[kraetzin]

I concur. It's important to be engaged with what's going on locally and things that will directly impact you and people around you. If everybody ignored these things and just kept their heads down then I'd argue we'd all be worse off. Your own mental state could be improved by ignoring them, but I do believe that we all have some responsibility to try and improve the society around us.

I've found that keeping exposure to media down to every week or two and mostly reading summaries of events after the fact has helped immensely. It filters out all of the noise you get from live reporting. This helps get down to the facts of what's happened, and allows one to keep a certain emotional detachment from the events and focus on the important things.