Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world. Researchers say the answer isn’t to stop following current events—it’s to build healthier habits around how, when, and where we get our news.
My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.
“The human mind has not adapted to this level of bad news”
Yet
I’m going to stare into the abyss until it blinks first
I feel like it kind of has.
Otherwise, people who are about 40+ years old would all be driven mad by now.
Umm. I am driven mad.
That’s our secret, we just hide it well.
bro I just turned 40 and… it doesn’t seem far off
I think I was wrong, the human mind adapts on the fly however it needs to. I should have kept it closer to the original: “The human brain has not adapted to this level of bad news.” All of our minds have adapted, right, one way or another?
We must leave behind the fiction that a God created us. There is no God, we have no souls.
its by design from murdoch, to putin and bannon its called flooding the zone, so your other heinous acts get drowned out. its whats trump doing in the news right, epstein is barely registering at all on news right now.
I use RSS now for news.
Its been so liberating. I can read offline, save articles for later, no ads or paywalls, no algorithms, no bullshit.
I highly recommend.
I’ve been doing the same. The issue is finding high quality feeds with full articles. Most are just a snippet of the article with a link saying “read the full story at…” (The Verge, PBS, The Guardian). Others are even worse and just link directly to the shit-laden website (Ars Technica). The best quality news feeds I’ve found are Techdirt and The Intercept. Would you care to share some good RSS news feeds you’ve found?
So for those style websites, FreshRSS (my server)/and CabyReader (my client) offer options to parse the linked article for content.
They mostly get the full article without tinkering but other sites I use css selectors to get the article section of the website.
Then I press the “parse” button if the article is just a summary and it’ll get the whole article.
That said, I do put more emphasis on following individuals rather than large sites like those you mentioned. So I have a couple dozen individual blogs followed, but also a handful of sites like NewScientist, BigThink, AndroidPolice, TinyBuddha, VICE
Okay, that’s very cool. I’m into self-hosting and will look into running FreshRSS to parse sites and feed me articles. Much appreciated!
what’s your favourite rss aggravator?
What’s an RSS?
It stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s basically a subscriber feed of websites - you choose a website to get updates about and the aggregator will keep an ear out for updates.
I mostly use it for webcomics.
Oh, great… more bad news.
I want to read this in Marvin’s voice from HHTTG
Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’ve got me delivering bad news.
I’d argue that it was never designed for this much stimulation full stop. All the constant noise and things competing for attention all the time around you. Bad news is just the nasty icing on the cake.
One of the reasons I LOATHE advertising. They are legitimately overstimulating all of society and manipulating their thoughts at the same time. They are in actual fact, driving the world into literal psychosis. These people are beyond evil.
The environment we have created is so fast-paced and complex that our brains are often in a constant state of overwhelm. We were never meant to be always available, always aware of everything and always caught in the belief that we have to react to everything at a time.
I strictly get my news on the toilet
Your brain wasn’t designed at all.
Iteratively designed by evolution to maximize survival, I guess
Yeah, so you could easily say we evolved to, or our brains evolved to… And so on
No, in fact that is still teleological.
Is it? I’d guess ‘to evolve to do smth’ doesn’t necessarily need to be teleological. IIRC the verb ‘evolve’ means the fittest getting randomly selected, no?
I think I understand where you’re coming from but I think it’s fundamentally different to ‘being designed with a specific goal in mind’
Evolved into or evolved with may reduce the implication of an intention.
- Our brains evolved into structures capable of supporting complex language.
- Our brains evolved with the capacity for complex language.
Don’t mind me, I had a prof who was uptight about it. I am sure it would only matter for formal or technical writing, like a scientific paper.
Oh I don’t mind. I just thought it an interesting question. I would like to know your prof’s reasoning for his insistence.
Because that would mean that ‘evolve’ can also be used teleologically, imho.
Since we’re all being pedantic about words here, we wouldn’t say our brains evolved to X because it’s our ancestors’ evolutionary precursor brains that evolved into ours.
I’d suggest we just back off the pedantry in general. The headline could have said “your brain isn’t suited to…” if they wanted to avoid the possible implication of a deity but I think we know what they were trying to say.
I just took issue with the very literal interpretation of the phrase “not designed for” and I couldn’t hold my tongue
well, my fingers, I guess
Evolution did as much design as my socks design themselves to stay in their drawer. Evolution doesn’t design, it works with what it has and nothing else. It doesn’t even optimize because optimization requires choosing between options with intent. Evolution has zero intentions. Evolution creates un-“optimized” things that go extinct all the time, but it’s not because it “failed” at designing because that implies it “tried” to design, but because it’s not a designer, it can’t design. No design made fish have legs. No design gave elephants their tusks and no design gave flies their wings. Evolution won’t ‘design’ new vertebrae segments, but they still might happen—it just won’t be because of any design.
Natural selection is actually technically an optimisation algorithm. Its just a kind of crappy one that only ever finds local maximas because it can’t traverse valleys (the thing just dies). So we end up with optical receptors on the wrong side of our retina. Ooof.
Neanderthals evolved to traverse valleys just fine
I don’t mean literal valleys.
That was just my highly-evolved sense of humour
And see where that got them!
Settle down.
Yeah I dunno about design as much as iterative adaptations over incomprehensibly large periods of time.
Figure of speech. Perhaps “optimized” would be more accurate?
Ok
And the people who are in charge and doing evil things know this and are using it to their advantage.
It’s literally written down as part of the playbook.
