Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been following the coronavirus news since mid January, spending hours a day on twitter and reddit looking at virus and financial news. There are days I take a break from it all, but overall I feel like I want to bear witness to the events as much as possible. I firmly believe the outbreak and the economic devastation are the most important events of my lifetime and it’s worth staying informed no matter how grim the news.

I don’t recommend everyone do the same, and I definitely don’t pass on all shear weight of all that’s going on to my wife, but someone’s got to try and keep up with the zeitgeist and make informed decision for the sake of my family. My hunch is we’re in for some bad socioeconomic times, worse than most are predicting, and I’m trying to do due diligence spotting trends as they start happening.

Ideally I’ll look back at this post and laugh at all the wasted energy chasing the impossibly fast news cycle...

One thing I’ve been doing is creating a list of predictions about where we are headed in order to be able to look back and evaluate whether I was able to process the firehouse of news into consequences. At least that part is fun.

> got to try and keep up with the zeitgeist and make informed decision for the sake of my family. My hunch is we’re in for some bad socioeconomic times, worse than most are predicting

This really resonated with me. While most seem to think that a return to normalcy is right around the corner, I can't shake this feeling that the world is in the early stages of multiple, massive (and potentually rapid) once-in-a lifetime paradigm shifts. Not knowing how to position myself and my family for the future (and not even knowing where to start) leaves me with this growing sense of urgency and desperation that ultimately manifests as a frantic, nonstop search for any and all information that might help.

There's got to be a better way to handle this, and I'm sure there are others out there that feel the same way. I wonder if its possible to get some sort of crowd-sourced intelligence platform built that can filter out the noise to help provide accurate, actionable information and extrapolation into trends without it devolving into some end-of-days prepper forum.

If anyone's interested in helping build such a thing, or if one already exists, please let me know!

I'm glad there are some people taking this approach, but I just can't do it. There's way too much, and the majority of it is fear based and predicated on incomplete models and assumptions. And it just feeds my anxiety with information that is rarely actionable. I also feel like there's a danger of getting so caught in the weeds of the day to day headlines that the bigger picture is somewhat lost, leading to less accurate personal predictions.

So I'm staying informed, but mainly through local news (because that's where the majority of actionable information will come from).

> There are days I take a break from it all, but overall I feel like I want to bear witness to the events as much as possible.

I've been an information junkie for most of my life, and over time I've taken the approach of taken (at most) a few topics that I 'stay on top of', and do my best to restrict going down too many other rabbit holes.

In the past I've tried to ration all my information intake, but I've come to the conclusion that there's definitely a value to 'experiencing' things as they happen, even if it's mostly the online information firehose. The coronavirus being possibly (and hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, makes it one of those topics.

The one reason why I sometimes shy away from the 'full experience' is when I notice the topic depresses me or causes anxiety. With the coronavirus, for some reason, I don't feel any of that (yet).

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