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by Zetice 1220 days ago
I fed this to ChatGPT and asked for a summary, and got something a lot easier for me to understand than the article itself. Maybe I'm a dummy! But it helped. (edit: the below is not ChatGPT's response!)

The article presupposes there's anxiety, indecision, uncertainty, and frustration as a result of collecting more data, but this isn't a given. Instead, a better solution would be to simply observe; you're not being asked to make decisions, you're not being asked for certainty or clarity, the reality is you don't meaningfully matter to almost any of what's being shown to you in media, and almost nothing being shown matters to you.

Caring and feeling empathy towards those negatively impacted by something is one thing, but your job is not to solve those problems in any real, if-you-dont-then-no-one-will sense. You can do your small, tiny part (e.g. throw $5 at a relief fund, be kind/forgiving to those who do get hurt, use your vote to improve the way your government handles those situations, etc.) but there's no big, sweeping act you're being asked to perform.

The narrative is irrelevant. The "connected dots" are irrelevant. If you want to live a happier life while still being informed, then you must stop trying to understand everything. Just observe, accept you're mostly powerless, and do the tiny amount you can to ease the burden of those who get harmed by the stuff you read about.

1 comments

Wow, chatgpt really told the author to go touch grass.
I didn't paste the ChatGPT response in here (doesn't feel healthy to HN to flood it with ChatGPT responses), I wrote that myself.
Ah, disappointing!

In all seriousness, I have found the conclusions you drew from your chatgpt summary to be quite useful for making my way in this particular era of history. Being able to just evict any such controlling narrative from my head has prevented me from severely losing touch with actual reality, which I have sadly seen happen to more and more folks in recent times.

This has ultimately made me a much more "reasonable" person, but at the cost of having many hard convictions that I'm willing to "unreasonably" stand my ground on.

Being able to be stubborn like that can occasionally be a force for good (e.g. civil rights movement), but can also lead to personal ruin, not unlike bashing one's head into a concrete wall trying to move it. This has led me to think really hard about what convictions I do hold dear. I haven't come up with many, but so far I'm leaning a lot on "don't treat people like objects".