zlacker

People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives.

It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

>>icelan+(OP)
An archduke shot in Bosnia, or an incident near a bridge in northern China?

>>icelan+(OP)
Yeah, it's not that we don't care, or that it doesn't affect us directly, it's the complete lack of agency that makes us disinterested. Why focus our attention on the million things that we can do nothing about, when we could focus instead on the very few things where we can make a difference?

There are plenty of people out there who live their lives rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it is really hard to make an argument that their lives are any worse.

>>cafard+C1
This is a good point, but the average person is unlikely to hear about a skirmish on a different continent, and then know they should start stocking up on tinned food and bottled water. The problem is with the volume of information. It's impossible to take all of it in, so you need to pick and choose, and stay within your own limits. Some people might have the capacity read a whole newspaper's worth a day, others can only manage the local headlines.

>>david-+y2
The argument is rarely that their lives are worse, it's that they're somehow making other people's lives worse by not paying attention to X, Y, or Z injustice. But even that argument doesn't really hold water.

I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.

>>icelan+(OP)
On top of the things that we have zero control over, that do have an impact on our lives. DEI outrage killed a Girls in Tech summer program at our local children's museum. Similar cuts killed a lot of kids summer programs at our local library. Fewer summer programs at the public library and other institutions means thousands of extra dollars in extra camps we have to find and pay for over the summer so that we can sort of work during the day, between drop-offs and pick-ups.

>>cafard+C1
There is a great netflix documentary made in 2018 called "the long road to war". By the time the shooting happened a lot of other pieces had fallen into place. Basically, there were people in military circles and in the government that dictated the geoplitics game based on which country has leverage, who has the train tracks or a port to handle the logistics of war, and there was a certain zeitgeist, an egregore if you will, and things were ripe for conflict.

>>cafard+C1
I think the problem is signal-to-noise. For every thing that actually turns out to matter, there are hundreds of thousands of things that you're told are Important but turn out not to be. It's basically impossible to filter "Which remote events are actually important vs just ragebait?" until after the fact.

>>cafard+C1
Both things I can do nothing about.

>>icelan+(OP)
But you can. Out of the (limited) choices, vote for whoever you think is most in tune with how you'd like the world to be.

If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change anything, the few people who do care enough to vote get to say who's elected.

>>lolind+f6
Since you touched the topic. The protests in the US did have an impact, which now triggered a second impact on Harvard international students.

I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong way and there will be more awareness.

Additionally, there should be more awareness that protests are less tolerated by the government, which seems a bad thing.

>>catlik+ml
How does "awareness" of any problem help anything? As people have been saying in this thread, we lack agency to do anything about the million problems that we are already "aware" of. That awareness is neither helping us nor the million causes we are bombarded with.

>>zh3+gh
Sure, I vote. I do the things I can do, but I mostly focus on hyperlocal things (Little Free Pantries/Libraries) and my friends/family. Impacting their lives and the lives of the people in my community are my top priorities.

>>icelan+qe
You can try to move out of harm's way, though.