To feel like this world is going to shit right now?

[Notbigandnotclever]

I am just so sad right now. My heart is breaking over so many innocent people killed in recent months. Terrorist attacks around the world, overflowing refugee camps housing people fleeing from war, people shot for seemingly no reason other than their sexuality, an MP shot doing her job. When will it stop ffs? What on earth is going on?

I feel right now like I just want to get off the world. I really don't want to live in a world with such malice, hatred and spite in it. I can normally feel sad but then let things wash over me. Not anymore though. It's too much. So much darkness it is horrible. The weather is matching it as well. Dark, cloudy, dreary, fucked up and all over the place.

Does anyone else want to bail?

I feel the exact same op, the world seems so full of evil. I think the constant media coverage plays a big part. I tune off from time to time to just go in a bubble, too much bad news is not good for anyone. I was finding it hard to sleep last night and a certain festival in china that upsets me constantly and that poor baby girl in the news recently just kept playing in my head. How and why are people so evil to such innocents.

Blame the media, person does good does not sell newspapers, but it seems person does something bad or horrendous does.

The news is always doom and gloom. Stop watching/reading. The world will still be full of bad things but your own thoughts will be on something you are experiencing. Spend half an hour doing something nice instead of watching or reading about nasty stuff.

and finally.....................you are in control

I grew up with the "Protect and Survive" ads on TV - anyone else remember them?
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4743384.stm

For those of you a bit younger than me. They were a series of Public Information films / Infomercials telling you what to do in the event of a Nuclear Attack. People genuinely believed there was a high probability there would be all out Nuclear war at some point.

Britain was also subject to an IRA bombing campaign at the time.

Different times bring different risks but I don't think now is more risky.

person does good does not sell newspapers unless they are dead.

Sadly, there wasn't much coverage of all the good Jo Cox was doing while she was alive. Too boring. It's all coming out now.

Yes. I honestly believe that things are actually going to shit, i.e. that this isn't a state of mind that can be done away with by having a hot bath and a cup of hot chocolate, but actually - objectively - things are going to shit. I could point to stats that bear that out - widening inequality, worsening climate change, increasing polarisation of the political climate, increasing vocalisation of hatred and intolerance, increasing power of a very small oligarchy, very much including owners of mass media, to dictate the terms of political debate.

I don't believe it's something we should ignore 'for the sake of peace-of-mind' either. I think things have got to such a pitch that we HAVE to intervene, whether we like it or not - ethically, the things that are happening are now so bad that you can't morally justify turning away unless you're actually ill.

We're going to look back on the last two decades as a golden age. That level of peace and cooperation is an aberration and like all aberrations, temporary.

Normal service will be resumed shortly; It will not be pleasant.

Don't campaign - do something.

And man hate is as bad as any other kind. I'd report that post if I could be bothered .

There have been and always will be bad things happening in the world.

I think the 24-hour news channels, hourly news updates on radio stations, and the always-on access to the internet we have on our handheld devices these days, makes it feel like the world is a lot worse than it really is.

I have to zone some of it out too, otherwise I get caught up too much in all of the dreadfulness and end up spiralling downwards. Haven't done it for a while but I can feel it catching at me - too much shit going on.
I feel so bad for so many people, despite having a pretty comfortable life myself. It's not healthy, but I'd rather be me than just ignore it all.

I agree that the rolling 24 hour news and social media is a great contributor in forming our perceptions of how bad it is (and it is bad). There is so much hatred in the world. I know it has always been this way to some extent or the other but what really upsets and confounds me is that even with all of this information at our fingertips and the knowledge of history we still don't seem to learn. There is so much hate, violence, intolerance and bigotry .

I used to be a complete news hound and I had to scale back significantly and turned to audiobooks and music around the house and in the car as the constant bad news was really adversely affecting me.

Here are a few stats to put things into a different perspective
1994 Rwanda - 800,000 people killed in 100 days in ethnic genocide (8000 people a day)
1992 -1995 Balkans War (inc Srebrinica massacre)
1988 Pan Am 103 blown up over Lockerbie killing all passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground as the plane fell on to residential areas
1983 -1985 Ethopian Famine 400,000+ die
1974 - 1979 Khmer Rouge Cambodia - 2 million killed

These are just a few of the ones that leap to mind when I look back over my life I am sure there are many more.

Current events feel more raw because we see them immediately and up close on TV. We find out about things at the time not after the event. Bad things have always happened and I don't think now is worse.

I agree with rivertam - toxic, violent, entitled masculinity is a huge part of this.

In the past you could turn off.

Turn off the radio.
Turn off the tv.
Not read the newspaper.

If you were not interested in the rest of the world, you could avoid it. You could live in a bubble. I think perhaps there is something of a longing for that going on at the moment.

Now, people carry their phones in their pockets. Phones with the internet on. You don't have to look at the news. Your friends will tell you and express their opinions. You never escape it. You are required to join the conversation in many ways.

