For me it’s just the knowledge that I have around 100 total years on this planet and a limited amount of reach in terms of geography, relationships, etc.

I can’t swing an election by myself, but with me and millions of my closest friends we can. But only if we all pull together. It’s like a paradox but not quite.

This too shall pass. I take comfort that the pendulum of politics has always swung back and forth. This moment of insanity should swing back to rebuilding, and progressive changes.

When I was in college, we had “the midnight scream”. During finals, entire dorms would open their windows at midnight and just scream. It was very effective at venting frustration, allowing us all to refocus on studying. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now: we’re all just screaming in frustration.

This is crazy, but i read the news on paper. I have a couple of subscriptions to magazines with good reporting, but you could also hit up your library to read for free. For one thing, print journalism is a lot more in-depth and balanced than the outrage-mill crap i find online.

On Lemmy i read headlines only in case something happens that i stay current, but i rarely read a whole article. This contains my news consumption to a small portion of my day.

Plus, Trump says 64 stupid lthings a week. I read all 64 in 1 hour each week and get it over with, instead of poisoning myself with it several times a day.

I block most news sources and get the jist of events via memes.

Insert Invincible ‘you don’t’ meme here

But seriously, you can’t. You either choose to be ignorant of 99.99% of the world or to be ignorant of 99.9% of the world and live in a perpetual scramble to absorb all the disparate information. Most news isn’t worth knowing in and of itself, only serving as data to construct deeper understanding, so unless you are going to actually connect the dots, it’s a better use of your time to let the world act as a filter and only pay attention to what hangs around long enough to get through to you.

I block news from all social media. Then I chose 2 news networks I thought had decent reporting and wasn’t too bias. Every morning I read news from the 2 sources and that is ALL the news I consume for that day. That’s it.

If this is too overwhelming even you can try starting with 1 news source. I find that news is mostly still pretty boring (in a good way) if you only look at 1 source.

Are those who are well adjusted to a unjust world really the sane ones?

I remind myself that news media have a vested interest in keeping me outraged and on the edge of my seat, addicted to consuming their every update.

There are definitely things worth getting outraged over. But on top of that we have an outrage industry harvesting our attention and fear for ad dollars.

So I remind myself not to spiral down the doomclick drain. If something is THAT important I’m going to hear about it. I don’t need to be checking a news app daily.

On top of this I do what I can to support change. We donate to Ukraine and Gaza relief efforts. We vote. We make our political views known to those around us to support right action in them as well (not talking about politics is what Trumpers want - they want cover for their fascist hate and violence - I make damn sure that everyone I know is aware that there’s no room for that shit in my life).

Conserve your strength. Do everything material that you can, and don’t spend yourself past that point.

But that first part is important: DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN.

Step 1: remove all news feeds from your life.

Step 2: live your life. Be happy. Have fun.

Step 3: if anything worth knowing actually happens, it will filter in through your social networks.

It helps a lot that the assholes are not doing well. The Epstein thing has made it easier to breathe.

Going to protests helps too. The energy of the crowd really feels good and assures me that the people are on my side.

I’ve figured that I can either be informed or happy. Not both.

I have a large broken chest freezer I climb into, I shut the lid and scream