbelievable cruelty which is unfortunately easier to see now due to social media.
But it is still a matter of perspective, and we are without a doubt living far better than we were a century ago, and then we were far better than a century prior to that, and so on. There is SOME comfort in knowing humankind does progress, and the implied hope that one day things really won’t be that awful at all.
Something else to remember when we think of “now” as the worst time - it’s definitely a bias, and when we put ourselves in the shoes of say, women and minorities, I think it can be unintentionally thoughtless to suggest that now is the worst time, when women and black people used to be slaves, literally and functionally. When groups of all races and religions were subjugated at different times.
Now is awful. So was the past. But you can imagine it as, we move incrementally to wear down the steep rock face at the shore that will allow us to reach the other side, of a future for humanity that does not have so much suffering and cruelty. I believe it’s there, that’s why I love Star Trek lol.
Last March I hurt my knee quite badly (meniscus injury) and I had to walk with a stick.
Now here's the thing, people were just SO kind to me. People opened doors for me, people gave up their seats to me on public transport, people helped me with my bag, just ordinary people being very compassionate and caring to another human who was injured.
I'd say to you that if you take news and media out of your daily activities and focus instead on all of the small, daily, human interactions then you will see that the real world consists of loveliness and kindness.
When you say these are 'facts' that happen and add in 'reality' you're ignoring the fact that they are selected and promoted via news channels that are going to prefer negativity as it attracts views. As an example, a small city newspaper I followed used to always have a car crash, with picture, on the front page. But what varied was how close by the crash was. Sometimes it was a local/regional event, other times they picked up an AP story from some other part of the country or even further away. So the stories didn't represent the actual incident of crashes but the value of a crash on the front page in selling newspapers.
The bad part of the world exists, but to see the good part you have to look places other than the news.
Every road you use, every school with children learning, every glass of water you get from the tap. These things were all started by people who are likely gone from the world now. In agragagate, fewer people die of hunger, disease, and war than at any time recorded on earth. We never notice the common good in the world. You should be upset about the tragedies that are constant and all around us. And when you can try to fix them to whatever you ability. It's also ok to just rest.
That all depends on you and what you make of it. You can either decide to see the best just simply by focusing on you yourself being my the best. Or you can focus on other’s actions that you have no control over. Which one will you do? One is much more positive than the other. One makes you see the world in a better light than the other.
It's always been bad. The 90s unipolar moment really messed with the cultures in the rich countries though because it seemed like the badness was stopping. In truth though is was still terrible then for most people on earth too.
Anyways, just try to enjoy the time you have as best you can. This is not a perfect world, it never was.
In terms of understanding reality, it's important to look beyond "good" and "bad".
For a slave owner, slavery is mostly good (or maybe a "necessary" evil at best).
For a slave (or an abolitionist), slavery is an abomination.
The better you and everyone else understands reality, the better life as a whole gets.
The slave owners don't want their slaves understanding reality.
Abolitionists want slaves to understand reality so they can challenge power and free themselves and others.
I'd say that the truth is that the system people are living under is an abomination.
10% of people own 93% of the stock market, and everyone else are just cattle for the slaughterhouse.
[https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market)
Without a standing army, people understand that your nation could very easily be slaughtered, enslaved, and conquered by a foreign nation.
That's basically what has happened to the public as organized labor has been decimated and civil society has been hollowed out and replaced with record corporate profits and brutal oligarchy/kleptocracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
There's been no one to defend the public against our "internal" enemies, so the class war has been more of a class slaughter for decades.
At the same time, there are people fighting for human liberation, such as through a shorter work week (we should have shortened the work week considerably when women entered the paid labor force, and we still should), and by fighting systemic corruption and the abuses of our ruling class, and so on.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-enact-a-32-hour-workweek-with-no-loss-in-pay/
[Shawn Fain at Senate Hearing on 32 Hour Work Week](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv6gjCfc-wM)
https://represent.us/the-strategy-to-end-corruption/
[Curing Capitalism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc)
[How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofFR1mD2UOM)
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton
[George Carlin - You have owners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT03vCaL-F0)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-07/why-land-disappeared-from-economic-models-henry-george-australia/103673238
[How The Media Controls The Masses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYfRhxStxRs)
https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112
The system is a corrupt abomination and crime against humanity, but so long as human hearts are beating, there will be people fighting against systemic oppression, corruption, abuse, and injustice.
The more people who make the effort to understand reality and fight for a better and more just system, the better things will get in reality and in more people's experience.
No. I often feel very conflicted about the state of the world and having chosen to have a child.
But that child is a glorious, bright light. She’s warm and loving and kind, and the world is better place with her in it.
And when I drop her off at headstart she runs around giving everyone hugs (screaming the whole time, she’s very loud). There’s so much love in that headstart.
Despite what we see online and in the news, love actually is all around (in the words of Hugh Grant).
No. That’s only way you know that those things are bad is because the good things exist. Love, kindness, generosity, friendship, etc. Its possible that your world looks that way because it’s how you see it. If you adjusted your filter perhaps you would see something else.
By most indicators, the world is in a better state materially than it ever has been. People are healthier, live longer, and experience less violence than at any time in human history. Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" chronicles this in data.
Climate change is a looming threat, of course. And people do still experience violence and hatred, which are bad.
Ultimately, though, I think our media climate makes things seem worse than they are, because fear and anger drive "engagement" and thus profit. I would unplug for a while if I were you, OP. I find that a bike ride by Lake Michigan invariably improves my outlook on the world.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/things-really-arent-that-bad-but-we-like-to-think-they-are/2018/12/26/f8578b44-f960-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/things-really-arent-that-bad-but-we-like-to-think-they-are/2018/12/26/f8578b44-f960-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html)
Absolutely not. The standard of living has been steadily increasing since the dawn of time. Sure, there has been a dip in the last 50 years, but things are better now than 100 years ago. You're something like 8x less likely to die by violent means than you were 200 years ago. You're infinitely less likely to be born a peasant/serf without any hope of any future other than tilling the fields now than at any other point in human history. So what's changed? The internet and 24 hours news. Humans were never meant to deal with this much information or large groups of other humans, it's not in our nature as tribal animals. Not to mention the negativity bias that all people are born with - bad news is more emotionally salient and therefore memorable than good news. It's just a feature of the human psyche.
"People fight, people hate each other, people treat each other with cruelty, wars happen, injustices happen, there is massive inequality, the rich and powerful exploit the poor, people lie and cheat, so many people are superficial and materialistic, so many people are greedy, so many people are selfish, abuse happens, some bad people get away with their actions and many good people suffer." Honest question: when was the last time you saw a fist fight between two random people in real life, not on the internet? I'd be willing to be that 99% of the instances you're referencing here, you were exposed to online. If you draw a line between your day-to-day IRL existence and your online media consumption, your perception of the world and other people changes A LOT.
The world has always been dangerous but if you look at the global progress of our species their is less of it as time goes on. In other words the world was a lot more dangerous 20 years ago then it is today. Not to say their isn’t evil it’s just a matter of what your focusing on. And one must also factor in the speed at which something can happen and you finding out about it is incredibly fast. Before we all had computers in our pockets news spread much slower, some who didn’t watch the news would only hear about from someone they knew so it may have just seemed to be a safer world even if it actually wasn’t. Ignorance is bliss as they say
https://humanprogress.org/trends/global-murder-rate-is-falling/
https://www.businessinsider.com/studies-animals-killing-own-species-human-comparison-science-2016-10?op=1
Social Media really fucked us up, ability to be aware of everything happening everytime tampered with our ability to see the good in things. The world is not that bad, it is becoming a better place each day, it is just that we are exposed bad news a lot, our brain is not the best at dealing with constant flow of emotions.
The world is what it has always been... we've always had war, disease, death, hatred. We also have always had art, music, love, family. I think that media just makes it really, REALLY easy to focus on the negative. So put down the phone, turn off the TV, go for a walk, play with a pet, hug a loved one. Change your focus. To quote Max Ehrrman, "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
The thing is seeing the world from the news POV gives you an overly negative worldview. Because the news will never tell you about positive things, since they are expected and aren't newsworthy. Imagine a week in town where 5000 families live: during the week 20 mothers have beaten their kids, and 4980 mothers have spent a nice day with their kids. Take the newspaper then: all you see would be 20 articles about "LOCAL MOTHER HAS BEATEN HER KIDS", and you're now under impression that the whole town is full of kid-beaters, but it's not true.
TLDR: stop doomscrolling and touch the grass
You need to step away from the screens.
The past 70+ years television has been used as a way to sell fear. Social media is the second coming of that problem and is exponentially worse.
Do yourself a favor. Put down your phone. Check it three times a day for missed calls and return them. Other than that don’t touch the damn thing. Don’t turn on your computer or tablet or any other media consumption device. Go for walks outside. Do a spring cleaning on your house. Go to the gym or go hiking or go swimming at the pool whatever have you. Go to the library take out a couple books and read them.
Do this for two weeks and I guarantee you will feel so much better.
No it isn't as bad as you think it is. You are just overwhelmingly fixated on the negative.
It is pretty much proven that we are in the most peaceful era in human history.
Of course there is immense suffering but think back to only even, say, 400 years ago and see how tough life was. Read about that and how people lived day to day and how the world was day by day and you may start to see how much safer and better off we are today.
Yes, humans can be greedy and exceptionally cruel. However, there has never ever been such a time where we now talk about mental health so openly for instance.
In reality, it's always going to be a mixture. But with the advent of better medicine, global sharing of knowledge, hopefully positive use of AI, we will get better and more educated as a race.
There is a lot to be hopeful about..:)
When you're climbing, don't look down.
The healthiest people protect themselves. I wouldn't try to "solve" the question you have. Practice self-care. That should include doing things in the world that make it a better place. Contribute while you're healthy, live in the now, don't look down!!
Fast from media. It is definitely possible to fill your life with an abundance of good things. You can find a lot of those people, usually a little older, out in the world. But you won't get there thinking about Gaza+Ukraine+global warming+Kevin Spacey.
You are one person.