I am often shocked at how many people don't remember historical events in our lifetimes.

Overall, I believe that people are much as ever they were - but the state of the planet, and our impact on it has worsened considerably in my own experience.

You just do what you can.

The world has always been like this:

• Genocide in Rwanda
• Crusades
• Burning 'witches' at the stake
• World War I
• World War II
• Extermination of the Jews
• Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
• Irish 'troubles' and IRA bombings
• Vietnam War
• China's cultural revolution under Mao
• Russia's starvation of the people in Ukraine
• Serb/Croats
• The plague
• The Spanish flu
• Slavery
• Child labour in the early industrial revolution
• Potato famine

I won't even go back to things in the Roman Empire and Egypt.

We have our issues but this is still the safest time to be alive.

"I am often shocked at how many people don't remember historical events in our lifetimes."

Yeah me too. Terrorism has been a part of British life for ages and ages and ages. It's not a new thing; just a different motive behind the atrocities.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Manchester_bombing

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Bishopsgate_bombing

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing

I don't see it as about safe or not safe. I know that I can walk around the streets near my house without any large threat of violence. And I know that, and the fact I actually HAVE a house, make me tremendously privileged.

What I do see is a dramatic and rapid worsening of the context, to the point that I think that the world that we leave to our children is going to be very dramatically worse than the world that was left to us. And I can't see any way of preventing this, because most people can't see it coming. Climate change and loss of biodiversity are absolutely lethal, poisonous legacies to be leaving - both are already affecting us - but the vast majority of people just don't give a shit. And that's just the environmental - don't get me started on how black things look in the political sphere. And no, it's not the referendum - it's a change that's been coming since post-Fordism in the 70s.

I know bad things have always happened, but what I find scary right now is that there seems to be a mainstream legitimising of hate in this country that is new in my lifetime. I am genuinely scared of fascism at the moment.

I think what worries me is the sense of a rolling back of enlightenment values. We've fought so hard for women's rights, yet the response to the mass sexual assaults in Germany was 'don't dress provocatively you jezebels.'
Isis are entitled, death cultist, rapists. At the heart of it is this idea that they are right and anything that challenges their world view get annihilated. That's reflected in the Orlando shooting - entitled violent male annihilates what threatens his sense of self (gay people.) Stanford rapist sees passed out girl and is entitled to her body - then tries to destroy her reputation in court.
Linking so many of these events is this brittle sense of self coupled with violence. A healthy psyche can deal with viewpoints it doesn't agree with. I'm an atheist- but I have Christian, Sikh, Jewish and Muslim friends. I don't agree with their religious beliefs but I'm able to see the things that we have in common.
We are in great danger of losing our hard won secular freedoms - the rise of radical religious sects is nothing new, but this idea that we mustn't offend them because it's religionophobic is dangerous. No religion gets a free pass. No religion is beyond criticism. All ideologies, religious or otherwise need to be open to criticism and examination or we are doomed.

As a species, we have to get out of this 'agree with me or I destroy you' mentality.

And the eco stuff. The reality of that, and how soon our environment is going to be utterly trashed, is a new reality, and this generation of leaders seems to be unwilling or powerless to do the slightest thing about it.

When my children are grown up, if they ask me what happened to leave things in such a mess for them and what the hell my generation was playing at, I really won't know what to say

Me too, how bad. I don't know what scared me most, either - the relatively small amount of overt borrowing of fascist ideology and images that are easily recognised, or the huge, vast amount of stuff from the softer right (Gove, Boris) that has been legitimated yet represents a new, more evolved form of the same thing.

The 'enlightenment values' thing on Mumsnet makes me laugh. It's like the last 50 years of poststructuralism/postcolonialism/most political theory never happened here.

Global warming is not just one of those things. The world is in very very bad trouble.

On the political front, Brexit winning, then the extreme right wing Tories taking over indefinitely, and Trump getting into the White House, are deeply depressing and show that democracy just doesn't work when it is so easy to con people.

"I think what worries me is the sense of a rolling back of enlightenment values."

yup. I feel like the best and noblest and goodest people have an understanding that to be good is to recognise and work against base instincts. I feel like increasingly the existence of those impulses is considered to be legitimisation of behaving according to them - some filthy eve / psych nonsense about "natural" hateful behaviour or something

Paradoxically, although the Enlightenment achieved so much in freeing thought from the tyranny of bigoted religion, I actually feel now that the loss of religious-based thinking in ordinary people and the mainstream is a part of our problem. The idea of "oooh I shouldn't" only seems to apply to food now, which is a fucking disaster.

To be clear, I don't believe you need religion to be an ethical and moral person. But traditionally, neighbourly and generous attitudes have been dished out to the mainstream in this vehicle - to the extent that they have been dished out at all.

I agree RiverTam but people will make every excuse possible to avoid the issue of toxic masculinity and male violence