I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.

I think they are sick of it, but not because the grandparent post is wrong. They're sick of it because the emergency is "supposed" to be something you can overcome, feel triumphant about, and move on to the next thing.

But the emergencies in the media don't work that way. It doesn't matter how much you recycle, the media will keep screaming about catastrophe. It doesn't matter how many solar cells adorn your roof, the media will keep screaming. It doesn't how careful you are with your children, the media will keep screaming about child abductions. It doesn't matter if you pour hundreds of hours into organizing your neighborhood and fighting local crime, the media will keep screaming about crime.

It's the nature of this particular beast.

Consequently, you're never able to escape the "crisis" atmosphere, and stay stressed full time. That's not normal, especially in the absence of real, proximal crisis of that degree.

Yeah the trick is to turn off and tune out the media altogether. You really don't need to be hearing about everything that happens in the world and a non-stop partisan narrative interpretation of it. It's really not good for you, or anyone else. Turn it off. Go outside, go hike, go fish, play video games, whatever, just turn off the news. Remove the news feed from your phone. Add extensions that block news feeds on social media. Delete social media apps with feeds. Cancel your cable subscription. Go outside, enjoy your short life.

What I gather from your comment is that the media thrusts big societal issues (sustainability, climate change, child abuse, crime) upon the individual. When the individual tries to address these issues with their own actions or purchases, it's has zero impact on the reporting of the crisis.

I can conclude that the only sane things for an individual to do is not to counter these issues with individual actions, but to instead organize for a societal response strong enough to change the media narratives, or switch off the media completely and live life as best as one can.

> switch off the media completely and live life as best as one can

This is what I do. And I am confident that no matter what choices I make individually, they have no impact whatsoever on a global scale.

That's partly true, but it's also true young people look out for adventure and meaning. They've been fed the story that they can delay starting a family until well into your 30s. Dating apps don't help. They're overeducated and underemployed.

So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree with?

> So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree with?

I’m not sure if you’re suggesting this, but I think it’s more about attention and feelings of social acceptance, than it is about purpose.

Maybe. The reason I think it's more about purpose than attention and social acceptance is that Twitter is probably the platform with the most vocal social activism and its relatively pseudonymous. So your Twitter profile doesn't really carry any weight in real life social interactions, so it's less signaling than something like Instagram. And twitter is pretty ephemeral as well, so attention doesn't stay. I've seen someone with 15 followers dunk on some popular figure on Twitter, get mentioned in the NY Times (which is pretty weird) and they gain maybe 5 or 10 followers. I'm not even exaggerating. So it's not even 15 minutes of fame. It's nothing

People find purpose in dunking on others and they do it almost as a job. They even give up other social obligations and post regularly between certain hours.

People like this are easy to manipulate in the extreme, I fear we're in the midst of a pandemic of sociopaths practicing their art, more than anything. There's no end in sight either.

If they were sick of it, they wouldn’t lap it up. People like drama. If they didn’t we wouldn’t have reality TV

> If they were sick of it, they wouldn’t lap it up

The evidence does not support that.

People will often ignore their own plights (from which they are tired and feel trapped or impotent) to engage in remote problems with a feeling of authority and power. Voting for a federal office is the ultimate diversion. Rather than argue and campaign for local changes where they understand exactly what impact they can make (or not make), they invest in a far away problem for which they feel like there is a different performance profile.

People are sick of some crisis mongering, they just like a change of pace.

Yeah, it reminds me of the anecdotal phenomenon I’ve observed, that the kind of people to say “god, i just haaate getting involved in drama in general” are the ones to be most likely to stir up that drama in the first place.

Hmm, I think there's a difference between heavily fictionalized external personal drama and the diffuse, anxiety-provoking miasma of social media and mainstream news headlines feeds.

Even if there isn't a huge difference, I feel like the relationship is more like that of an alcoholic or other addict. Do addicts really "like" their drug? Surely most of them know at some level that it's really unhealthy, and there's diminishing pleasurable returns even in the short term, but they still crave it as a release from their short term anxieties and problems.

I agree. How much not-for-profit, non-state media, non-clout chasing fear mongering content is there? It does exist but the scale is small.

Honestly I think that there is quite a lot of non-fearmongering media out there. The Economist strikes me as a good example. And in general I think if you read any "respectable" (Economist, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, La Monde, etc.) newspaper as a whole on a day-to-day basis you wouldn't come away from the experience being especially scared or fearful. The problem is that it all gets dumped into the social media slurry and what a lot of people consume (in practice) is a sort of curated selection of the most sensationalist individual stories across the entire media ecosystem.

The Economist does a fair bit of fearmongering when it comes to China and inflation.

I think one dimension of crisis mongering is how drastic the stakes are portrayed. Its one thing to discuss discerning trends or potential problems, and another to portray every problem as a struggle of between good and evil in which the balance of the universe hangs. The Economist tends to stick to the former side of the spectrum than the latter in my experience.

That’s fair

If most people were truly sick of it, there would be no market for news corporations to exploit.

People are also “allowed” to focus their attention on whatever they want. It seems like you’re saying we are powerless to ignore the news, although I am curious if you mean something else.

People are "allowed" to ignore drugs and nicotine but it's pretty hard and culture and laws help us constrain the lower bound will power you have to have in order to live a life. I'm not necessarily saying drugs and news addiction are as strong or as destructive but there should probably be some "let's act in a way that's good for the public" ideas floating around rather than pure "the free hand means it's moral" motivated greed.

This is just the attitude of bored people online who comment on politics and imagine themselves as keyboard warriors. Most people have genuine problems that consume their lives instead.

With imminent apocalypse do you mean things like acid rain/tree dying, energy (oil) crisis, next ice age coming, nuclear destruction of the planet, nuclear hazard of power plants, Ozon layer depletion?

> We got so good at it, we took over the planet.

C. Elegans would like a word!

Humans are built to progress technologically and socially. It would be weird and unnatural if people didn’t want things to improve. It doesn’t matter how bad things were in the past. Your argument is a bit like saying we shouldn’t work on new CPUs because what we have now is so much better than an abacus.

> Humans are built to survive adversity.

No, we aren't. Adversity from other humans, but not adversity from nature.

Natural disasters routinely kill huge numbers of people, because we don't know how to deal with them.

Not all adversities are immediately lethal, but many will kill you eventually if you don't adapt.

Anyway It's not necessarily the surviving the immediate disaster that's evolutionarily selected for. No adaptation is going to make a human volcano or tsunami proof. It's the survivors piecing a viable way of life back together in the aftermath that matters.

Apart from obvious disasters, nature has also killed pretty much every human that has been born, so far.

It seems pretty good at what it does! :)