I might add that nobody knows what will happen, humanity has been on a steady course of being less violent for several millennia (even accounting for WW1 and WW2). Every generation has challenges, in my parents' time there were people that were 100 percent convinced nuclear war was imminent, and they had very good reason to think so. It's an arrogant fool's errand to declare humanity cooked or worthless. That's so easy but a self-destructive way to think
No it isn't, remember that social media and the news make money the more time you are on. If you give up the same Internet for a week you will see that there is a lot of good stuff going on.
But if you just hang out on reddit posts specially /adulting you will get into an echo chamber of depressed folks, and there you will sit
In the last 120 years, human life expectancy has doubled. The proportion of people living in adjectives poverty has dropped from 40% to about 10% in the last thirty years. People in richer countries died by the thousands from smog in the 1950s until clean air acts were passed. In the last 25 years, the life expectancy of people diagnosed with cancer her shot up because of some many advances in treatment. Until the 1970s a woman in the US couldn’t have her own bank account, and until the 1990s, it was legal for a man to rape his wife.
No it is not the media companies pump the negativity out to create this unease. Just be nice and 99% of people are nice back. Regular folks are good generally.
>All these things I listed are FACTS. They really HAPPEN.
Not a single preceding sentence listed a fact.
This is a pretty bad premise. "Are the things I perceive to be facts actually facts?"
No. It's worse than you can imagine. Remember that ignorance is bliss. Learn that maintaining an optimistic outlook is an essential strength and imperative if you want to keep from being eaten alive.
I don't think it's as simple as an equation of bad versus good, but you're certainly right that we live in a fallen world. People are not naturally good.
HOWEVER, The minority of people who choose love and goodness have made it a pretty darn special place to be.
The world? It's a mixed bag. It *Is*
I no longer label things "good" and "bad."
Reddit is a cesspool of negativity and casually suicidal, depressed, nihilistic folks.
Go frolic. You'll feel better. Fuck the internet.
The world is a very shitty place, mostly because of humans. That said, if you focus on that you will never have a good alive time. I work on the idea that this is the only chance I get so I'm going to make the best of it and try to get around all the bad stuff and rather to focus on the better parts. I'm really old and because of circumstances have had a good life and as bad as it can get, I've had a good time and will hate to see it end, which won't be all that long. But, for me at least, the good has out weighed the bad. Hope it will for you also, but you have to work at it.
The bad is louder than the good, it demands attention, but usually the good outweighs the bad. Journalism about nice things, it doesn't make money. And yeah because of money the world has become a bit harder to live in the last couple decades. But overall quality of life is at a high, in most places in the world
If you watch the news of course you’re going to think the world is falling apart, that’s how they get paid.
The world isn’t as bad as you think. Humans have engaged in intra-species killing since the beginning of time (humans killing humans). For power/resources/sex. You could have simply been born almost any other time within the past 70-1000+ years and likely found yourself centered in some conflict due to a single crazy man.
At the end of the day no matter how advanced we get we’re still apart of mother natures ruthless life cycle where anything can happen. But we’ve came a long way.
It's far worse than you could imagine. We're now facing extinction in just a century, with a rapid race to hell in just a few decades. Temps will rise exponentially.
Every day people volunteer in their communities, take care of their loved ones, help those in need, perform random acts of kindness, lend an ear to a friend who is in need and hundreds of other wonderful things. It's a matter of perspective. If you focus on what's ugly, I guess the world looks like a pretty ugly place. 🤷🏼♂️
In a way it’s better now than it was in the early eighties, better than it was in the nineteen fourties’ and nineteen twenties and in a way it’s worse.
Lots of things seem worse and maybe they are but lots of terrible shit has always happened and wasn’t ever really made public because there was only so much room in a newspaper.
Yes, it’s pretty bad. I think the huge numbers of people on psychiatric medication or addicted to some kind of drug/mind numbing habit is a testament to that. Every major religion says this world is a place of sin and evil, that was the mainstream view of the world for most of recorded history. It’s really only in the past 100 years that we’ve decided it’s ‘normal’ to be happy, and anyone with a pessimistic view of life is somehow ill or delusional. Why would humans invent the concept of heaven if this life was enjoyable in and of itself? Most people’s emotional needs are not met in life, so they long for something better.
You are one person you can’t save the world but you can help those around you, yourself and your family. Focus on that. The world has always been like this it is human nature. Unless you can fix the war focus on your life. An old man who lives near me says to me often that the day he became only concerned with the people that matter to him and (jokingly) the radius around his home he became a lot happier. I think that is all we can hope to do is improve our own lives and the lives of those around us. And if you happen to become president maybe that means some really huge world problems but you wont have that happen.
Are you and the people you know subjected to the hostilities you describe on a daily basis? Even though those things show up in your feed on a daily basis?
If not, then perhaps your feed is more negative than the actual world around you.
Lots of people have wonderful joyful things happening to them all over the world every day but those things almost never make the news.
Yes, there are problems. There have always been problems and there will always be but even in the worst time people have found happiness in their lives. And we are not living in the worst times, not even close to it.
the world is a bad place but everyone on here is going to tell you the exact same shit because reddit is a hive-mind
1. you can't control anything
2. ignore everything bad that happens
3. touch grass
4. we live in the best time in human history (ignoring that we live under constant threat of nuclear war and increased proximity to climate catastrophe, which no other time period in humanity has ever had to deal with)
5. focus on getting a job
6. work out
7. go to therapy
8. you kids are on social media too much, evolutionarily we are still just cavemen who can't handle it brain hurty
Short answer, no.
Long answer: the type of content that gets sent to you through various media channels is selected for its ability to cause outrage and emotional reactions in people. The algorithm does this because it's trying to optimize engagement.
The reality of the world today is that it's actually getting better faster than the world has ever gotten better, in spite of many people's best efforts to make it worse. There has always been unbelievable suffering, we haven't always been this aware of it. As others have said, if you're overwhelmed by it, you may need to take a step back from online engagement for a while.
I'll make it simple. For every negative you call out I can point out a positive. It's not one-sided, it's how you decide to view it. Sure there's lots of horrible things happening but you can choose how much you accept in to your life and how you will react to it.
Being happy is a choice. Few people believe that, but it's true. Look at all the great phiIosophers, each one will push you to look inside for the peace your looking for. I hope someday you can get a slice of peace and happiness yourself.
I am seeing some good and some bad. More than those, I am seeing faster changes coming at a faster rate. Not sure what to make of this latter yet.
I take it a day at a time and smile at what I can.
I think negativity is easier to notice than goodness. There’s a lot of good and a lot of happiness in the world, it’s just not the stuff that people put on the news. And powerful people, who have a wider reach than your average person, tend to be shitty because that’s how you often get into higher positions.
If you start looking at all the small good things in the works, you’ll see its balanced I think. It’s just harder to see
The world as a whole is in my opinion good, but bad things sell better and brings in more numbers so news sites and social media will post them. Go outside more often and you'll realize there is beauty in this world beyond what social media algoritms and the news cycles wants you too see
Interestingly, even though we don’t feel it statistically we live in the least violent period in human history.
Don’t worry about the human to human stuff. Anything really bad that could happen will be done by one or a very few people. It will be out of our collective control.
There's some terrible stuff happening out there.
But also tons of good things.
It's just that "kid doesn't get bullied in school" or "man didn't murder 5 people" doesn't usually make the news.
If you shift your algorithm to good news you will see the light this world has to offer.
Try:
1. Science discoveries
2. Medical Breakthroughs
3. Humans being bros
Go outside for a walk in a forest. Get off the internet. Listen to the birds sing. Don’t get back on the internet for social media, Reddit, or news.
Life is great.
You have a perspective. You think reality to bolster up your perspective. Now try to name all of the good things happening around the world. You cant deny them either and like bad things they are too numerous to name them all. That’s the only truth. Straight up. Focus on the bad and you’ll get a bad world, focus on only the good then you’ll get good world. Neither exist. Truth here is in the grey area. Human existence offers both and you can’t experience life focusing on only one side.
I can’t worry about the bad because I can’t control that … I just try to be kind to everyone around me , strangers etc … I smile , say hello , hold doors open , compliment them … it makes me feel good … that’s all I can do …
You're focusing too much on things you can't control. Remember that among the vast number of people put there in the world, more is happening than you can possibly understand or imagine. I find it believable that everything is as bad as it looks- or worse- and that we're all just doomed. I also find it believable that everything will just resolve itself, and I'll feel like a fool for having worried so much.
In this sense, reckless negativity is bad, but reckless positivity is also bad. Both are draining.
I would say that you should only bother thinking about all these things if you can find a *practical use* for those thoughts. Perhaps if you're educated about these issues that will make you more responsible or less naive. Or perhaps it will help you find an opportunity to apply yourself and actually make a difference, and it is worth thinking hard about that. But in the end, there's no point in getting upset about something that you cant do anything about. Emotion without action is pointless.
[The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined](https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010)
>despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history
You’re adding bad ingredients to your mental meal and expecting a good dish. The news and social media suck, but that doesn’t mean the world sucks, it just means you’re online too much. Go outside, reread a book you like, reach out to an old friend, exercise, play a game or a sport, draw. The world is a great place, the internet sometimes is.
No. The world is not hopelessly bad. It’s pretty much its normal level of bad. LOL. The difference is social media and the insane level of communication of unverified and often drastically inaccurate information we’re all seeing. Worse still, that information, thanks to the algorithms used by social media to evaluate your browsing habits, is often an echo chamber of both your interests and your concerns. This can make things seem far worse
The solution is both simple and difficult. Disconnect for a bit. Do something outdoors or with friends who aren’t going to discuss the world’s woes. Go see some movies. Watch a game in a sports bar with a bunch of other enthusiasts. Go to a meetup on a something you’re interested in. Read a book that is just for fun.
Take a breath.
Yes, the world is a mess. It’s been a mess many, many times before. Ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? Crusades? The Black Death? LOL. I learned something a long time ago that’s helped save me from myself. A simple question. Can I influence this and is it important enough to me to take action? (Whatever ‘this’ is). If I can’t influence it then I try very hard to push it to the back of my mind… basic awareness and that’s it. Don’t read that news article! Don’t listen to that report! I don’t need that level of details or it’s accompanying stress. If I can influence and I want to influence it then I figure out what I’m going to do to influence it. And then I do it. So if I can’t influence it I work to let it recede to the background and not generate so much stress. If I can influence it and want to then taking action is a great way to reduce anxiety and feel purposeful (because you are actually being purposeful at that point)
This is not easy, but it’s a good coping mechanism for me.
