Stopping myself from scrolling Twitter several times a day and avoiding reading the national/international news this week has really been beneficial for me, I think.
I've mostly just been reading the local news and Ars Technica to keep up with what's going on in the parts of the world that may actually impact me. Are any of you on similar regimes?
Ideally, I'd be able to inform myself mostly through Gemini, but sometimes it is good to know what's going on in my immediate vicinity.
2 years ago 路 馃憤 martin, jsreed5, mimas, eph
Doom scrolling is like picking a scab. Congrats on taking back control.
Figure out a collection of subjects which matter to your daily decsision making.
Find the people who aggregate, synthesize, and integrate all of the periodical events into a cohesive summary of each subject.
Actively optimize and adjust over time as subjects come in and out of scope.
Judge the fitness of your current subjects/sources by how much time the process of updating steals from other activity. Eg. a long form deep dive listenable video essay on one of your core subjects may not take as much time away from you as reading an article because the video can be backgrounded.
Hope that helps! 路 2 years ago
I have been using twitter for news purposes but as soon as musk has it i'm out - i also ars to keep up with tech and sci etc. apple music/tv got the axe this week:-) 路 2 years ago
I have stopped reading national US news and have switched to occasionally reading local news and The Toronto Star over NewsWaffle. Other than that, my news generally comes from friends or (believe it or not) web forums. 路 2 years ago
I started tapering off social media in 2018 and closed almost all of my accounts in 2020. Now the only social media site I use regularly, if you can even call it that, is YouTube. It's massively helped my mental state. These days I get the majority of my world news over Gemini via NewsWaffle, and I get local news either by municipal e-mail lists or from friends and family. 路 2 years ago
I wish I had that self control with limiting news consumption. We'd all probably be a bit saner at the end of each day doing that. I'm glad it's working for you.
Along that same vein I'm starting a project soon that has something to do with limiting impulsive phone usage. So maybe I'll be on a similar information diet in not too long. 路 2 years ago