The internet has always been my salvation.
As a socially underdeveloped kid, I’d spend my lunch hours in the high school library on those public desktop computers, reading fandom sites about my favorite video games. Computers always made sense to me. I even owe my entire career to them.
But the internet today feels wrong. Whatever the fuck kind of psychological warfare is happening right now with this Epstein stuff is too much for my mind to handle. I can’t do it anymore.
I will love. I will vote. I will support my community and continue to oppose this fucking nightmarish system we all find ourselves in. But I need to sign off.
Imagine the door closing sound effect when logging out of AIM.
I understand completely but am trying to mold my access to the world in a way that doesn’t cause me such depression. I don’t use the normal social networks, I’ve used the piefed filters to block everything about musk, trump, ice, america, politics, etc. and I’ve never followed any kind of “news”.
Before I did that, I was literally becoming chronically suicidal(well, that’s not gone but it’s better) from the absolute shit-show that the world has become(it’s not just the US, other countries are quickly adopting the bipartisan hatred model now that they see it works to divide). It would be different if you saw something regarding a change towards improvement but that’s never seen, you just get another endless scroll of shit that is destroying society with no way to change it.
The fediverse is just as bad as any other social network out there. Although the leaning is opposite, it’s still full of extremism, hyperbolic hatred, ridicule, mockery, division and sufferporn. Without filters, it would be as unusable to me as, say, facebook or trump’s social network.
I’m withdrawing a lot from people online but still spend a lot of time online, it’s just not as interactive as it used to be.
If this is not sustainable, I’m sure I’ll likely follow your lead and leave it to the rest of the world.
Yes, that’s exactly how I feel. It’s almost as if it’s being deliberately rubbed in our faces about our true collective powerlessness in this moment.
Yes! I have so many filters enabled in my Lemmy client, but this morning, I stumbled upon a screenshot (since filters aren’t smart enough to extract content from screenshots) of an Epstein email that was so incredibly disturbing in its implication. These aren’t my vile thoughts, yet they’ve been bouncing around my mind all day.
I can’t take it anymore.
Please stay strong out there.
I’ve done this as best I can too. It was hard because I feel a need to be informed, but I came to the conclusion that being informed was actually only making me miserable, and didn’t actually spur any kind of action. It was actually the opposite because the fear machine kept me paralyzed with despair and cynicism.
I cut out as much as I can, and while things are still tough, I have more mental capacity to focus on what’s actually happening to me in the here and now.
You might know it already but I would recommend a free newsletter called Fix the News. It’s a roundup of only positive news, and not fluff either. It’s honestly done a lot to make me realize the endless bad news is a very narrow look at what’s happening in the world.