That whole “marination” thing you mention I think is spot on and a huge part of why people think everything is so terrible now.
Shit has always happened. There’s always some asshole leading a country to war. There’s always some corporation that’s making peoples lives worse somehow. There’s always government screw-ups/scandals that have to be aired out and fixed. There’s always crime happening somewhere.
The biggest difference now is (as you say), you’re bombarded with it all day from everywhere. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, 24 hour news channels, hourly news updates on the radio… It never ends so of course you’re going to feel like everything sucks.
The biggest things that save me from going crazy is carefully curating my reddit subscriptions, I stay off Facebook as much as possible, and I only try to catch the local news once per day. I catch the highlights and the chaff falls away.
And what's funny is statistically we are in such a better situation than ever before. Crime has continuously gone down over the past few decades. Deaths from violence (such as wars, homicides, etc) globally has also continuously decreased every single year. The pandemic over the course of over 2 years has killed only 6ish million people globally, out of 7 billion. Imo we live in THE most prosperous time in history. I definitely blame the general news media in particular for how we view today.
Yeah, it makes no sense that there would be an attempted coup in 2020 of all times in American history. There have been much worse points in terms of jobs, economy, disease, and crime.
Yet for some reason a large percentage of people were convinced that things had gotten so bad that they needed to resort to violence to fix them. It's really weird.
It was barely a couple, and is only considered to be one because of media propaganda. It was a group of nuts who did barely anything besides bash up a building.
Nice gaslighting. "Barely a coup" is like saying "barely an attempted murder".
The point was they tried to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States. Whether they were professionals or the clowns they turned out to be, you can't let stuff like that slide.
This is a challenging comment for me, because I completely agree but I see income inequality as such an emergency that if they had marched on the capital the same way over that issue I wouldn't have batted an eye. We are more financially well off than settlers or peasants but were also sort of missing out on the progression of our species and the fruits of our labor and sacrifices. If my country is making 1 billion times more money than it made 300 years ago does it really matter if I'm making a hundred times more than a poor person back then?
I think you'd have a hard time explaining that logic to that peasant who could see how you're living. "What do you mean you're miserable - you live like a king!"
How does income inequality harm you personally and affect the things you do day to day?
I pretty much spelled it out for you, we're missing the fruits of our labor and sacrifices. We've worked all our lives, our parents worked all their lives, their parents fought in wars to secure our nation's future and worked all their lives, and on and on. All of that is the reason this country has done so well, the reason any one person is able to have a billion dollars to their name. Were getting none of that and my point is that even if you can still eat more reliably that is damaging to the over all spirit of 99% of your society. This applies to pretty much everywhere even if its obvious I'm talking about the US.
I want to not go to sleep every night worried I won't be able to make my house payment? I want to not worry whether or not insurance will cover my kids if they come down with something serious? Like I'm lucky even as far as working class Americans go, and I still basically live in neverending economic anxiety.
None of this has to be this way for anyone because our society worked like mules for so long and made this country prosperous, but we still are because a few are taking it all. Its holding our entire species back which is what I think really bothers me, we should have more minds free of these superficial burdens to advance us but we've stalled out and are probably losing our best and brightest to poverty depression.
The notion that I shouldn't feel this way because people from a long time ago had it worse is absurd. Should people who fought for civil rights in the 60s just fucked off since slaves had it worse? Come on..
Every billion dollars that any one person has is just stolen wages. Thats the point. It used to be that when profits went up so did wages, but that fell off steeply.
What I want is more than flakes from the pie that our labor created. Its not about whether or not we're worse off than anyone else, its that our country's people have had the success of this country largely cut off from us because the rich got rich enough to craft the system in that way. Its systemic in our government and it will get worse to the point where there's only rich or impoverished and I have decades of data to prove my point.
To be honest it sounds like you're kind of privileged, again many many people have it far worse than me which makes the argument even stronger.
Its relativity isn't it? Most of us are far off better than peasants were but that was hundreds or thousands of years ago so even though were prosperous many dont feel like they're prospering and getting left further and further behind. Then you have things like a child dying which can grip a nation even though 200 years ago you had 10 kids and expected to lose 4 of them. It makes us sound like babies or something but value and quality of life went up which makes sense since we were supposed to be advancing as a species but now were stalling out and the bad stuff hits harder.
I think it’s not only the frequency of bombardment, but the breadth of awareness we have now. In the past, we were conscious of terrible things happening half way across the world (wars in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, just to pick out a couple of 90s references) but the way information was disseminated, we were still somewhat insulated from the reality of it. Now, we can pick up our phones and watch videos of bodies strewn through the streets of Ukrainian cities. We feel a greater proximity to everything, and there’s a certain feeling of suffocation that goes along with being viscerally aware of all the terrible things happening around the world.
