How do you cope with living in this depressing era

[Prendetew]

Posting here for traffic.

I know the news is always negative and every decade has its bad moments but the 2020s seem particularly shit. I'm in my 30s and I can't remember ever living in such a depressing time like this.

Epstein files, rise of the far right globally, ICE, student debt, rising house prices, billionaire oligarchs controlling media and governments, climate change, the list goes on...

This is the world we have to live in right now. How do you deal with it and not despair? I guess limiting news consumption is an idea but isn't that just burying your head in the sand?

It feels like we're all in some kind of pressure cooker of hatred, divisikn and angst and its not healthy. A friend suffered a racist attack last week. It was caught on video and yhe perpetrator had 0 shame, he was like a man possessed. It's really shook me how emboldened ignorant racists have become thanks to the likes of Trump/ Reform etc

While this was written in the Bible 2000 years ago it is accurate as a reflection of the Roman world and every country since then and the same has been true for every decade since in some part of the world or another, there has always been trouble and conflict and natural disasters
"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, ... 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places."
same stuff different times

I spent years worrying about nuclear war in my childhood and teens!
My best friends dad was a miner, in the Strike years. They had no money, no pay. She came to our house for tea a couple of times a week ( we weren’t rich) but my DM made the food stretch.
I’m not worried about ICE, I don’t live in USA. But we had no social media and I spent my teenage years reading books from the library.
I do think from a high, living standards are going downhill. But I can’t moan to my DP’s as they lived through the war and rationing.

I cope by not worrying about what is out of my control. I never loose sleep by things that hasn’t happened yet. Also, social media is not something I respect or rely on much for aside from funny stuff or travelling tips and pets.

You're part of the problem. Of all the terrible things going on in the world right now, all you care about is whining about immigration and some vague sense of lost national identity.

We have billionaires controlling the media and politics and pushing their agendas so we're all angry at each other and distracted. They are the ones pushing the anti immigration rhetoric as it suits them to get us riled up about foreigners rather than about them. Only the ignorant fall for it.

I'm so sick of the MAGAs, the Reform supporters peddling this narrative, spreading this hateful bile.

The hatred spewed by Trump/ Reform and their supporters is what is really defining this dark era for me. It was clear the person who abused my friend was one of those sort of people. It makes me sick to my stomach. It's like people are proud to be racist now

Well said, OP. It's concerning how many people fall for the propaganda. We can be upset about our greenbelt being built on and nature being destroyed on a massive scale without blaming every last thing on immigrants.

Exactly. How can people not see what's going on? We need better education as so many are so easily manipulated

I'm avoiding the news, taking pleasure in the small things and being grateful for my health.
I've lived through 40 years and apart from what felt like a very brief era from about 1996 to 2001 or so there has always been something horrible happening.
We may not have had social media but being a teenage girl in the late 90s and early 2000s very much had its pitfalls.

As new mothers our instincts to protect our baby is at peak so everything that happens in the world seems like a treat to them. I had my first baby in 1990. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Kuwait was being invaded. My dh was a news junkie. Everytime l heard the opening music my heart started to thump. I made an excuse to hide in the bathroom while he revelled in bombing and shooting. I thought my baby would have a horrible life. Today he is 35 and blossoming! Try not to take in too much news. Switch off. Enjoy your baby. Stay safe in your own little world. You have no control over these events. Its your time to mother and look after yourself.
The world has always been a tough place for certain people at different times.

Its phrased as natural disaster, but its part of general preparedness. They have been more explicit in EU countries materials and stated war as one of the things to be prepared for.

I was just about to say I live in NZ and this is just standard advice, and yes I am also surprised that the UK hasn't bothered about it until recent years, given that it is common in many countries.

I was born in Belfast at the start of the ‘Troubles’ and experienced bombs going off and people being murdered every other day. Thankfully my parents moved us to Scotland in the early 70s, taking us away from our extended family and sacrificing so much to keep us safe. So no, compared to that, life now is bliss!

I think it's incredibly arrogant or incredibly naive to believe we live in an extreme "depressing" era.

We have more luxury, more free time and too much time to think, and a sense that none of our safety or luxury should ever be questioned.

