mogery's blog

You should care less

Controversial opinion time. Bear with me!

About a year or two ago, I found myself going down the route of doomscrolling. I was engaging with doom porn — constant bad news with everything wrong in the world. I thought it was fine — I didn't feel like it was hurting my mental state at all. I still had a feeling it wasn't too great though, so I put it down. I muted a lot of keywords, unfollowed a lot of people, altered my algorithms, etc. And holy SHIT, I could never imagine going back.

Our brains can only handle a finite amount of bad news until it starts affecting us negatively. The Internet, if misused, is an infinite bad news machine. The more bad news you see, the more you will care, the more you will share it, and now the bad news has more reach. The system feeds itself. It also makes you constantly expect bad news (aka pessimism).

I cannot solve the war in Gaza. I cannot solve the war in Ukraine. I cannot solve US politics, nor Hungarian politics. I cannot solve racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, police brutality, nor everything wrong in the world. And I don't think you can either, realistically. You can only change your own behavior, and protest — both of which are important. But these actions only let you to deal with the bad shit that actually affects you and your local community.

By feeding every bad thing that happens everywhere to your brain, you are only poisoning yourself. You are worrying yourself about things you are incapable to solve. You are making yourself feel powerless, and you are bogging down your mental. I have a lot of shit going on in my life right now, and I know that if I had to think about genocide daily, I would be a fucking wreck.

Don't get me wrong, I am not preaching blissful ignorance here — that's not great either. Forming opinions about Things That Are Happening is important to discover what your own values are. Instead, I'm saying that, when something happens, you should read the Wikipedia page, form your opinion, close it, and never actively think about it again. It's going to reach you in some amounts anyways — it'll be pouring from the tap. You can stay up to date from the drip of information that you can't avoid.

Ignorance is foolish. Overindulgence is foolish. Inform yourself once, form an opinion, (go donate to some places if you want to,) and close your eyes. It's really not worth any more time.

Reply via email

#opinion