zlacker

>>notion+(OP)
In 2019 my New Years Resolution was to avoid all news and social media. The reason I started the ban was because I found my mind unsettled after reading the news and I had trouble coming back to a tranquil headspace.

The inspiration is this simple quote: "The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control." (Epictetus)

I held this resolution for about 5 months and it was profoundly glorious. It's not hard. Treat current events like Game of Thrones spoilers. Focus on what you have control over. Be frank with others that you are taking a break from the news cycle. If your results are anything like mine you will find yourself calmer and able to concentrate on what matters. Your mind wont wander to externalities you don't have control over.

At the end of it, you can go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.

>>stevec+Jb
It’s easy when politics doesn’t actually impact you. If you had relatives being deported or being shot by the police, it’s likely that you wouldn’t just tell your friends/family « sorry, i have no control over this »

I know it’s extreme but it’s the reality. For someone who is impacting by politics (say lost their jobs due to COVID), you can’t just stay on the sideline and ignore it.

You just have the great privilege of letting other people take care of that dirty work.

Is taking a news diet good? Absolutely. Lots of crap out there and a mental break is needed once in a while. But ignoring the suffering of people around you is just bad.

>>jerome+Re
That ties right back into the original comment, though. The quantity of suffering in the world is great, and even those of us with the ability to do something about some small part of it (already a pretty small number) are severely limited in their impact.

For the most part, it's non-actionable info. You bring up "relatives being deported or shot by the police", but the number of people on HN that describes is going to be tiny. The average HN user is less likely than most to have been burned by COVID due to the remote-friendliness of tech jobs.

For me, the calculus works out like this:

1. Is it possible for me to do anything substantial about it? (Throwing a few bucks at a charity or "raising awareness" about the large social problem everyone already knows about does not count as "substantial")

2. If it is possible, do I have the ability? (Financially, mentally, physically, temporally)

3. If the answer to both of these questions is "no", then it is non-actionable and not worth expending my own limited energy on.

The vast majority of things you hear from the news media fail both of these tests. They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.

>>Karuna+hg
This is a profoundly dispiriting stance. Many individuals have made a difference in the past and will continue into the future. The primary way individuals make differences is either by changing the way people think about something, by assembling a group to strategize around their issue, or physically preventing the bad thing from happening.

>>tehjok+Hl
All of those people you mention had something where they could physically and practically do something about the problem. My comment addresses the vast majority of instances a human learns about a problem where that isn't the case.

Your sphere of concern and your sphere of influence are two different things at the end of the day. If you've decided some social problem is within your sphere of influence, then by all means, take whatever helpful action you can - just do not pretend that this encompasses all problems, or for that matter that the number of problems is not infinite.

Down that path lay depression and burnout.