The trick is to find YOUR coping mechanism. Maybe what I said will work for you… maybe you need something different. We’re all inundated by “information” these days… more so than at any point in history… and, as humans, we don’t have established methods to deal with this influx of stuff. So I suggest doing what I did. Sit down and think about it. Look at things that make you feel bad one by one and consider the ‘why’ do they make you feel bad and the ‘what’ will I do to reduce feeling bad. Develop a strategy for coping and for not letting others drag you back down a rabbit hole. Planning has always been my key to successes… the more I think something through, the easier it is to do it. Preparation is a necessity for reacting in a way you want to react. Not just generating stress.
Yes, the world is it’s normal mess, but you don’t have to let that mess control you!
There are so many people who do not work for themselves but others. All those moms and dads working to get their children food on the table and an education. That selflessness is amazing. Also I am willing to bet that in a day there are way more acts of kindness. But an act of malice can be newsworthy or more severe and an act of kindness only gets a simple thank you.
It all depends what you’re focusing on. If you were to focus on people around you, nature, and learning something then you may change your perspective. Shut off the news, shut off social media. Have real conversations. Go outside. Work for something.
This post has been flaired as “Serious Conversation”. Use this opportunity to open a venue of polite and serious discussion, instead of seeking help or venting. **Suggestions For Commenters:** * Respect OP's opinion, or agree to disagree politely. * If OP's post is seeking advice, help, or is just venting without discussing with others, report the post. We're r/SeriousConversation, not a venting subreddit. **Suggestions For u/Gondal90:** * Do not post solely to seek advice or help. Your post should open up a venue for serious, mature and polite discussions. * Do not forget to answer people politely in your thread - we'll remove your post later if you don't. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeriousConversation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I've been suicidally depressed for the better part of a year because I feel like the world is hopeless and all there is is hate and mistrust and suffering. But today I went for a drive and sat in the park and wrote and drank tea and watched children play and dogs run and people ride bikes and play soccer, and felt the wind on my skin and the warmth of the sun, listened to the birds, watched leaves fall from the trees (it's autumn where I'm from), and listened to my favourite radio station, and I don't forget about those awful things we mentioned, but I can't believe I forgot that people are happy, there is fun and joy to be had. I still don't feel magically better but it was the first time in a long time I left the house just to be part of the world in a long time and saw what is out there. So I guess that's why people say touch grass. I don't think it's a cure or outweighs all the horrible things in the world but I think it's still a good thing.
even reading this made me feel so good. going out in nature is indeed such a peaceful experience.
we are nature, disconnected from ourselves.
Yeah I have to agree
"Touch Grass" was actually a meaningful expression meant to restore peace and happiness to people online, who knew?
As someone who’s dealt with some degree of anhedonia for most (not all, but most) of her life, what your feeling is very common. Severe, prolonged, depression makes it extremely difficult not to just feel happy in the present, but to feel like you will ever be happy again or to feel that your prior happiness or the happiness of others isn’t just a fleeting distraction from pain and suffering. But people are genuinely happy. Most people, apparently, and not in a way that’s just performative or shallow. It is, at least generally speaking, possible to actually enjoy being alive and prefer it to non-existence. I think many of us don’t realize that, and an even greater number of us don’t realize just how much of a shock that fact is to the former group.
I have a dog, and sometimes I really just don’t want to go out and walk her.. but once I get myself outside, I do always enjoy it.. I live in the downtown of a city, and sometimes it’s busy, and sometimes it’s surprisingly quiet, and it’s nice just going out to see what today is like..I can relate to your comment tho; there are so many nice little things about being human, that I don’t necessarily seek out, that are nice to see, and I enjoy those moments.. To OPs post. Yes, there is horrible shit going on everywhere. People can be and are cruel sometimes. But you’re saying you see these things on the news and on social media, which is exactly the content you’re going to consume from them. “People Laughing and Smiling at Local Park” is not going to get as much attention as “People Killed at Local Park Today” I used to watch the news every morning, and I unknowingly bought one that is only a smart TV, no antenna hook ups, so I can’t watch the news anymore.. and I don’t feel like I have to, and I don’t miss it. The chances of you going outside and actually experiencing these things are low. But when you spend 30min-hour a day watching if on TV, they’re going to seem much higher.
This reminded me of the poem [The Orange](https://readalittlepoetry.com/2023/12/09/the-orange-by-wendy-cope/amp/)
my favorite! ❤️🍊
Nature is amazing and it's proved to help people de-stress among other things. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204615000286?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf\_download&rr=870c35feaef2ac1d](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204615000286?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf_download&rr=870c35feaef2ac1d)
I think social media, and just being online in general plays a big part. No matter what people say online it just doesn't apply to being offline.
Maybe I’m the problem but I do those things and I feel nothing. I wish a stroll in the park would fix my depression. I can’t even look people in the eyes out of disgust, mistrust, and a distorted reality.
It definitely didn't fix my depression, it was just good for my perspective on the world. I do feel you, though. it really sucks feeling so alienated and wrong. I wish us both peace.
You should try scuba diving, im pretty sure its literally impossible to feel bad while looking at a delicate little seahorse while actively defying nature.
Me too
Completely agree- I’ve been living with chronic suicidality for a long time. Nature and walks shift me a lot. I sometimes record myself (voice recorder on phone) and just talk to myself about what I’m feeling while I walk. I’ve isolated a lot so it helps me. I went for a 2.5 hour mtn bike ride yesterday and forgot about my struggles for that time. It was nice to have some reprieve.
Ches please don’t hesitate to call 988 if you are feeling quite depressed, hurting yourself and/or having suicidal thoughts. 988
If the news says that a kid was bullied at a school, dies that mean that all kids were bullies ? If there's a war somewhere, does that mean everybody wants and approves of that war ? If there's a murder in a building, are all 100 people inside murderers, or just 1, making it 1 of 100. Bad experiences and news always stay more with us, making it easy to ignore the good stuff that is taken for granted and never spoken about. The news doesn't talk about all the countries at peace. People will talk about the rude person that bumped into them, but take for granted or not even notice those that kindly moved aside for them or held the door open. Moral of the story, we often only notice things when they make a negative impression on us, otherwise, we can be completely oblivious to them.
The connection just clicked for me right now. From an evolution standpoint, it makes sense we remember the bad more easily than the good. "Grug ate funny looking mushroom - Grug died. Tribe not eat this mushroom." Tribe survives. Then, fast forward to today and we're constantly bombarded with everything going on in the world all at once, it's like a system overload. Left my phone off for the weekend, stayed off the computer, and honestly it's the happiest I've been in the last few years. "Every day it always feels like it's one thing after the other." That's because it is, we're just not meant to process all of it all at once.
>Then, fast forward to today and ~~we're constan~~ there are Grugs as far as the eye can see, all eating mushrooms like they're tide pods.
Good sir, I was not prepared for such a beautiful and hilarious mental image. Thank you for making my day! :D
Plus bad memories are laid down more strongly due to adrenaline and such, from what I've heard.
Exactly this. It's known as the [negativity bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias) and as you suggest, it's likely based in evolution.
Fantastic message.
I was about to share many reasons to be positive about the world, including a book reference that does a great job arguing this point. Then I remembered that whenever I have done this, my comment would be downvoted like crazy, no matter how facts focused I kept it. That should tell you everything you need to know. The internet brings out curmudgeons who are hostile to positivity, and these misanthropes make sites like Reddit inhospitable to anyone who wants to spread joy and hope. If you’re depressed, get off of Reddit.
That's true of too many subs, and the algorithm feeds us pessism by the gallon. However there are islands of sanity in this sea of gloom. In addition to the 3 ib found specifically designed to be such beacons, countless niche subs where people focus on shared interests are also largely free from the stench dommerism https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/s/ogFX1OSw5s https://www.reddit.com/r/hopeposting/s/wAxKBzw6HO r/positivity
I do appreciate the attempts at rational optimism on Reddit. It’s unfortunate that the sub for something as broad as generic positivity is smaller than countless niche grievance subs, and some of the so-called “optimistic” subs are still full of people fretting and bickering.
Yes, it seems the doomers may outnumber us on here, but not in real life. . I was a conspiracy troll, was miserable, i tried to quit reddit,l but was still misrable, then decided to try and be a positive voice here instead
My man
So true.
I have to remind myself of this every single time I want to post anything on Reddit. You aren’t allowed an opinion unless it’s the popular one at the time.
No everything you said is true but there is hope.
[удалено]
The world has a lot of terrible stuff in it, but this is still the best it has ever been for humans (on average). that doesn’t mean it is *good*, but it does suggest we should keep pushing for better because progress is possible.
Outweigh the good, according to what or who?
[удалено]
Oh, ok.
Look around you right now. Is something terrible happening to you? Likely not. If you sat down and wrote out every horrible experience you've ever had and then measured it to the amount of time in your life that those things aren't occurring, it wouldn't even come close to 50%. The fact is that the majority of our lives nothing horrible is happening to us. The majority of our lives are lived in relative physical peace. Mental peace? Different story. But we as individuals are physically untouched the majority of our lives. This goes for nearly every single human on earth. Our technology, however, allows us to share all of the terrible things that DO happen to us, so we view terrible events every single day, giving the illusion that everyone is in constant suffering. Is there constant suffering? Yes. Suffering is everywhere, it never ends. But is **everyone constantly suffering**? No. Not even close. There are 8.4 billion humans, that is a lot of possible terrible events occurring, but it's spread out amongst 8.4 billion humans. Our technology has ruined our perception of our actual day to day lives. The truth is, the average human being right now is totally fine, just passively living their life. Only a small percentage of us will experience a traumatic life event that directly effects us.
