Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.

“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”

https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman

Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind.

Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging.

Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.

As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:

https://leash.ax

I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it

The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.

The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.

[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.

One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white. Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me. Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media

gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"

closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.

example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.

a cheap way of assessing relevance score.

That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution.

Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates.

My focus is insane when adrenaline hits.

I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.

"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."

- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)

I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.