Life is certainly less stressful if you ignore all the terrible things... unless a terrible thing happens to you and everyone ignores you.
Just like voting has almost zero effect. However, is not voting wise?
In what direction would society move if nobody watched the news?
As for voting, I find these tools that ask you questions and tell you which candidates/parties best match your beliefs to be enough to know how to cast my vote. Not that it really matters, as you've said but it still lets me do my civic duty without the years of stress and anxiety in-between elections and during the elected's mandate. I'll leave it up to other to get needlessly outraged by following the news.
We need more people voting and speaking to their representatives, and fewer people outraged about something some random brainless celebtrity said.
If you want to be educated voter, pick any journal or periodical like The Economist or The New European. Their journalism will actually cover an issue in some depth, from whatever is their biased perspective.
But those are news too. Why are we judging news based off the worst examples? If you have a problem with the news you are consuming, find some other source. Don't write off all news consumption as bad.
I do not watch or read news daily, so when I went in a vacation at the hotel I had nothing else better to do then open the TV. There was some big outrage that the president mumbled something racist(he was inside a car and people were lips reading) - again not in US. I realized what I was missing by not watching TV, I am ignoring all the useless drama. The other part of the news that is not politics is also mostly irrelevant crap.
The thing is that there is almost nothing we can do as individuals, elections are 4 years apart and sometimes people organize and manage to change the prime minister with big protests but that is when something so big happened that even I knew about it.
What could work much better is a weekly summary that ignores things that happened this week, so it will be like a filter for minor stuff and all the events reported would have been better digested and all involved parties would have had the time to respond.
There are some rare events that should not be ignored, and this are large enough that will surface, a local example is this incident that eventualy caused protests, some resignations but probably nothing actually major changed to improve safety(unfortunately we have a few horrible incidents related with fire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectiv_nightclub_fire
The opposite of that I do would be me having to read or watch 3 different reports on same maybe relevant stuff and decide what is my favorite interpretation.
Add on top of that the propaganda by US to start their wars by fabricating stuff, now when I read some report about 1 million people in camps in China I will always have a doubt the numbers and facts are real, or the interview with persons could be fabricated, so with news from far away is double pointless to be on top daily, is nothing you can do about it today so it can wait a week and you can never be sure it is not manipulation.