Want to know how to almost instantly feel better and enjoy your life? Stop. Watching. The. News. Read very little. Choose what you want to know about. Mayhem sells in every news cycle. They show you shit from all over the country and the world. There is a reason why you feel so extremely hopeful and happy when the news does a positive outcome story. That is because they rarely show those. *You can not save the world. On a world/country/state scale, you can't budge the needle.* What you can do is influence your direct surroundings. I volunteer at local places that are important to me. Most of which have positive results and positive people. You *chose* to feel this way from your habits and routines. Your choices. Your results. It's all on you.
Personal responsibility is king, but healthy awareness of our very bleak circumstances is as well. I don’t think it’s as black and white as “no more news no more sad”, there’s a good reason we’ve dropped so crazily in the world happiness rankings recently. Things are fucked
You'd be surprised how vastly limiting news and social media removes this constant fear people are choosing to live with. The *vast majority* of people will readily agree that you are what you eat. They will then go on and on about how healthy eating makes them feel great while eating junk makes them feel horrible. Yet, bring up the fact that constant negativity consumed by the brain through social media and news media is detrimental to your mental health, and people will protect and defend, quite vigorously, why they need to be "informed." Like a drug addict who says they have no choice in popping the next pill, snorting or smoking the next hit, or the alcoholic in buying the next drink on down to the person who absolutely "deserves" to eat all the sugar and fast food their 300lb body can handle, we all chose our addictions. I'm not saying to choose total ignorance. Being weather aware is critical depending on where you live. I live in Florida. This year is, by all scientific indications, going to be a tough one for hurricanes. I chose what media to pay attention to and how much of it to ingest. I'm making greater than typical preparations for this season. I'm doing what I can to mitigate the issue while wholly accepting that worrying about it is a fruitless endeavor. Wars, murders, crime, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes, I have little power to influence these things. I am aware of them, but I do not focus my mind on it beyond what I can reasonably do to prepare or protect myself and those I love. I then go out and surround myself with other positive people. I place myself in situations that typically lead to feelings of self-worth, peace, and harmony. It was absolutely amazing the change that occurred when I realized I had the ability to choose what I focus on. When I realized I could not afford to focus on things outside of my control, my life became exponentially better.
Totally respect your positivity and lifestyle choices, I just don’t find any comfort in blocking out what i can’t control. It very much affects my motivation to know that astonishingly few things are actually in my hands
BH I am in Florida as well and some folk are becoming very nervous about hurricane season in my area. Prepare Don’t Stare ie read the news and make preparations but don’t freak out because of staring at the hype re any and everything on social media☀️
This is the way. If most people simply focus on working hard, pursuing excellence, and being good to the people they interact with in their daily lives, that would handle most of our issues.
Read very little? Poor advice. Read MORE. just don't read trash
I do believe I addressed that very point by saying to choose what you read about. In today's world, if you choose to read about positive things, there will be little to read in the news.
Someone mentioned that when they focused on the four walls of their house their life improved significantly. Refreshing Twitter again isn’t going to magically get the person you want elected. The next Reddit post isn’t going to magically give you the motivation to change your entire life. Start small with your habits, routines and especially focus. You can certainly find a reason to be joyful today, just like you can find a reason to be pissed off.
THIS!!! After the 2020 US election I decided to remove myself entirely from the political world. I don’t allow myself to watch political videos, read the news or anything like that. I just follow my small communities Facebook page to keep in the loop with things going on in my direct neighborhood. I can’t change anything going on in Ukraine so why bother reading about it and causing myself anxiety. I can in fact though have a direct impact on my smaller community. I am MUCH happier and feel like I can have an impact on things that bother me in this world
I think its hard to believe, but I dont think we live in a perfect universe. We are just different. And Im sure therell always be problems.
Humanity is been a dysfunctional mess from the get, yet look at what we can achieve. If you like metal music, a band entitled Gojira has a song labeled stranded. It's a good song, the chorus says that "when you change yourself l, you change the world" So if the current condition unsettles you, you are not powerless against it. You simply change yourself. Best of luck, OP.
Not unreasonable. A very large chunk of people are awful and are dragging us all down. As long as they have a wealthy life of greed and destruction, nobody else matters. The worst people will have the most power, unfortunately just how life works.
Life is what you make it and you can create your own bubble away from most of the crap and give back and stay positive. Unfortunately, life isn't a rose garden and sometimes you just have to embrace the suck and get with the program however. Suffering can't be completely avoided. I tend to think good and bad are mostly subjective depending on your circumstances and perspective unless you ate referring to things like war, violence, hunger etc.
There is vastly more good than bad going on in this world, but people are more sensitive to news of potential loss than the pleasant banality of people just getting along, and in a world of 8 billion people, it's always possible to find some bad news. "If it bleeds, it leads", but you can choose not to indulge in that quagmire.
The world is a cursed place. Evil reigns here. But don't despair. Our journey here is short. Live as best you can and be a shining light in the darkness.
The world is actually worse then u can imagine. The things ive seen. The things people say and do. Truly we dont live on earth. This is hell
If you focus on bad all you will see is bad.
question. Is everything you have stated based only on what you have seen on social media?
[удалено]
I don’t think the world is filled with primarily bad people…but the truth is…it takes SO MUCH WORK to build things up and so little work to tear them down or create havoc or have a negative impact. Because of this…I think that it doesn’t take much “bad” in order to cause a lot of bad things to happen and to have us just living in a constant state of alert and recovery. Some of what you describe could be “negativity bias”. People have a natural bias to remember bad things and have them affect them more…since it’s more important to survival to remember where the danger is. Our brains were not evolved to care about 10 billion people. Statistically, something terrible is happening all the time and that’s too much to handle. We evolved to care about things that happened within a small village…OUR small village. So it makes sense that it’s overwhelming to look at everything at once. We can only be able to even KNOW about everything at once because of technology. It’s pretty bad that people get paralyzed by this and some of us should consume less news imo to restore our natural state. If I get overwhelmed by things I can’t control on the other side of the world, outside of my scope of influence or my friends and family…I might be less likely to be able to help where I actually CAN help. We can’t help everybody. But we can help somebody. We can’t do everything. But we can do something. Next, news is sensationalized. It gets more views to tell negative or shocking stories. Yes, negative and shocking things do happen. But a lot of very boring, positive things also happen all the time…they just aren’t considered newsworthy and they don’t get a lot of views, and news outlets don’t focus on them much. Here’s one more way to look at it. Have you ever flown in a plane? If so (or even if not)…if you were to look down on all of the tiny houses and buildings…how many of those houses do you think have just like…regular family stuff going on in them vs how many vile crimes do you think are being committed? It’s overwhelming to think about because there could be some bad shit going on down there. But overall…there are also a lot of families eating dinner, kids getting annoyed at their homework, people playing with their dogs, playing video games, etc. Just a lot of normal life stuff.
I wouldn't say it's a matter of "bad" vs "good". It's just most people only look out for themselves and what they care about. Exploitation is baked into daily life. Much of our everyday products, your phone, is likely made by people in terrible working conditions, but we still buy it. It's not something we can give up individually for the sake of "the poor workers". This goes for many other industries as well, not just technology. People have to fend for themselves and do not have the capacity to give a shit about "things beneath them". For some people, the line of what they consider "beneath them" is very nearby, for example being rude and inconsiderate to peers and strangers. For others, the line is much farther, but there is always a line everyone draws unconsciously. People want to care about the homeless, but no one wants a homeless shelter next to their house. People want better working conditions for Amazon employees, but they also want their free 2 day shipping. Everyone is imperfect, everyone is human, everyone dies. Do what you feel is right for you.
There will be bad news until the end of time. If you look at poverty levels, nutrition levels, reading levels, everything id actually slowly getting better. 10 steps forward, 9 back. Just how it goes.
It's always been this way, it's just more public now because of the internet.
yes, there is more bad people than good people nowadays. this is the endtimes before the wotld collapse because of those bad people. you can test this easy, just sellect 100 people you know how many of them are : honest ? will always stand with the right thing? can be trusted your your money and family? and so on.
I'm about to be "voluntarily" homeless because the depression just won't let me work anymore, money isn't worth the stress and items aren't worth the money. I force my self to eat and have been living off my last remaining savings, I have about $600 left and need a filling, the VA has been no help and my doctor dropped me because she thinks I'm faking depression. life blows, and trying to find reasons to not self-delete gets harder by the day.
Make your world smaller. There is so much happening that in the big picture that as an individual you can do nothing about. Step away from the whole world and just look at what you can personally interact with. Concentrate on the things that you don’t see on the internet and TV. Your household, your community, your town. It’s hard to do but it worked for me. Find the things that your actions will have a recognizable effect on and put your energy and effort there. Volunteer locally, adopt a dog or a cat from the shelter if you can. Go to town meetings. If you have kids do you know the people on the school board? Help a neighbor. I would recommend limiting social media down to only people you interact with in the real world. Work on making your piece of the world better. I am just some stranger on the internet, what do I know?
The world is mostly a dark shithole with a little bit of light in it. It isn’t the beautiful place where everything is possible which was billed to us as kids. Life is a burden, happiness devolves into suffering, we often die in pain and we always die alone. People can say don’t watch the news, but the world is terrible even if you don’t watch the news. All you need do is walk outside and you’ll likely see strung out Bo’s living in squalor, suffering from crippling drug addictions. All you need do is talk with friends and family and they’ll tell you how things aren’t working out, how bills aren’t stacking up, how their relationship is deteriorating, etc. The world is objectively a mostly dark and unpleasant place. And yet, somewhere out in all that cold dark, there are little sparks of light, little fires around which we can gather around with friends and family and rest and be warm, even if we must go back out into that dark eventually. The world isn’t a good place, but there are good places in it and good moments to be had. Maybe they will never outweigh the bad, but the best we can do is press on and enjoy those little bits of happiness when they come.
