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.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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My brain was not designed for anything. It was not designed.
We must leave behind the fiction that a God created us. There is no God, we have no souls.
"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
Sure it has, meet my brain's healthy levels of bitter sarcasm and bitter cynicism!
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.
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?
bro I just turned 40 and... it doesn't seem far off
Your brain is one of the most artificial things in existence. How many years did you spend in formal education in one form or another? What is education other than a way of shaping a mind to a certain form?
That's the mind, not the brain. The way I see it, the opposite mistake that I made elsewhere in the thread.
What do you think the mind is other than a physical thing directly molded by the environment around it?
I guess I consider the mind something that emerges from what the brain does. I'm sure it could be defined in other ways, though.
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I strictly get my news on the toilet
It was never designed, because it evolved, and evolution did not stop in the stone ages.
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.
bad news, everyone: bad news is bad for you!
That does sound like some Professor Farnsworth shit, I tell you hwhat.
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 remember coming back from a long backpacking trip, totally disconnected from the media. When I got back I couldn't stand TV, especially commercials, for a while.
"where we get our news."
And then they link to Reuters. LOL
In the past you didn't get everything on earth reported to you. Now I think, "Do I really need to know 30 people died in a bus crash in Peru? What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?"
I think the bigger issue is actually more on the positive side than the negative. In a social media world, it is hard to gain esteem from realistically achievable effort.
I'll use my hobby, woodworking, as an example. I'm a hobbiest woodworker. I'm a far better woodworker than all of my family and all except maybe one or two of my friends. But then again, all the others don't do it as a hobby. They have their own pursuits that I can't begin to match their skill in. I can show my works to those in my immediate circle and receive genuine admiration and praise for a job well done. My work is legitimately impressive to those around me.
But on social media? Suddenly I'm comparing myself to people who have done this all day everyday for 30 years as their profession. Or I'm comparing myself to people who present a very curated version of their work. I can't do this full time. I have a day job. I will never be as good at this as someone who spent decades doing this and nothing but this. And if I compare myself to people like that, then it will make my own work feel less valuable.
We weren't meant to compare ourselves to the most skilled people on Earth at every single activity and craft. We're meant to produce things and to make things and do things that are legitimately impressive to those around us, but are still achievable with realistic effort. You shouldn't have to spend decades doing something before you can achieve even a modicum of social esteem. That's not how humans are evolved to exist. We're met to live in and seek to impress relatively small groups of people.
I think you can relate that to the whole idea of lifestyle comparison you hear about on social media. People posting glamorous vacations, shopping, cars, etc gives the false impression that everyone else is living better than you.
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.
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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.
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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.
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