I remember when Majorie Taylor Greene left the government she made a comment about something regarding a playbook she was given when she first came to Congress. I wish someone would dig into that more because I’m fairly certain it contained things like how to belittle people when they ask serious questions or how to revert to whataboutisms as soon as you’re confronted with damning evidence.
There’s a book? A new one or is it just the usual suspects?
Project 2025 has a book.
I think Steve Bannon articulated the press blitz approach clearly even before that, back when he was a Trump inner circler, back in that farcical first term.
Amazing how much history rhymes.
Is Jar Jar the key to all of this?
How high are you
Right now? Not very much 😇
Its wild to see people type “this news isnt good for my mental health”. Like ignoring the planet dying is a price well paid for personal mental wellness. I guess we are doomed as a species. Its really humbling to learn our limits to change things.
The cognitive dissonance on display in this article is crazy. The idea that anyone should be concerned by the mental damaged caused by endless bad news before the impact of life in a world of bad news is just about the same as turning off smoke detectors in a fire to limit the stress they cause constantly going off (sorry I guess here it would be like asking people to build “healthier habits” about when they hear the alarm).
But the news isn’t really like that, though. Like, currently my news feed has multiple items on the aftermath of Trump’s Lincoln Reflecting Pool project. That is something on the other side of the continent with no impact on my life and which I cannot do anything about. Every local murder gets a news story, even though most individuals are much more at threat from other things. Apes together strong, but maybe not this together.
I’m not sure I understand what “build healthier habits around how, when and where we get our news” exactly means and how that would help. I mean if TACO drops bombs on little kids, I can’t think of how digesting this differently is going to be any healthier for me.
One thing I see a lot is the same event repackaged repeatedly with various headlines from different angles to elicit despair and outrage. If you heard about it once already, that is probably enough.
Spending an hour a day reading news from reputable sources is a lot healthier than doomscrolling questionable content for 8 hours on Reddit and Instagram.
If you say so, but he still diddled children.
It means that you are not in control of any of it. You can’t impact any of it meaningfully as a single force, at least in real time. People used to watch a “news hour” once a day. You could artificially recreate that, and then detatch for the other 23 hours using self control, muted phone notifications and browser filter extensions. And maybe your brain will thank you.
Of course you could have a separate rule for local alerts that may be more relevant, but local news is dying unfortunately, soo… You could probably just check in once a week to see how the surviving local paper verbatim reprints favorable press releases from the city’s PR person that they retain from the local municipal consultant group with a forgettable acronym.
What is the question here? You take kids to do your work?! Die! You even just slightly have sexual dreams about kids?! Die twice! Kids must be protected and sadly that doesn’t happen as much as you think. Anyhow.
Yooo, wtf?? Who the hell is having sexual dreams about kids? I mean if you are then it means you are probably sick and should get therapy for that. Help is available.
bad news, everyone: bad news is bad for you!
Switching from Reddit to Lemmy did wonders for my mental health. Less time doom scrolling, more time to engage with my hobbies
I feel the opposite, my feed is almost entirely people describing how the world is falling apart, how communism is good but not that communism, and Linux
Absolutely, lemmy has such a downer vibe to it, it’s not doing me any good using this platform lately.
We need more jokes around Lemmy, this is all communism this and that gays blahblahblah trump yapyapyap, holy cow. Sometimes I can’t help but doomscroll on Reddit, missing the community and the jokes and the friends I had there.
Voyager has the ability to filter anything you want, the moment you see some toxic bad news you can remove a keyword. The only reason I haven’t banned .world outright is because there are meme channels
You have control over what you see in your feeds. I was talking more about the volume in content on my feeds here. Could’ve worded my post better.
I’m spending more time away from social media.
I agree with you, but I also agree with people commenting. I think reddit and the other corporate social media have really got their algorithms tweaked in such a way to keep you addicted to scrolling their apps. And the addictive stimulation of doom scrolling part makes Lemmy better. But I also agree with the other posters. To paraphrase someone much smarter and funnier than me reality has a real downer bias to it lately.
I don’t engage with algorithmic content. I used Reddit through RSS and I browse Lemmy the same way.
The problem with doing that on Reddit is that there was so much trash in my feeds I ended up developing my own filter system to make scrolling through it manageable. It got to a point where it felt like I was spending more time blocking content than engaging with it. Lemmy’s smaller population means I’m spending less time reading and commenting, and spending more time doing other things with my life.
The gaming communities here are somehow even more miserable than reddit. I need different hobbies clearly.
This is a problem I struggle with philosophically. I have lived in the US with a degree of privilege and I feel the price for that should include knowing how the proverbial sausage is made, that is, knowing all the crap that is being done to allow me to live in (meager) comfort.
It’s Poor Things cranked up to eleven. The British empire is holding the beer of the American one. It’s just too much.
The continual rush of news, propelled by the addictive properties of the YouTube algo, have driven me quite mad, albeit, I suffer from behavioral health problems already. I haven’t found a balance to this.
I feel like, between starting to pay attention to politics in 2000 (also starting puberty), 9/11, the ensuing rise of authoritarianism, trump v1 and trump v2, I’ve achieved levels of depression and anxiety that have propelled me into a kind of nirvana.
Ultimately, I don’t want the human race to end, but the human race seems to. Why try fighting that?
It was never designed, because it evolved, and evolution did not stop in the stone ages.
Title is true even without the last two words.
Honestly it’s true with just the first 5 words.
But if you really think about it, only the first two words describe the problem perfectly
Right, but that’s not relevant to the point the article is trying to make.