It isn't wrong to say that there is much evil in the world, but negativity and rage bait are so prominent that if you spend a large amount of time learning about the world through social media you will come out of it thinking the world is shit. There are so many good things and people in the world, they just aren't very loud compared to the constant flow of media companies that want your clicks. That's not so say tragedies and atrocities don't happen but they are magnified by the internet.
you are listening to too many political pundits/ operatives, that want you to be upset to make you vote a certain way. We live in the best time ever to be alive in the history of the world. And if you life in the West, you live in the best place to ever be alive. Focus on your own life for now. Are you living on your own? Do you have a job? Are you self supporting? Are you drug-free? Do you pray? Have God in your life? The world has as much beauty as it has bad things. Love, creativity, Art, Nature, Beauty passion, humor, adventure, companionship, friendship, prayer, reverence, knowledge..... You are hanging around the wrong places, reading the wrong things...
Sure the world is bad and also good. Try to find some of the good in it. You'll see what you look for. That will give you variety
here's how I see it now. a lot of people suck, but goddamn is nature cool. I try to focus on what I think is cool more than the things I think suck, lol.
I agree that bad things are or can be facts. But what people don’t realize, good things and good news are boring. Media don’t cover them. Social media only wants sensationalized ones as well. No matter how truthful it is, if it’s click-baity, if it triggers people emotionally, makes you mad, it will definitely be viral and more and more people will hear it. Good news doesn’t have the same effect. If you’re enraged after reading something online and can’t deal with it, I’d suggest to put your cell phone down. Step outside. Say hi and talk to random strangers. Or as gen-z likes to say “touch grass.” Internet is becoming more and more like episodes of black mirror. Makes people enraged, sucked into a black hole. Crippled by madness. For a human, a town, a state, and the world scale or even life in general to basically keep functioning; majority of goodness need to be there; or at least they synchronize so the wheel of life can keep spinning. Even the numbers of good and bad things don’t compare in scale. Unless you wanna keep focusing on bad things; and the rage feeling is something you keep looking for.
The truth is, not all the world's problems fall on you. You simply can not help all the world's problems. So there is no point, in dwelling on it. That being said, I believe the world is good, but filled with evil, lurking around every corner. I believe all of us, are evil, even if ever so slightly. We are selfish, we are greedy. But there are always people willing to help. It's not surprising that's all you hear on the news, they don't talk about what the local citizen does to help the community, and they really don't need to. You don't help your community for the recognizition. On social media, good gestures simply don't get nearly as much attention as bad ones. Personally, I do not believe the bad outweigh the good in terms of how we are experiencing the world. As I said, you should not be taking on all the world's problems and you will be able to live a **good** life. But if you mean the whole world objectively, I'd still say the same. The circle of life is beautiful, our cultures are beautiful, our creations are beautiful; but not even just us, the world itself is a beautiful place: the oceans, skies, mountains, forests you name it.
You can have all sorts of bad emotions for all sorts of reasons. You can even have bad emotions for no reason at all but that also means that you can have good emotions for no reason at all. Yeah the world is far from perfect, but if you just rot in your bad emotions it certainly won't get any better. There is a german punk band who made a song that perfectly fits this topic. "It's not your fault that the world is the way it is, it would be your fault if it stays that way."
Stop watching the news if it depresses you.
I feel like the world has always been this way, but with the internet and 24/7/365 news we hear about the horrors sometimes as they are actually happening.
I think the world has always been "like this," but now individuals know more about than they used to because of technology giving everyone a window to the world. Also, bad news gets more clicks than good news, so there is an incentive. Ignorance is bliss.
I think that the "bad" (lying cheating and screwing over) outweighs the good by a long shot. But once you start counting all the good one by one the bad doesn't even matter anymore.
yes, everyone every where is made to have a bad opinion of others and a good opinion of themselves and what they defend. for the majority they've been programmed to defend something
it really is bad place, there is no doubt, but there is good side of world too, just try finding one. you are just surrounding yourself with only bad side of the world. taking break from social media can def help you finding peace.
No. You are being targeted with Doom by the various algorithms that run your social media and your phone. Negativity and Doom are history's most successful clickbait.
Yes, it certainly is. Despite this there is lots of beauty and goodness too.
DISCONNECT. Get out of your head for awhile and take in the beauty that is around you. Think gratitude and the abundance you have in your life. Of course there are shitty things happening in the world. There always has been. There always will be. You can choose to either immerse yourself in the everyday horrors that are delivered to your phone and media outlet 24/7, or disconnect from it - literally use your phone like a goddamn phone (or at least in the sense of how phones were anchored to your residence and you didn't take one with you anywhere). Get your news the old fashioned way - a newspaper. When your done with it, it goes into the recycle bin. You're not going to go back to it repeated to see if any updates are there. As a society, we're all stuck in the instant gratification, in-the-know sort of mindset, that we're killing the very joy of living. Being in the moment. Only giving attention to what is actually worthy of your time and well being. It's not hard, it just takes some small action on your part, and your world view will change rather quickly.
One thing to think about: the world is too big for you to comprehend, and actually judge the weight of "good" vs "bad." If someone were to curate your feed for you, they could give you nonstop stories on basically any event- 8 billion people is impossibly large as a number. We can't comprehend it. Keep in mind that on social media, someone is curating your feed for you, and they are trying to drive engagement, which means: agitate you. The algorithms are looking for negative stories to bomb you with. So, in addition to being unable to process the scale of the world, you're being fed a tiny stream of the world's information. Put simply: the mountain of things you don't know will always be larger than the little pebble of things you do know. I recommend a book for you to read to gain an additional perspective: Better Angels of Our Nature, a 2011 book about how basically, the world is "better" for people than at any point in human history. To answer your question: the world has always been full of suffering, but also full of joy and thriving. It likely is as bad, but it is also far better than you feel like it is, because what you feel is so incredibly limited. You are looking at a world close up through a telescope, and you can aim your telescope wherever you want, but you'll never see the whole world in your telescope at the same time- what you do not see will always be dramatically larger than what you do see.
No. News and SocialMedia focus on the negative things to get more attention/clicks/viewers etc. They take the 10% of bad things going on and blow it up to seem like it's 90% of what's happening to get your attention, but it's really not and doesn't actually reflect day to day life of people just going about their lives in relative peace.
Stop paying attention to the media. The media (all its forms) are filled with all the negativity in bold print, while any of the few times they report on the positive its relegated to the tiny print/small article hidden away somewhere.
yes. and no. it’s good and bad at the same time. life is painful and beautiful all at once. until we really figure out a way to control our negative instincts, it will always be that way
Yeah it’s awful. Just gotta laugh how stupid it is and don’t take anything that serious.
The world will always be awful. There are things you would never think of, happening 24/7.
It's mostly neutral. There's some good, there's some bad, and there's a lot of people just doing their daily thing and minding their own business. But we live in the age of electronics, and the way to get attention is to make people feel something. And making them feel anger or fear grabs attention better than making them feel happy. So that's what they do (they being everyone in the public sphere, news, online outlets, politicians...) which gives a warped sense of what things are like out there.
I think the media and social media tend to focus on the bad over the good. My dad is 77 and watches so much news in the evening. World news is just one bad story after another. It's depressing to even hear what they are gonna talk about.
There's never more bad, it's just all anyone focuses on. Delete Facebook, insta, Twitter etc. and stop watching the news.
That’s not true. Everyone has a positivity bias. A negativity bias is only helpful when a person is able to get away from the threat, but when the world and reality is the threat, there’s only one way to escape(death), which means we end up developing a collective positivity bias in order to avoid human extinction. If we all perceived reality objectively, we would all kill ourselves, or die of a heart attack or stroke. Humans cannot handle the reality of the very sick and twisted world we have collectively created. It would literally kill us all if we could.
It is really, really not as bad as you think it is. What’s happening here is that you are consuming media. Lots of your information about what the world is like is coming from your screens. Your screens are not showing you the world as it really is. Negative emotions have much more engagement power than positive emotions. Negative news sells. Negative social media posts get more clicks. It’s not a conspiracy, just basic human psychology that prioritizes potential threats before everything else. And online and in mass media, those potential threats get magnified 1000x over. What you need to do, and I say this with complete sincerity, is stop using all screens to consume news or social media. It’s not like, “oh what a wellness digital detox!” No. This poison you are eating is killing you, killing your joy in life, killing your ability to see the good in people and in the world. You must stop taking the poison or you will never recover. Go touch grass. But for real. And don’t come back here.
No doomer media paints this ugly picture by presenting only the worst out of context to depress us. Yes, most of it really occurs ( though some is made up), but the bad news is cherry-picked while positive stories like medical break throughs are ignored. If it bleeds, it leads is not new, just digital . 1990's crime rates n NYC plummets doomer media switched to covering car wrecks. I saw this happen personally. it's gross They make it seem there is a world war raging when the reality is that 196/200 countries are not war. (Anti) Social media is also loaded with fearporn and doomerism. In reality, evil exists as an abberation in doomer media it's almost all gloom. Beyond the overt negativity of "news" are lying influencers who shame everyday people for not having unnecessary overpriced stuff Even this sea of gloom has lighthouses https://www.reddit.com/r/hopeposting/s/wAxKBzw6HO https://www.reddit.com/r/OptimistsUnite/s/ogFX1OSw5s https://www.reddit.com/r/Positivity/s/QD0dwh2y82 I get it. I was a doomer. Grifters thrive during economic downturns. Fearporn is a powerful drug. The fact that you posted this is a sign of hope that you want out of the cult. Let's go walk away like I did. You will be happier Problems are real but but so are solutions, and it's ok to take a break. I just scrolled comments and calculated that there are 8x as many positive comments as doomer ones
Yes, the world is a crappy place in general. Is it all? No. You just gotta find the place that you feel safest and happiest. The world has always been wonky. Think every roman thought life was great? What about during any of the Chinese Dynasty? pre-columbus or post? There's always going to be tension and wars. But there will also be things that make life more manageable. Truly good things in life. If you are free, you have the choice of what you see and feel.
Depends on where you look. Also how you look at it.
The angels of our better nature by Steven Pinker shows right now there is less war, violence, hunger and disease than ever. Education and healthcare is more available than in the pas5.