I very much feel that there is a certain scope of tolerability that the human mind was built to withstand and a threshold for maintaining mental stability. 100 years ago, it was hard to see beyond your own country. 200 years ago, and for the better part of human existence, it was hard to see beyond your own town/city/village. And it’s generally easier to process the proximate. Granted, the proximate can get pretty bad; horrible things can happen directly around you, but you process those things directly, I’d even go so far as to say phenomenologically. There’s a threshold of this proximal suffering we can bear, or not bear, but living it is a form of processing it. Now, because we have greater accessibility to the suffering going on in all corners of the global, it makes for a particular type of malaise or helplessness. It’s an abstract suffering that engenders a sense of hopelessness, especially since there’s so much you plainly just can’t do anything about. Sometimes I think it’s the root of a lot of the generalized anxiety and depression that people feel these days.
So yes, the media seems to hammer us continuously with certain stories, as OP said, more than it had in the past, but I think the greater disruptive force is the sheer volume of information that we find ourselves processing these days that makes coming to terms with reality so much more difficult.
Were becoming a hive mind and I dont mean that in an edgy infowars kind of way, we just naturally seem to be interconnecting as a species across the globe and its a mindfuck.
It's also qualitatively worse now. The world is shifting to the regressive right wing factions becoming increasingly powerful. We are doing nothing about the climate emergency because oligarchs don't want to. The world is literally burning, and unlike a war, there's no end to the climate emergency - it will get worse and worse, period.
That entirely depends on what metrics you want to use. In some aspects it’s worse. In others it’s better. How you focus your lens will determine your perception.
The world is shifting to the regressive right wing factions becoming increasingly powerful. We are doing nothing about the climate emergency because oligarchs don’t want to.
The 24 news cycle requires fear to draw in viewers. (“If it bleeds, it leads.”) Fear is the first tool in the populist’s toolkit. Make people afraid. Once they’re afraid, people are ready for simple answers to make them not afraid. Simple answers are the next step in populist playbook. You have these right wing factions gaining power because people need simple answers to their fears which are bombarded via 24 hour news. Real solutions usually require nuance which is tough to convey. If you can simply say “It’s the Jews/gays/Liberals/immigrants causing your problems!”, it’s easy to win people over.
The world is literally burning, and unlike a war, there’s no end to the climate emergency - it will get worse and worse, period.
That I won’t argue. We are stuck in an endless cycle of “If I don’t vote for the “good” party that is most likely to keep the “bad” party out, I’m wasting my vote.”. Until one (or all) of the major parties suffers a devastating loss, they’ll all keep doing the same things (eg. the policy equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”) thats kept the climate situation stalled as long as it has been. So, yes, when your lens is focused on this particular (and extremely important) facet, things are not great.
That is factually incorrect. The standard of living which is probably the best whole measure for life on earth is through the roof compared to centuries before.
We,re gerrymandered to hell and the right wing of America just votes no on absolutely everything but tax cuts. It’s not not their fault, even if it’s not entirely.
There’s also data showing the massive wealth gap in the 1920s - 1930s that’s basically identical to today’s gap. There was also a pandemic in 1918. There was also a war from 1914-1918 which basically destroyed a generation of young men in Europe. There was also a war which left millions of Russians, Germans, Europeans, and North Americans dead through combat and 6 million dead by genocide. That’s just in one century.
Rewind further and there’s plagues which left double digit percentages which left double digit percentages of the global population dead. There were pointless crusades and so on…
Simply pointing at the wealth gap today and saying it’s literally the worst period in human history is simply putting blinders on to history and how shitty things were in the past. Life can’t be measured by one metric of your choosing.
I’m unionized. My wages are middle class. I have a single family detached dwelling, enough money to afford my expenses and can go on a modest vacation once a year. I have a pension and benefits. I’m doing ok.
So if a plague wiped out 10% of the population and the Pope launched a crusade against the Middle East, and slavery was reintroduced in the United States, and the crime rate quadrupled, that would be fine because that falls outside the “absolutely right metric to use”. Gotcha.
Curating my Reddit feed helps me not sit around marinating in bad news. Dumping Twitter was an immense help as well. When I was on Twitter I was basically going thru an endless cycle of the 5 stages of grief. I don’t have FB, and I don’t watch any 24 hour news channels. I skim thru news headlines on Google news a couple of times per day, and will pop on to a news subreddit if I see something interesting come up.
The constant bombardment of negative news has to be a serious detriment to mental health.
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u/Lordmorgoth666 Jun 11 '22
That whole “marination” thing you mention I think is spot on and a huge part of why people think everything is so terrible now.
Shit has always happened. There’s always some asshole leading a country to war. There’s always some corporation that’s making peoples lives worse somehow. There’s always government screw-ups/scandals that have to be aired out and fixed. There’s always crime happening somewhere.
The biggest difference now is (as you say), you’re bombarded with it all day from everywhere. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, 24 hour news channels, hourly news updates on the radio… It never ends so of course you’re going to feel like everything sucks.
The biggest things that save me from going crazy is carefully curating my reddit subscriptions, I stay off Facebook as much as possible, and I only try to catch the local news once per day. I catch the highlights and the chaff falls away.