A couple things:

• Use keyword and community filters in Lemmy to clean up what’s presented to you.
• Use the “Not Interested” and “Don’t Recommend Channel” options in Youtube to cull the trash from your algorithm feed.

It will make your life so much more peaceful. Don’t let the algos just blast their firehose of shit at you. Tap your own stream of customized content by interacting with these tools instead.

Anything outdoors. I like mountain biking and gardening, but you do you.

Get off social media and avoid the negative people in your life as much as you can for a bit. Read some books. Play a chill video game. Make something. Just get away from it for a while so you can re-center yourself.

Things are bad and we should be worried about them but there’s only so much any of us can do about it. If you don’t take care of yourself and your mental health you’re not going to be able to do good for anyone else when the time comes.

Get off the internet. Truly. When it gets to be too much, put your device away and do something else. My go-tos, I either cook something, play music or go for a walk.

Gotta find your way back to this vibe. There’s a lot of good out there, a lot to be grateful for. And on a long term timescale the world is in many ways better than ever before on important stuff like infant mortality.

First and foremost I can suggest meditation. You don’t have to personally save the world, do what you can when you can and that’s enough, honestly more than enough. I can suggest figures like Pema Chodron and Ram Dass, they’ve been extremely helpful for me in extreme moments of life. I think Pema’s book Welcoming the Unwelcomed is pure gold.

Also don’t mind taking a break from it all. The world will keep on ticking. One day the sun will run out of fuel and vaporize the earth, one day the last star will go dark, one day the last black hole will evaporate. Nothing is forever besides change. That’s not to say it’s all pointless, more so to say enjoy it and if you can even enjoy the unpleasant things along with the pleasant ones.

For me: it’s the total loss of faith in humanity.

Even the political views I used to associate with “the good people” - now I see their proponents as maniputive, self-serving, bullies.

So there’s no cause to support anymore: no good or evil. No point supporting the needy: because they’re terrible people just like everyone else - I’ll only be supporting their selfishness and the suffering they will create.

So all I’m left with is: getting from this moment of time until the time of my death as easily as possible.

I know it really doesn’t help, but remember that this is how they want you to feel

It’s tough. Social contract is broken and yet we’re all still mostly working for capitalists and paying taxes. I think there are a lot of right answers and paths forward, but the current system and momentum is all in favor of increasing inequality.

I’ve spent the last several years just trying to understand it and that helps me. Seeing how things are currently playing out and events that lead there just makes it clearer. That and diving into hobbies that also double as useful collapse skills (gardening, leather work, 3d design and printing, electronics).

Touch grass. Leave your phone home and go outside and enjoy nature. Go on a hike. Stop reading the news, any news, for a while, you will be fine.

I hug someone when I have someone, or a pillow or something

Genuinely one of the only things that takes my mind off how horrible this world is

I find that 99% of the negativity is online. Interacting with people in person is way more pleasant and upbeat. And basically on youtube ignore all videos with clickbait titles like “We were Wrong about [whatever] - and it’s NOT GOOD!”, they’re all bullshit.

Hosting one or two regular game nights a week in my house has made a world of difference in my attitude.

Same thing you do when anything else is fatigued, you rest. Take a break from all that stuff. You are not the savior of the world and everything will not fall apart because you stopped paying attention for a little while.

I’m sure you’ve had other hobbies, get back into those. Play some games, watch some movies, read a book (not about those topics), get some exercise if you aren’t already. If it creeps up in the back of your mind to go look at the news or whatever, that’s fine just ignore it, it’ll go away. Do stuff so that you’re enjoying your time and wanting more of it rather than just waiting for the day to end.

I’ve radically cut my news intake and it’s helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what’s happening. There’s that famous quote about how “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy” and I try to hold on to it.

Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.

However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it’s just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I’ve no interest in.

Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.

I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk’s soon to be trillionaire status (don’t ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for ‘lefty tears’ and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I’d like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.

Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don’t consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there’s a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever have a government that has any real decency or compassion at it’s core.

Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengage from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that’s the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.