I am so fatigued with so much negativity that happens in the world and in my personal life as well. I have become numb to the topics I used to care such as politics, equal rights, environment and so on: I just want my day to end and that’s it. I don’t think I’m depressed tho (I used to and I know what it is like).
I don’t know what to do. What would you suggest doing? Thank you.
Get off all social media you can.
On the social media you can’t, block anything politics and news related. They are designed to keep your attention with psychological triggers.
Start a hobby, reading is cheap to get into assuming you have a library. Drawing with pen and paper, colouring in books. Honestly anything that takes you away from a screen.
Also start a physical hobby if you can. Exercise, besides the mental benefits, is going to be a more powerful distraction than anything intellectually adjacent IMO.
Ideally, outside, in nature. This too has been shown to have mental health benefits. Go walk in the woods.
Honestly nothing brings me back down to earth and resets (almost) all my stress and worries like spending time in a forest
Trees are awesome they deserve so much more respect, theyve been around for so much longer than us just chilling making oxygen and a habitat
Spotting wildlife is also entertaining
The sound is critical for me, pure nature noises, no human geberated crap like cars or yelling or construction or whatever
Nature is extremely unhurried which is so radically opposite of almost every aspect of modern life that it’s like finally get a breath of air to be able to immerse yourself in a setting that isn’t manically trying to get your attention.
Or take your money just for existing
I taught myself a few knots! Took a few tries, but now I can tie a monkey’s fist without screwing it up too badly. Gives me something to do with my hands for a while, and I can give them away as gifts.
This means Lemmy and the greater Fediverse too. It’s nice being part of a network of people that share similar views on things but damn this place can be depressing. Kind of just a byproduct from the state of the world but humans weren’t designed to be aware of every horrible thing happening on this planet
It’s better if you limit your feed to subscribed communities. Not perfect, but without that it’s like a hundred negativities per minute.
You can also set up word filters in a lot of the Lemmy apps. Filtering words like Trump for example will remove a lot of negative content from your feed, especially since people are bad to post about him in specifically non-political communities.
Today I was about to post on here about basically the same thing, and, well, I don’t know, I guess I want to talk or at least write it out. I’ve been blanket blocking politics and news ever since Trump got elected - as black and white as it gets. If a sub I see says “Trump”, it is blocked, and that is also applied everywhere else, including people I used to interact with. I completely left TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and mostly left Reddit, because I thought it would make me feel better. Between here and Reddit my blocklist probably has multiple hundreds of places that do nothing but wallow in misery or post about how everything sucks. Long story short I’m way less on social media now.
Anyway, it didn’t make it better. I’m still on here, occasionally, and now I’m finding that I also fucking hate it; everyone sounds miserable, no one is kind to themselves, there is a lot of hostility in general in relation to a bunch of severely inconsequential stuff—like serious heated arguments about which flavour of sponsored diarrhoea is less disgusting when consumed—I’ve even started noticing it in myself hanging out here. What I realised is that all the platforms I’ve left, I did so because they went to shit and lost any semblance of what I liked them for. It would’ve been fine if it was one facet, but it’s fucking everything, everywhere, and all at once, IRL and online.
Everything is invented, perfected, sometimes repeated and remembered, gentrified, commodified, sold for a profit, repackaged, dropshipped, consumed, regurgitated, optimised, dopamine fracked (shameless self promotion), ran through ChatGPT, summarised by Claude, and then I get to interact with it - maybe. If I subscribe for $9.99/wk. Just… so many things have become like that, it’s insufferable to ingest and even harder to create, because you have to meet that standard if you want the herd to see you, and for me creating for no audience at all is no fun, and empty proclamations of “just create!” help very little.
I have about a billion different hobbies (ADHD) and they don’t help or pay off at all, maybe just to distract myself and burn time faster, but there’s no enjoyment anymore. Everything kind of sucks there too.
And taking myself away from screens only serves to make me feel even worse - here a lot of my friends and a lot of my hobbies live one way or another; that’s why I used to love computers. Out there, people hate me for being gay, I have to mask constantly, and I faint from the summer heat. And now I can’t even love computers in peace at home, because even they have been mercilessly slopped by our sacreligious overlords.
I don’t feel depressed - I have a great job, friends, money, stuff, hobbies, social norms say I’m not really supposed to be depressed with all of that anyway. But I’m really struggling to actively enjoy anything anymore, and I’m honestly beginning to think it’s not me but everything else lol, as egotistical as that is. Except it’s not just me, it’s very prevalent - everyone knows everything sucks, and that’s another reason everything keeps sucking even harder. Oh well. I enjoyed writing this, a little, for a moment.
Sorry for rambling.
A similar option is to split your social media accounts in two. Keep everything political on one account, only dive into that account occasionally/rarely.
For your main account, keep it subscribed to all of your hobbies and unsubscribe from anything political. For this account switch your news feed into “uplifting news” feeds.