[irq]

Please, and I do not mean this offensively - I wish I could be as disengaged from world events as you are - can you tell me how you manage it? It used to be useful for me to be on top of everything, but I've been questioning that lately.

[blep_]

Not that person, but I'm the same way.

You just... stop caring. The only two good reasons to pay attention to news are if it affects you in some way, or if you can do anything about it. The vast majority of news is in neither group.

That's the first pass. From there, you adjust your definition of "affects you". I'm in the US, for example, and our government does plenty of bad things I do not approve of. But most of them, even the ones that ostensibly should affect me, don't actually noticeably change anything in my life. After a while, it all blurs into "my team scored a point" or "the other team scored a point".

Is this privileged? Of course. But it's also a requirement for my mental health. Paying attention to it wouldn't even improve anything for the people who are suffering, so there's not even any sort of utilitarian tradeoff. It would just be making my life worse for no reason, so I don't.

[H8crilA]

Works until it doesn't - see the high amount of dead Russian soldiers, especially the mobilised soldiers. They delegated political decisions until someone literally grabbed them from their workplace and sent them to die in a ditch. I.e. somewhere along the way they found out that despite them not having an interest in politics the politics found some serious interest in them.

[sidewndr46]

Your personal opinions, feelings, thoughts, and emotions aren't going to matter in the least bit to someone who is going to send you off to die in their war.

[swader999]

You think the ones in Russia that followed the news are any better off?

[girvo]

Yes. They left the country.

[enraged_camel]

Uh, absolutely. They saw the way things were going and fled the country before they could be pressganged.

[H8crilA]

Also this would not have happened had they actually acted on time and had they cared. The level of depoliticisation and degeneration of that society is insane. Consider the practice of hiring an ambulance to get through traffic quickly. Yes, it is a thing. Now you and me would think that it is completely unacceptable to abuse the system in such a way and protest. But many Russians see that and think "gee, I should have that kind of money too".

Timothy Snyder half-jokingly asks whether Russia is even a country. Sure, it exists as a state (for example it can wage a war, ineptly but still), however the civil society is nearly entirely demolished. It wasn't always so.

[InitialLastName]

That passes both of our ancestor's tests:

- it affects you in some way

and

- you can do something about it

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think this is helpful and honest. For example this kind of disengagement is much harder for my female friends of child birthing age in certain states, but it is also emotionally exhausting for them even when they feel like they can’t disengage because… yknow… lol

[blep_]

As someone in another often-politically-attacked group... yeah. It sucks when it's things that actually do affect you. Those are the times I'm glad I saved my mental energy so I can properly deal with it.

I'll admit to sometimes taking this too far and continuing to ignore things that I probably shouldn't. Eventually, someone mentions the actually important things to me, so I continue to get away with it.

[TaylorAlexander]

People are apparently really surprised but I simply had a busy day today. I have not been sleeping well so I was tired this morning. I woke up and worked on a programming problem that had been on my mind all weekend, listened to one of my favorite youtube channels that talks about news usually a day or two after it happens, posted an update on my programming project to mastodon without reading the feed, entertained my cat before leaving the house, ordered lunch from a local takeout place, made my partner a matcha latte, picked up lunch, brought my partner the matcha and gave them a beanie I knit last week, then drove to work listening to a couple podcasts. At work I got a delivery of circuit boards and I am now debugging a hardware problem and listening to the latest episode of Well There's Your Problem.

Idk one thing I do not ever do is open a website like CNN or NYT and read the front page. Please don't misunderstand that statement of fact as a judgement, but you asked about my media habits so I am sharing that. I will hear about major news events, as this very post makes clear. It seems I am hearing about this major earthquake in Turkey 14 hours or so after it happened... which seems fine. There is nothing I can do.

I tend to get news from youtube sources (not major outlets though) and these creators take a day or two to produce their videos. Sometimes I listen to Democracy Now or the KPFA evening news (available online), but I do not regularly consume that kind of thing. I am doing as much as I can to help the world with my little nonprofit thing. I learn about things like the police killing in Memphis police killing, the situation with the police training center outside of Georgia, and various foolish things politicians do. But I don't have much appetite for the firehose of details that come out of major news outlets.

[wkat4242]

> Idk one thing I do not ever do is open a website like CNN or NYT and read the front page. Please don't misunderstand that statement of fact as a judgement, but you asked about my media habits so I am sharing that.

You're not the only one. I like only occupying my mind with stuff that affects me and I can do something about. Or things I can create.

I see more and more people around me doing the same by the way. A lot more since the pandemic, I think everyone got a bit fed up with bad news every day and after it was over started focusing more on the real life they'd been missing out on.

It's funny because when I was young everyone would sit down for the 8 o'clock news every day and most would read the paper in the morning. Now news is everywhere and I consume less of it than back then.

[User23]

I also want to be direct with intent to offend. What is it about world events that demands your attention? Are outcomes going to be worse for your lack of awareness? Will people be hurt if you stop paying attention or be helped if you do?

I personally take a great interest in the challenges my local community faces because I can be directly and verifiably helpful.

[swatcoder]

Yup. National and world news is mostly a spectacle that lets us feel engaged even when there’s almost nothing of consequence gained from our rapt, immediate attention. If we get meaningfully involved at all, the extent of our consequential involvement is usually captured in a vote or a donation, and it usually takes all of a late minute’s briefing to catch up enough on a news item to hone in on how we’d proceed with those.

The easiest way to disengage is to humbly admit that you’re not important enough to matter very much to almost any issue on that stage, and that the people who do matter probably spend less time soaking up coverage about it than you do.

If you want to be anxious or have enthralling dinner party conversations about big events, by all means keep up your hobby. There’s sincerely nothing any more wrong with it than any other idle hobby.

But if you think the news is important and that your attention is a resource to invest in things that matter, look to the news from your family, your friends, and your community.

[lmm]

You can just not read the news. I generally don't, since I've found it rarely enhances my life.

[tjohns]

Speaking personally, I just don't usually open Twitter or news sites while I'm at the office.

It's not that I don't care. (I do.) I just read everything at a digest at the end of the day. Most news doesn't require a real-time response. Trying to stay on top of everything happening, as it happens 24x7, just leads to emotional exhaustion.

If it's not something I have direct control over, I don't need a real-time feed of it. The news will still be there to read in the evening when I get home.

[unethical_ban]

Yep, just don't check the news. Very little affects your day to day.

Grab the Sunday paper if you want to be periodically checked in. I think I'd be happier if I did this. I don't need to read the nyt opinion section every day, or what lie some congressman from New York just told.

I need to fold my clothes and schedule my vacation and research for work.

[quickthrower2]

This happened quite recently: Had my head in a screen of code pretty much and first I heard of this. Shocked that I didn’t hear it over slack though.