Even if I do have time and energy, my lack of knowledge on the subject matter would probably lead me to waste that time on dead ends, wrong conclusions, or learning things I will never use again outside of fact-checking one study.

> dead ends, wrong conclusions

You have to trust yourself to try anyway. Beats doomscrolling even if both are equally meaningless in the long run. Something that helps me is refusing to accept any narrative or conclusion about any topic where it would require a specific named group of people (e.g. members of any nationality, profession, corporation, ancestry, presentation, etc — anything) to be uniformly dumb or malicious.

That might sound silly but it means there’s no downside to entertaining any consideration, not even the downside of my own bad feelings from negative ideas. It totally removes a layer of mental latency I didn’t even realize I had until recently, even about topics where that wouldn’t ever be a question that’s possible to ask.

Instead of getting bogged down checking one story after another it’s easier to ignore entire storyline arcs at a time once they’re more obviously one set of jangling keys after another all vying for my attention at a higher priority than any self-directed interests :)

We, as a society, bought a dog, and it took at literary shit in our communnal kitchen. No one wants to clean it up, and frankly, I can't blame you/me/any one individual for it. It's exhausting but a society-wide problem. It sucks that the only response from platforms has been to ban the discussion, rather than pay for a writers corp to come up with easy to parse FAQs why some of the garbage misinformation is a pile of lies, and to write systemic takedowns of odious dreck. But here we are.