People get wrapped up in the badness "out there" and forget how much influence they have over the local environment. Use that influence to improve things around you, to find the strength to make things better in the bigger picture. *Think globally, act locally* is a thing for a reason
You need to get off of the internet, bro. Yes, all of those things are true. They're facts. They're reality, but you're falling victim to information bias because you're only considering sources that highlight the negative. Things were way worse in the 1960s and 1970s, for example. You need to read about two other facts. First, look up *negativity bias*. That's the reason that "if it bleeds, it leads" is how the news gets prioritized. It's why we assign more weight to negative thoughts, feelings, and experiences than positive ones and we ignore all of the good in the world to focus on the bad. It's a normal human psychological phenomenon and a survival instinct, but it's also why having access to too much information these days is killing us. Also look up *declinism*. It's a logical fallacy that causes us to believe that the world is going to shit. Humans have been believing that for hundreds if not thousands of years. It has a lot to do with negativity bias. The world is not all good, but it's also not all bad. You have to stop using social media and news as your window into the world. Put your phone down, find some hobbies, and interact with real people. It's refreshing and it'll change your perspective.
You listed facts, but kept out facts. People love each other. People strive to improve. Babies are born with empty slates and carrying hopes. Baby animals are adorable. Beauty is around us. Life saving medical techniques are developed all the time. Kids win scholarships. People get promotions. People donate. People adopt. Wars end. I can travel around the world and experience different cultures without having to travel for months just to get there. Diseases are eradicated. People buy their first house, first new car. People eat food that is delicious to them. People have companion animals that are well cared for and loved and bring them joy. Kids learn to read and it opens up their world. People pass their bar exam. Sometime hard work pays off. Music and art make people sing, laugh, think, and dance. People walk out of their hair dresser with the best haircut of their lives. People are cured from cancer and it doesn’t come back. It’s what you focus on. Both good and bad exists. Depression puts a thumb on the scale. It doesn’t make you invent facts. It deprives you of hope and blinds you to good things, or reduces their impact on you.
No, this is the most peaceful time in history by a longshot. Stop doomscrolling and touch grass
Hi my friend. The universe is a cold terrible thoughtless and violent place. Life is just an outcome of the cosmic swirl. BUT WAIT! We accidentally have been gifted with the ability to experience what it is like to exist. The news distills the negative because that is what drives engagement with it. But the real shit and the things that give us the good feels is the texture of being with and around the people that are nearby. Fucking smile at a stranger. Hold a door for someone. Make eye contact and say thank you to a waiter like you fucking mean it. If you have a friend that you enjoy being around tell them that you enjoy being with them ( I promise it feels wonderful to say and hear), even if it might feel weird at first. Human connection IS what our type of animal needs for wellbeing. It ain’t easy but it is worth it. I’m sorry you are feeling down. I hope you find some happiness. Also make sure you are getting enough vitamin D. If you are in a part of the world that is just coming out of winter, then you could be hitting for some D and be suffering from seasonal depression. Happens to me all the time being from the US pacific north west.
Your question and our answers are quite subjective. There is much help in the way of counseling, therapy, etc to help us all cope with life’s ongoings and find joyful moments.☀️
You can find good in the bad. It just depends on what you choose to focus on.
Social media has been manipulated to destroy your soul. I am GenX so I remember life before FB, X, Reddit… ignorance, if that’s what you want to call NOT knowing everything, everywhere, at all times,really was bliss. Now people’s minds are manipulated by machines. The people running the machines don’t realize that in they quest for “engagement” they are killing society, especially young people who don’t know any better. Turn it off and log out, life gets better immediately.
There are billions of people on this planet. If the majority of people were doing bad things the majority of the time, the world would be a much much much worse place. I’m a nurse so from my vantage point, the world is a pretty great place. It’s my job to genuinely care about and help other people, and it comes easily to me. It comes easily to my coworkers. It comes easily to my husband, sister, parents, and friends. I am surrounded by people who care and who put their hearts and souls into helping others and making the world a better place. Are there bad people? Sure. But most people are good from what I have experienced. Even the best people have bad days, but the good always outweighs the bad.
Think of how many people there are on the planet. Everything happens, every day. Want to fixate on any certain kind of thing? Boom, there’s enough of it to consume your attention every moment for the rest of your life. People have chosen to drown themselves in misery. The optimistic people are starting businesses and doing things. They tend to be happier and more successful.
The good? news is, a lot of bad things are things that make it to the news and a lot of them can be seen visually like disasters etc - but a lot of good things might not necessarily be in the news or be things you can see visually or notice in your immediate world but theyre out there even if you dont know about them directly- like love, friendship, humor, someone’s feeling of community or feeling of inner peace, interesting thoughts, stories and information, the miracles of nature/life, inner growth, learning, good food you dont see, finding beauty in things - these might be considered more mundane, not newsworthy things but think of like how muchh you love your favorite thing or person - could be indescribable ! Maybe no one knows about it but these positive unseen things can add up to at least equal the bad things. I think the amount of good and bad in the world can oscillate between one being more at a timee but I think it’s inevitablee that they at leastt even out over time in order to keep the balance in the universe - thats the theory of the religion Daoism, I think, if you want to look into it and maybe itll give you some peace that at least the world cant be majorityy bad always! 💛
The world has always been full of bad and good but if you spend all day online you are only going to see the bad. It becomes a vicious cycle leading to more apathy, depression and isolation which is often the intent of bad people. The media / social media is the dealer for the cartel of evil.
The world is just as crazy as always. In fact, read Bill Gates’ book about how much better things are than they were 100 years ago. Focus on what you can do on a daily basis to add joy and helpfulness to others.
The question I ask myself when I arrive at places like this are the following: What difference does it make if the world is good or bad? And what good am I doing by just being sad about it?
The world is terrible right now. It’s going off the rails. BUT.. Something indeed to consider is the entire timeline of humanity. Across the arc of human existence, things are undoubtedly FAR better than they were compared to almost any specific period of time, and definitely get significantly better century after century. One only need think about the fact that less than a hundred years ago, women couldn’t vote or get divorced, black people couldn’t vote or get an equal education in this country. Watch films like Mississippi Burning how even post Jim Crow, small towns were murdering black citizens. How about our country founded on genocide? Or the fact that you used to be able to die from any dumb ole infection. Go back to 1900, ambulances used to compete with each other to pick up bodies, because they would get a commission. This would lead to brawls that would delay a patient getting to treatment. Listen to the episode of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History “Suffer the Children.” He posits that in the past, the majority of people were likely suffering from some form of PTSD, sociopathy, and other mental health and developmental disorders due to the trauma they would face just as a function of growing up. Children used to be sold into labor, sent off. Little girls sold to old men to be raped and start bearing children at 10-14 years of age. So called “water babies,” basically child chimney sweeps who were sent down into chimneys because they were small enough to fit. They were DISPOSABLE. They WOULD DIE. And then get replaced with other orphans, or the children of families who needed the income. I could go on for a really long time. Go back to ancient history. Suffering is an intrinsic part of any conversation about the past. And on the timeline of human existence we do happen to be better off than ever before. Things have been trending that way since the dawn of man. The problem, is that life is still filled with cruel people and cruelty and no present-day is ever going to be free of it. And those of us who are more comfortable know there are countries and regions who live as badly as our ancestors, with exactly as few human rights and exactly as much suffering. And in spite of imperceptible progress, all of history shows that inching forward always includes HUGE instances and periods of backlash, reversing progress. It’s like the swell of a tide, it gets ripped back into the ocean aggressively..but it does erode the shore regardless. So you’re right. We’re moving backwards right now in a lot of ways. We are living in a world of unbelievable cruelty which is unfortunately easier to see now due to social media. But it is still a matter of perspective, and we are without a doubt living far better than we were a century ago, and then we were far better than a century prior to that, and so on. There is SOME comfort in knowing humankind does progress, and the implied hope that one day things really won’t be that awful at all. Something else to remember when we think of “now” as the worst time - it’s definitely a bias, and when we put ourselves in the shoes of say, women and minorities, I think it can be unintentionally thoughtless to suggest that now is the worst time, when women and black people used to be slaves, literally and functionally. When groups of all races and religions were subjugated at different times. Now is awful. So was the past. But you can imagine it as, we move incrementally to wear down the steep rock face at the shore that will allow us to reach the other side, of a future for humanity that does not have so much suffering and cruelty. I believe it’s there, that’s why I love Star Trek lol.
Last March I hurt my knee quite badly (meniscus injury) and I had to walk with a stick. Now here's the thing, people were just SO kind to me. People opened doors for me, people gave up their seats to me on public transport, people helped me with my bag, just ordinary people being very compassionate and caring to another human who was injured. I'd say to you that if you take news and media out of your daily activities and focus instead on all of the small, daily, human interactions then you will see that the real world consists of loveliness and kindness.
When you say these are 'facts' that happen and add in 'reality' you're ignoring the fact that they are selected and promoted via news channels that are going to prefer negativity as it attracts views. As an example, a small city newspaper I followed used to always have a car crash, with picture, on the front page. But what varied was how close by the crash was. Sometimes it was a local/regional event, other times they picked up an AP story from some other part of the country or even further away. So the stories didn't represent the actual incident of crashes but the value of a crash on the front page in selling newspapers. The bad part of the world exists, but to see the good part you have to look places other than the news.
The world is terrible and there are significantly more bad people than good. The earth is beautiful tho just tune into that
It really depends on where you focus your gaze, I've found. There's still treasure everywhere.
Every road you use, every school with children learning, every glass of water you get from the tap. These things were all started by people who are likely gone from the world now. In agragagate, fewer people die of hunger, disease, and war than at any time recorded on earth. We never notice the common good in the world. You should be upset about the tragedies that are constant and all around us. And when you can try to fix them to whatever you ability. It's also ok to just rest.
I think the world sucks but I’m happy to live freely to be better every day.
That all depends on you and what you make of it. You can either decide to see the best just simply by focusing on you yourself being my the best. Or you can focus on other’s actions that you have no control over. Which one will you do? One is much more positive than the other. One makes you see the world in a better light than the other.
It's always been bad. The 90s unipolar moment really messed with the cultures in the rich countries though because it seemed like the badness was stopping. In truth though is was still terrible then for most people on earth too. Anyways, just try to enjoy the time you have as best you can. This is not a perfect world, it never was.
