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Comment by Fischgericht | Hacker News Reader

- Wake up - Grab a coffee and two cigarettes - Go take the big pile of pills "against" depression and autism - Read some world news - Get some more pills - Take a shower, thinking about killing myself, but telling myself "pills will start working in 20 minutes" - Get another coffee and another two cigarettes until second batch of pills kick in - Start coding

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Skipping the world news might be good for your mental these days

I've gone cold turkey over the holiday break and I literally felt the anxiety melting away.

Yeah, I personally take the view that any really important news will find me anyways

Yep, I've adopted that mentality. Finally. I wish it hadn't taken me so, so long. My wife even commented that I'm much less on-edge, much less prone to find the negative in things. It's sort of like a switch inside of my brain has been welded permanently to the off position, it's pretty wild how it only takes 2-3 weeks for the brain to sort itself out after many years of being stuck in some cycle.

I haven’t watched/read the news in years and I feel so liberated from it. When something worth knowing happens, I still hear about it. But not consuming news gives me the space I need to think independently about things from the influences of mass produced media. It’s beautiful

I am going on a year from watching. feels good.

Serious question: so to all posters above me in this thread, do you do HN regularly as a social but just avoid other sites?

Pretty much, yes. Reading WSJ/NYT is fun but not productive at all

yeah been off that as long as the news. reddit, HN, github, & usenet are my social now which is funny because only 1 or 2 actual friends probably even know about these sites. i am waiting for aim to make the big come back! I only go on socsh every blue moon for a couple friends that refuse to communicate on anything else and to see pictures of all my cousins and their families -usually around the holidays to spell check their names. haha.

Basically, yeah. I find that the aggregation here is a dozen cuts above what I can find elsewhere and the "news" is tends to be things that are at least tech adjacent and when they're not they're genuinely "newsworthy."

Yeah, I don’t frequent many websites. I go on Facebook occasionally intermittently, but go through phases where I deactivate it. I also go on my university website for my online learning but I don’t go on many websites.

I recently dropped $99 to get the Financial Times delivered to my door six days a week. If something truly important happens, I'll have the chance to read about it. But I can't doomscroll for hours.

Doesn't work for me. I feel much safer tracking the disintegration of civilization in real-time, making predictions based on that information, and adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly. So I must newspapers from all around the world every morning, even if it's painful.

I have to admit though: Yesterday I cheated. On new years morning I skipped all world news to beat 2025 to it, delaying the inevitable by a day. Worked well, as it turns out. And I wasn't too smelly due to it, either :)

> adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly

No offense but unless you have at least $1b or are incredibly lucky you're screwed no matter how prepared you are.

Menial and positive stories aren't as engaging resulting in the "news" being nothing but a list of all the awful shit that happened recently.

Enjoy life while you still have it. As another commenter already said, important stories will find you anyways.

Very off-topic here, but no, money is not the key when trying to find a spot on this planet that nobody does have on their radar when it comes to fucking up the planet on short notice :)

Also: Different people, different coping strategies. I don't want to wait until the "Active Shooter!" cell broadcast message finds its way to my phone. :)

For some people, potentially especially those on the spectrum, having as much information as possible to work with might bring mental security and stability.

People are different, brains are diverse.

I'm also on team Keep An Eye On Things™, and approximately none of it really feeds into an anxiety loop. (There's a tiny sliver of the pie that does, but it's easy enough to talk myself off that ledge and go engage in a Weltschmerzspaziergang[0].)

I know it's stuff I can't control, and that's sort of the point. I want to know what I can't control so that I can know what I can control, if that makes sense.

0: Otherwise known as "touching grass."

Spot on.

Closely tracking things you can not control may provide a sense of control to some.

Or the other way round: Crunching enough data and building reasonable predictions based on that takes away the element of surprise, and the element of surprise for some translates to anxiety.

For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.

It's all part of the actuarial mindset. The entire point of the exercise is to arrive at a model of reality that has some degree of predictive power.

> For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.

I feel exactly the same way. It means that I have no idea what those things will wind up costing me, and that's the anxiety trigger as far as I'm concerned.

That's a fair point, I just want to call out no one except you can tell you what you can control, since you're able to just "do things."

Genuinely interested what the downvoters find offensive or unreasonable about me having a coping strategy that works for preventing me to kill myself...?

After all, I am not criticizing those who have different coping strategies to protect their mental health, including to keep world news at distance. That just does not work for ME.

Care to enlighten me?

I found the off hand implication that civilization is disintegrating to be sophomoric.

Civilization might not be disintegrating, but we sure are living in “interesting times” compared to the life two or three decades ago. It definitely feels worse, so I can empathize. I certainly struggle with home affordability, or lack thereof. Plus other things but home ownership is a big one.

Maybe you’re better off financially and emotionally, so you find it sophomoric - like a parent looking at a kid in high school struggling with their emotions.

While I do think wealth inequality is a big issue of our time, I don't think it is an issue of civilizational level disintegration -- that would look like the total amount of wealth in our society decreasing, which by all accounts doesn't seem to be happening.

While I'm far from rich, I have done well the last couple years after many years of being poor. But even when I was poor I looked around and saw lots of people who were wealthy and doing well, which I took as a general measure of how society was doing, instead of using my own situation or those in my immediate circle as a measure of that.

Understood, thank you.

Just be clear: This is my DAILY morning routine for ages. So outside of that 20 minutes "Weltschmerz [1] shower" time window I am not suicidal. :)

[1] "Weltschmerz" - the ONLY German word you'll ever need to learn.

Thank you, I appreciate the new vocabulary. However, I still enjoy Schadenfreude.

They strangely work quite well together

epicaricacy being more or less the English equivalent btw

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