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
> They are intended to provoke you or scare you about something that is mostly out of your sphere of influence.

And yet, every post about H1B visa rule changes will have hundreds of comments bemoaning the selling out of the American IT worker. There will also be much hand-wringing about the on-shoring of foreign jobs and anecdotes about how terrible it is working with Indian consultancy firms.

HN commenters want to vent as much as anyone else. They just do it on political posts that they feel affect them personally, even if it's not something they can change directly.