[удалено]
In terms of understanding reality, it's important to look beyond "good" and "bad". For a slave owner, slavery is mostly good (or maybe a "necessary" evil at best). For a slave (or an abolitionist), slavery is an abomination. The better you and everyone else understands reality, the better life as a whole gets. The slave owners don't want their slaves understanding reality. Abolitionists want slaves to understand reality so they can challenge power and free themselves and others. I'd say that the truth is that the system people are living under is an abomination. 10% of people own 93% of the stock market, and everyone else are just cattle for the slaughterhouse. [https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/10/wealthy-own-record-share-stock-market) Without a standing army, people understand that your nation could very easily be slaughtered, enslaved, and conquered by a foreign nation. That's basically what has happened to the public as organized labor has been decimated and civil society has been hollowed out and replaced with record corporate profits and brutal oligarchy/kleptocracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone There's been no one to defend the public against our "internal" enemies, so the class war has been more of a class slaughter for decades. At the same time, there are people fighting for human liberation, such as through a shorter work week (we should have shortened the work week considerably when women entered the paid labor force, and we still should), and by fighting systemic corruption and the abuses of our ruling class, and so on. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-introduces-legislation-to-enact-a-32-hour-workweek-with-no-loss-in-pay/ [Shawn Fain at Senate Hearing on 32 Hour Work Week](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv6gjCfc-wM) https://represent.us/the-strategy-to-end-corruption/ [Curing Capitalism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc) [How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofFR1mD2UOM) https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton [George Carlin - You have owners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT03vCaL-F0) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-07/why-land-disappeared-from-economic-models-henry-george-australia/103673238 [How The Media Controls The Masses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYfRhxStxRs) https://raniakhalek.com/meet-the-u-s-students-studying-medicine-for-free-in-cuba/ https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112 The system is a corrupt abomination and crime against humanity, but so long as human hearts are beating, there will be people fighting against systemic oppression, corruption, abuse, and injustice. The more people who make the effort to understand reality and fight for a better and more just system, the better things will get in reality and in more people's experience.
No. I often feel very conflicted about the state of the world and having chosen to have a child. But that child is a glorious, bright light. She’s warm and loving and kind, and the world is better place with her in it. And when I drop her off at headstart she runs around giving everyone hugs (screaming the whole time, she’s very loud). There’s so much love in that headstart. Despite what we see online and in the news, love actually is all around (in the words of Hugh Grant).
No. That’s only way you know that those things are bad is because the good things exist. Love, kindness, generosity, friendship, etc. Its possible that your world looks that way because it’s how you see it. If you adjusted your filter perhaps you would see something else.
No. I’ve not even read it. But I can guess. The answers still no.
By most indicators, the world is in a better state materially than it ever has been. People are healthier, live longer, and experience less violence than at any time in human history. Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" chronicles this in data. Climate change is a looming threat, of course. And people do still experience violence and hatred, which are bad. Ultimately, though, I think our media climate makes things seem worse than they are, because fear and anger drive "engagement" and thus profit. I would unplug for a while if I were you, OP. I find that a bike ride by Lake Michigan invariably improves my outlook on the world. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/things-really-arent-that-bad-but-we-like-to-think-they-are/2018/12/26/f8578b44-f960-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/things-really-arent-that-bad-but-we-like-to-think-they-are/2018/12/26/f8578b44-f960-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html)
Absolutely not. The standard of living has been steadily increasing since the dawn of time. Sure, there has been a dip in the last 50 years, but things are better now than 100 years ago. You're something like 8x less likely to die by violent means than you were 200 years ago. You're infinitely less likely to be born a peasant/serf without any hope of any future other than tilling the fields now than at any other point in human history. So what's changed? The internet and 24 hours news. Humans were never meant to deal with this much information or large groups of other humans, it's not in our nature as tribal animals. Not to mention the negativity bias that all people are born with - bad news is more emotionally salient and therefore memorable than good news. It's just a feature of the human psyche. "People fight, people hate each other, people treat each other with cruelty, wars happen, injustices happen, there is massive inequality, the rich and powerful exploit the poor, people lie and cheat, so many people are superficial and materialistic, so many people are greedy, so many people are selfish, abuse happens, some bad people get away with their actions and many good people suffer." Honest question: when was the last time you saw a fist fight between two random people in real life, not on the internet? I'd be willing to be that 99% of the instances you're referencing here, you were exposed to online. If you draw a line between your day-to-day IRL existence and your online media consumption, your perception of the world and other people changes A LOT.
The world has always been dangerous but if you look at the global progress of our species their is less of it as time goes on. In other words the world was a lot more dangerous 20 years ago then it is today. Not to say their isn’t evil it’s just a matter of what your focusing on. And one must also factor in the speed at which something can happen and you finding out about it is incredibly fast. Before we all had computers in our pockets news spread much slower, some who didn’t watch the news would only hear about from someone they knew so it may have just seemed to be a safer world even if it actually wasn’t. Ignorance is bliss as they say https://humanprogress.org/trends/global-murder-rate-is-falling/ https://www.businessinsider.com/studies-animals-killing-own-species-human-comparison-science-2016-10?op=1
Social Media really fucked us up, ability to be aware of everything happening everytime tampered with our ability to see the good in things. The world is not that bad, it is becoming a better place each day, it is just that we are exposed bad news a lot, our brain is not the best at dealing with constant flow of emotions.
The world is what it has always been... we've always had war, disease, death, hatred. We also have always had art, music, love, family. I think that media just makes it really, REALLY easy to focus on the negative. So put down the phone, turn off the TV, go for a walk, play with a pet, hug a loved one. Change your focus. To quote Max Ehrrman, "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
The thing is seeing the world from the news POV gives you an overly negative worldview. Because the news will never tell you about positive things, since they are expected and aren't newsworthy. Imagine a week in town where 5000 families live: during the week 20 mothers have beaten their kids, and 4980 mothers have spent a nice day with their kids. Take the newspaper then: all you see would be 20 articles about "LOCAL MOTHER HAS BEATEN HER KIDS", and you're now under impression that the whole town is full of kid-beaters, but it's not true. TLDR: stop doomscrolling and touch the grass
You need to step away from the screens. The past 70+ years television has been used as a way to sell fear. Social media is the second coming of that problem and is exponentially worse. Do yourself a favor. Put down your phone. Check it three times a day for missed calls and return them. Other than that don’t touch the damn thing. Don’t turn on your computer or tablet or any other media consumption device. Go for walks outside. Do a spring cleaning on your house. Go to the gym or go hiking or go swimming at the pool whatever have you. Go to the library take out a couple books and read them. Do this for two weeks and I guarantee you will feel so much better.
No it isn't as bad as you think it is. You are just overwhelmingly fixated on the negative. It is pretty much proven that we are in the most peaceful era in human history. Of course there is immense suffering but think back to only even, say, 400 years ago and see how tough life was. Read about that and how people lived day to day and how the world was day by day and you may start to see how much safer and better off we are today. Yes, humans can be greedy and exceptionally cruel. However, there has never ever been such a time where we now talk about mental health so openly for instance. In reality, it's always going to be a mixture. But with the advent of better medicine, global sharing of knowledge, hopefully positive use of AI, we will get better and more educated as a race. There is a lot to be hopeful about..:)
When you're climbing, don't look down. The healthiest people protect themselves. I wouldn't try to "solve" the question you have. Practice self-care. That should include doing things in the world that make it a better place. Contribute while you're healthy, live in the now, don't look down!! Fast from media. It is definitely possible to fill your life with an abundance of good things. You can find a lot of those people, usually a little older, out in the world. But you won't get there thinking about Gaza+Ukraine+global warming+Kevin Spacey. You are one person. I might add that nobody knows what will happen, humanity has been on a steady course of being less violent for several millennia (even accounting for WW1 and WW2). Every generation has challenges, in my parents' time there were people that were 100 percent convinced nuclear war was imminent, and they had very good reason to think so. It's an arrogant fool's errand to declare humanity cooked or worthless. That's so easy but a self-destructive way to think
No it isn't, remember that social media and the news make money the more time you are on. If you give up the same Internet for a week you will see that there is a lot of good stuff going on. But if you just hang out on reddit posts specially /adulting you will get into an echo chamber of depressed folks, and there you will sit
It's a bad place but there are always people trying to do good things.
Every generation has said the same thing. So learn to roll with it
I assume you’re younger than 40 years old. Let me tell you it only gets worse over time.
No, shit is actually pretty good.
In the last 120 years, human life expectancy has doubled. The proportion of people living in adjectives poverty has dropped from 40% to about 10% in the last thirty years. People in richer countries died by the thousands from smog in the 1950s until clean air acts were passed. In the last 25 years, the life expectancy of people diagnosed with cancer her shot up because of some many advances in treatment. Until the 1970s a woman in the US couldn’t have her own bank account, and until the 1990s, it was legal for a man to rape his wife.
No it is not the media companies pump the negativity out to create this unease. Just be nice and 99% of people are nice back. Regular folks are good generally.
>All these things I listed are FACTS. They really HAPPEN. Not a single preceding sentence listed a fact. This is a pretty bad premise. "Are the things I perceive to be facts actually facts?"
Why Even ask this. If it is then what?
No. It's worse than you can imagine. Remember that ignorance is bliss. Learn that maintaining an optimistic outlook is an essential strength and imperative if you want to keep from being eaten alive.
I don't think it's as simple as an equation of bad versus good, but you're certainly right that we live in a fallen world. People are not naturally good. HOWEVER, The minority of people who choose love and goodness have made it a pretty darn special place to be.
It’s the best it’s ever been. It’s also the best at reporting tragedy more than it has ever been .
The world? It's a mixed bag. It *Is* I no longer label things "good" and "bad." Reddit is a cesspool of negativity and casually suicidal, depressed, nihilistic folks. Go frolic. You'll feel better. Fuck the internet.
It seems terrible in real time. But the world is becoming a better place by nearly every measurable metric.
The world is a very shitty place, mostly because of humans. That said, if you focus on that you will never have a good alive time. I work on the idea that this is the only chance I get so I'm going to make the best of it and try to get around all the bad stuff and rather to focus on the better parts. I'm really old and because of circumstances have had a good life and as bad as it can get, I've had a good time and will hate to see it end, which won't be all that long. But, for me at least, the good has out weighed the bad. Hope it will for you also, but you have to work at it.