You don't have to go that far back in time to see what people had to put up with - Cold War, Cuban Missile crisis, world wars and the realisation that entire generations were wiped out, you could go on all night.

We should do better, but I don't believe that for those of us in the West, it's a relatively depressing time.

Sort out your news and social media algorithms. The more you pay attention to certain articles or posts the more you will be exposed to. Close them off and highlight as „nit interested”. Reading about all this negative stuff will not change anything in the world but will seriously impact your wellbeing. Don’t read Daily Mail.

I do think there's a bit of an end of days feeling at the moment tbh. Trust in the media, Government and other institutions is at an all time low, which feels like a dangerous place to be. We are also living at the very beginning of the AI revolution, which is predicted to escalate at an alarming rate in the next few years and will have far reaching and unseen consequences for humanity. I too find it overwhelming and sometimes have a strong desire to go and live off grid!

im 60 …there’s always been shit going on in every era of my life…..I don’t really think about the stuff going on outside of what I can control…..i don’t look at stuff on SM…,I just life my life….enjoy my part time work…..spending time with my kids and GC and my DM ….go on lots of holidays since mortgage was paid off 13 years ago….got a decent nhs pension….COL crisis I’m aware of but has not really affected me or my family or friends ( live in NW where most young people can still afford to buy a home)…..my DC have been able to buy homes in their early 20s and go on holidays ….my life is good ….their life is good…..I don’t let outside ‘news’ affect me

Quite! I have a severely disabled child, he is entitled to free education until 24. He gets help with living costs etc. I know I’m more hard up than most but even 60 yrs ago my child’s life would have been very different. Institution?

I know it’s not much but I do get paid for helping him, £83! It’s pittance in the grand scheme but also how amazing is it a government is paying me to care for my own child! Unthinkable years ago!

It pretty much has always been like this. Global warming? In previous decades it was the loss of the ozone layer and acid rain. Artificial intelligence is a misnomer, there is no intelligence involved just pattern recognition (hence the hallucinations). My MIL genuinely feared nuclear war might happen back in the 1960s, and frankly the Cold War never ended, it has been stalking us since WWII.

The only difference between then and now is that then, information spread slowly through newspapers who had time to fact-check (and risked prosecution for not doing so); and now, information is spread electronically and instantaneously, by people who don't want to fact-check if it slows them down and indeed may deliberately be spreading lies because there's no penalty for doing so.

Just watched the Netflix film Anniversary with Diane Lane and honestly… pretty grim.
It unsettled me more than I expected.
Anyone seen it? Thoughts?

If I spend more than 20 minutes reading the news I start feeling a bit ill.

Just minimise your media consumption and focus on your life and the people around you.

In the grand scheme of things this era is far less depressing than our ancestors faced. Let’s face it watching half your children die of deadly diseases and being helpless is pretty depressing. Having to go outside and poo in a toilet in a hut was pretty depressing. Ending up living in a workhouse because your husband dies was pretty depressing. Time to get some perspective I think. Maybe book a holiday?

This post is literally an example of the problem we have today. So many buzz words, so much polarisation. People who need homes aren't your enemy. People from other countries aren't your enemy. People with a different political perspective aren't your enemy. While you are separating yourself from people you think are too different, on the global stage politicians are calling each other friend and doing diplomacy. A Labour member actually recommended having Nigel Farage as US ambassador instead of Mandelson. Even the Brexit negotiators in the EU all had meals together. Because blind hatred is stupid and changes nothing.

Make sure you switch off from the news and scrolling social media. Make time for things you enjoy. Bad things have always happened in every decade. I agree with previous posters though, the Internet is magnifying everything.

Better make the most of the next 4 years then and hope I'm in the centre of the nuclear blast. Worrying about it won't make any difference to the likelihood of disaster so I'll pour my love into my family, live well and work hard until it all goes to shit

Get off social media (you won’t I imagine)
Work hard, play hard and invest in your family and friends
Chose an area that really bothers you and volunteer locally where you can see positive and sustainable change inch by inch ( will you?)
stop naval gazing and virtue signalling
Have some kids and you won’t have time to scratch your fanny let alone ruminate duck x