this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024

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Is everything the worst? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by boaratio@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm 43, almost 44, years old and went through a bought of alcoholism during the early part of the pandemic. I went through treatment and have been fine since. However, I can't help but feel that all the news in the last few months is just the worst. Between the AI bullshit, the wars, the effects of capitalism, and the political situation in general it's just the worst. Is it just me or have other folks noticed the same trend?

Edit: I should have also mentioned the enshitification of everything tech related.

Edit 2: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. For some more context, yes I'm American and live in a state that's about to ban the wearing of masks in public. I haven't had a drink in over year and have been in therapy for 3 years. I don't watch any news sources and rarely read media websites. But yet, that information seeps into my life somehow. I donate blood, I make charitable donations, and try to live a good life. I have 2 amazing kids and a great wife. It's just hard to not end up in a doomer mindset at times. A Bitcoin company bought a power plant up here that has an existing lease to use a lake as cooling water, and it's heated up the lake to the point that it's killing fish.

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[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago

It doesn't help that news corps have found that we generally respond to the negative news much more than we do positive news.

[–] viralJ@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Remember that there are biases at play here. There's the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about good things happening), and the media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don't happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, "I'm reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out". (...) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

Edit: typo and grammar

[–] Omodi@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Pinker is a neoliberal hack.

[–] Bongles@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Is the statement they're quoting incorrect?

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is my first time(that I remember) hearing about this guy. How is he hack? Legitimately asking.

[–] viralJ@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I see you never got a reply to your question. I am obviously biased in favour of Pinker, but my perception is that "liberal hack" (and other epithets) is a mindless insult that people throw at him when they don't like to uplifting message that he's communicating, but can't find anything logically or factually wrong with his arguments or his presentation of data.

The closest I saw someone trying to have a legitimate case of showing Pinker misrepresenting reality, was the criticism of this passage (also from "Enlightenment Now"):

What proportion of pairs of ethnic neighbors coexist without violence? The answer is, most of them: 95 percent of the neighbors in the former Soviet Union, 99 percent of those in Africa.

(i.e. only 1% is at war)

Critics pointed out that, at the time of Pinker's writing, the number of countries in Africa at war was X, and X divided by the number of all countries in Africa is much greater than the 1%, so clearly Pinker is lying. But firstly, the passage talks about ethnic neighbours, not countries, of which there is much more in Africa and the former Soviet Union, and secondly, there is almost always more neighbours than there is countries in any region. For example in Australia, there are 5 states, but 6 borders (pairs of neighbouring states), so if Queensland went to war with New South Wales, 60% of the states would be at peace, but 83% of pairs of neighbours would be at peace.

Edit: grammar

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I mean, that's a nice info drop, but it doesn't really explain too much. Can you drop me a link to some of his stuff, so I can make my own mind up about it?

[–] viralJ@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

If you Google Steven Pinker, it should show you links to his websites, articles, and books.

[–] Eol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Negativity and wedge issues sell. Keep your head up and don't let them play you out. It's all for money or power ...or both. I think people just never wanted to see how dark reality is and now it's showing how naive the common person is to the evil in the world.

It's like all the horrible things they played out to be history or entertainment are actually real and that we were just told it's all in the past so "tHeY" could keep us subservient with a false sense of security.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I was always rather politcally passive. I decided to join MERA25 this week (self proclaimed radical leftist group). Get active.

I normally avoid doomerism, but it starts feeling like the end-times here in Europe and I think it is worse at other places. Open fascists are about to take power in several federal states here in Germany this year.

[–] Clbull@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Unless they pull off some kind of paramilitary overthrow of the German government (and last time I checked their co-leaders didn't have an army of brownshirts to do their bidding) I cannot see Alternative fur Deutschland taking power in Germany. They actually lost vote share and support from other far right European parties when they spouted borderline Nazi views recently.

Reassemblement National on the other hand... Macron was stupid to call a snap parliamentary election, and if Marine Le Pen can make it to 2027 without being driven out by political scandal, she'll probably be the next French President.

[–] Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago

Nothing borderline about their views

[–] CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Came to say, touch grass. Get a job, get busy. Clean your home (I sure need to!), tidy up your corner of the world & exert positive control over things you can control. If you can't control it, please, don't worry about it.

[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Fuck caring about legitimate issues. Get busy for capital gainz and do not worry about the exploitation of people like yourself, ya pleb.

[–] Yrt@feddit.de 0 points 3 months ago

As mentioned by other commentators, negative, emotional news sell the best and the news nearly perfected this method during the last couple of years. Yes, it isn't as good as pre pandemic times, but it's not the worst. For me it really helped to limit my news time to max. once a day (like in the past with the newspaper in the morning or a news show in the evening) and watching things called "good news". In Germany some TV shows have this category so I never searched it on social media or YouTube, but I bet there are some channels/pages dedicated to good news (like there is a new treatment for disease XY or here is a good step in the fight against climate change, but sometimes just news like "the big panda isn't as endangered as it was".