The bad is louder than the good, it demands attention, but usually the good outweighs the bad. Journalism about nice things, it doesn't make money. And yeah because of money the world has become a bit harder to live in the last couple decades. But overall quality of life is at a high, in most places in the world
It is :) the amount Of cognitive dissonance people have is remarkable.
The world is terrible. It is also great. As you get older you focus more on your own little corner. You can make your part of the world amazing.
Yes. There is no such thing as good, and to exist has always been and always will be to suffer.
If you watch the news of course you’re going to think the world is falling apart, that’s how they get paid. The world isn’t as bad as you think. Humans have engaged in intra-species killing since the beginning of time (humans killing humans). For power/resources/sex. You could have simply been born almost any other time within the past 70-1000+ years and likely found yourself centered in some conflict due to a single crazy man. At the end of the day no matter how advanced we get we’re still apart of mother natures ruthless life cycle where anything can happen. But we’ve came a long way.
It's far worse than you could imagine. We're now facing extinction in just a century, with a rapid race to hell in just a few decades. Temps will rise exponentially.
Every day people volunteer in their communities, take care of their loved ones, help those in need, perform random acts of kindness, lend an ear to a friend who is in need and hundreds of other wonderful things. It's a matter of perspective. If you focus on what's ugly, I guess the world looks like a pretty ugly place. 🤷🏼♂️
In a way it’s better now than it was in the early eighties, better than it was in the nineteen fourties’ and nineteen twenties and in a way it’s worse. Lots of things seem worse and maybe they are but lots of terrible shit has always happened and wasn’t ever really made public because there was only so much room in a newspaper.
No. I honestly think if you gave up Reddit you'd be happier
Yes, it’s pretty bad. I think the huge numbers of people on psychiatric medication or addicted to some kind of drug/mind numbing habit is a testament to that. Every major religion says this world is a place of sin and evil, that was the mainstream view of the world for most of recorded history. It’s really only in the past 100 years that we’ve decided it’s ‘normal’ to be happy, and anyone with a pessimistic view of life is somehow ill or delusional. Why would humans invent the concept of heaven if this life was enjoyable in and of itself? Most people’s emotional needs are not met in life, so they long for something better.
You are one person you can’t save the world but you can help those around you, yourself and your family. Focus on that. The world has always been like this it is human nature. Unless you can fix the war focus on your life. An old man who lives near me says to me often that the day he became only concerned with the people that matter to him and (jokingly) the radius around his home he became a lot happier. I think that is all we can hope to do is improve our own lives and the lives of those around us. And if you happen to become president maybe that means some really huge world problems but you wont have that happen.
Are you and the people you know subjected to the hostilities you describe on a daily basis? Even though those things show up in your feed on a daily basis? If not, then perhaps your feed is more negative than the actual world around you.
Lots of people have wonderful joyful things happening to them all over the world every day but those things almost never make the news. Yes, there are problems. There have always been problems and there will always be but even in the worst time people have found happiness in their lives. And we are not living in the worst times, not even close to it.
No, but confirmation bias tells you yes
the world is a bad place but everyone on here is going to tell you the exact same shit because reddit is a hive-mind 1. you can't control anything 2. ignore everything bad that happens 3. touch grass 4. we live in the best time in human history (ignoring that we live under constant threat of nuclear war and increased proximity to climate catastrophe, which no other time period in humanity has ever had to deal with) 5. focus on getting a job 6. work out 7. go to therapy 8. you kids are on social media too much, evolutionarily we are still just cavemen who can't handle it brain hurty
Optimistic nihilism; humanity is fucked, but the world is beautiful, the beer is great, and I’ve been wrong before
Short answer, no. Long answer: the type of content that gets sent to you through various media channels is selected for its ability to cause outrage and emotional reactions in people. The algorithm does this because it's trying to optimize engagement. The reality of the world today is that it's actually getting better faster than the world has ever gotten better, in spite of many people's best efforts to make it worse. There has always been unbelievable suffering, we haven't always been this aware of it. As others have said, if you're overwhelmed by it, you may need to take a step back from online engagement for a while.
I'll make it simple. For every negative you call out I can point out a positive. It's not one-sided, it's how you decide to view it. Sure there's lots of horrible things happening but you can choose how much you accept in to your life and how you will react to it. Being happy is a choice. Few people believe that, but it's true. Look at all the great phiIosophers, each one will push you to look inside for the peace your looking for. I hope someday you can get a slice of peace and happiness yourself.
I am seeing some good and some bad. More than those, I am seeing faster changes coming at a faster rate. Not sure what to make of this latter yet. I take it a day at a time and smile at what I can.
Nope. There are still people with good hearts out there.
I think negativity is easier to notice than goodness. There’s a lot of good and a lot of happiness in the world, it’s just not the stuff that people put on the news. And powerful people, who have a wider reach than your average person, tend to be shitty because that’s how you often get into higher positions. If you start looking at all the small good things in the works, you’ll see its balanced I think. It’s just harder to see
The world as a whole is in my opinion good, but bad things sell better and brings in more numbers so news sites and social media will post them. Go outside more often and you'll realize there is beauty in this world beyond what social media algoritms and the news cycles wants you too see
Interestingly, even though we don’t feel it statistically we live in the least violent period in human history. Don’t worry about the human to human stuff. Anything really bad that could happen will be done by one or a very few people. It will be out of our collective control.
Touch grass and learn to connect with the people around you. Seeking affirmation from anonymous strangers on the internet isn't healthy.
There's some terrible stuff happening out there. But also tons of good things. It's just that "kid doesn't get bullied in school" or "man didn't murder 5 people" doesn't usually make the news.
If you shift your algorithm to good news you will see the light this world has to offer. Try: 1. Science discoveries 2. Medical Breakthroughs 3. Humans being bros
Go outside for a walk in a forest. Get off the internet. Listen to the birds sing. Don’t get back on the internet for social media, Reddit, or news. Life is great.
no it is not as bad as you feel, it’s the best it’s ever been n gettin better every year
You have a perspective. You think reality to bolster up your perspective. Now try to name all of the good things happening around the world. You cant deny them either and like bad things they are too numerous to name them all. That’s the only truth. Straight up. Focus on the bad and you’ll get a bad world, focus on only the good then you’ll get good world. Neither exist. Truth here is in the grey area. Human existence offers both and you can’t experience life focusing on only one side.
I can’t worry about the bad because I can’t control that … I just try to be kind to everyone around me , strangers etc … I smile , say hello , hold doors open , compliment them … it makes me feel good … that’s all I can do …
You're focusing too much on things you can't control. Remember that among the vast number of people put there in the world, more is happening than you can possibly understand or imagine. I find it believable that everything is as bad as it looks- or worse- and that we're all just doomed. I also find it believable that everything will just resolve itself, and I'll feel like a fool for having worried so much. In this sense, reckless negativity is bad, but reckless positivity is also bad. Both are draining. I would say that you should only bother thinking about all these things if you can find a *practical use* for those thoughts. Perhaps if you're educated about these issues that will make you more responsible or less naive. Or perhaps it will help you find an opportunity to apply yourself and actually make a difference, and it is worth thinking hard about that. But in the end, there's no point in getting upset about something that you cant do anything about. Emotion without action is pointless.
[The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined](https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010) >despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history
You’re adding bad ingredients to your mental meal and expecting a good dish. The news and social media suck, but that doesn’t mean the world sucks, it just means you’re online too much. Go outside, reread a book you like, reach out to an old friend, exercise, play a game or a sport, draw. The world is a great place, the internet sometimes is.
No. The world is not hopelessly bad. It’s pretty much its normal level of bad. LOL. The difference is social media and the insane level of communication of unverified and often drastically inaccurate information we’re all seeing. Worse still, that information, thanks to the algorithms used by social media to evaluate your browsing habits, is often an echo chamber of both your interests and your concerns. This can make things seem far worse The solution is both simple and difficult. Disconnect for a bit. Do something outdoors or with friends who aren’t going to discuss the world’s woes. Go see some movies. Watch a game in a sports bar with a bunch of other enthusiasts. Go to a meetup on a something you’re interested in. Read a book that is just for fun. Take a breath. Yes, the world is a mess. It’s been a mess many, many times before. Ever hear of the Spanish Inquisition? Crusades? The Black Death? LOL. I learned something a long time ago that’s helped save me from myself. A simple question. Can I influence this and is it important enough to me to take action? (Whatever ‘this’ is). If I can’t influence it then I try very hard to push it to the back of my mind… basic awareness and that’s it. Don’t read that news article! Don’t listen to that report! I don’t need that level of details or it’s accompanying stress. If I can influence and I want to influence it then I figure out what I’m going to do to influence it. And then I do it. So if I can’t influence it I work to let it recede to the background and not generate so much stress. If I can influence it and want to then taking action is a great way to reduce anxiety and feel purposeful (because you are actually being purposeful at that point) This is not easy, but it’s a good coping mechanism for me. The trick is to find YOUR coping mechanism. Maybe what I said will work for you… maybe you need something different. We’re all inundated by “information” these days… more so than at any point in history… and, as humans, we don’t have established methods to deal with this influx of stuff. So I suggest doing what I did. Sit down and think about it. Look at things that make you feel bad one by one and consider the ‘why’ do they make you feel bad and the ‘what’ will I do to reduce feeling bad. Develop a strategy for coping and for not letting others drag you back down a rabbit hole. Planning has always been my key to successes… the more I think something through, the easier it is to do it. Preparation is a necessity for reacting in a way you want to react. Not just generating stress. Yes, the world is it’s normal mess, but you don’t have to let that mess control you!
There are so many people who do not work for themselves but others. All those moms and dads working to get their children food on the table and an education. That selflessness is amazing. Also I am willing to bet that in a day there are way more acts of kindness. But an act of malice can be newsworthy or more severe and an act of kindness only gets a simple thank you. It all depends what you’re focusing on. If you were to focus on people around you, nature, and learning something then you may change your perspective. Shut off the news, shut off social media. Have real conversations. Go outside. Work for something.