I’m 43, almost 44, years old and went through a bought of alcoholism during the early part of the pandemic. I went through treatment and have been fine since. However, I can’t help but feel that all the news in the last few months is just the worst. Between the AI bullshit, the wars, the effects of capitalism, and the political situation in general it’s just the worst. Is it just me or have other folks noticed the same trend?

Edit: I should have also mentioned the enshitification of everything tech related.

Edit 2: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. For some more context, yes I’m American and live in a state that’s about to ban the wearing of masks in public. I haven’t had a drink in over year and have been in therapy for 3 years. I don’t watch any news sources and rarely read media websites. But yet, that information seeps into my life somehow. I donate blood, I make charitable donations, and try to live a good life. I have 2 amazing kids and a great wife. It’s just hard to not end up in a doomer mindset at times. A Bitcoin company bought a power plant up here that has an existing lease to use a lake as cooling water, and it’s heated up the lake to the point that it’s killing fish.

  • Eol@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    8 months ago

    Negativity and wedge issues sell. Keep your head up and don’t let them play you out. It’s all for money or power …or both. I think people just never wanted to see how dark reality is and now it’s showing how naive the common person is to the evil in the world.

    It’s like all the horrible things they played out to be history or entertainment are actually real and that we were just told it’s all in the past so “tHeY” could keep us subservient with a false sense of security.

  • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    8 months ago

    It doesn’t help that news corps have found that we generally respond to the negative news much more than we do positive news.

  • viralJ@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about good things happening), and the media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

    News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

    Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

    Edit: typo and grammar