It's not pure choice, though. Because people react stronger to outrage, news tend to focus on such stories, so you end up seeing disproportionally more of them in the feed by default. You have to actively seek out more balanced media if you want that.

So you mean to say it IS choice, which is being exercised to choose outrage-inducing material for profit.

I mean to say that it's not a conscious choice most of the consumers of news media, but yes, it absolutely is a choice by the producers.

Yeah. I always find it a strong tell when people make statements like “make the world a bit less shitty” or “… in reaction to the horribleness of everything”. The world is no more shitty than it was 40 years ago - but the general public perception of the world seems to have gotten much bleaker.

Like you, I attribute a lot of that to social media. I left Twitter and Facebook a few years ago and my outlook on life got much better. I want my news to be balanced. Not all positive or all negative. I want to be pandered to sometimes, and sometimes challenged on my world views. So I found sources that would give me that.

I totally agree with your comment - you media diet is pure choice. Make it a healthy diet for you.

> The world is no more shitty than it was 40 years ago - but the general public perception of the world seems to have gotten much bleaker.

I'll call bullshit (what is it about a thread on the media that so often necessitates this?).

I don't have an objective measure for shittiness, but in terms of the bleakness of public perception of the world I feel more confident in making a comment: forty years ago, The Day After had just aired.

GenX wasn’t moping around not having sex or kids or fun because they were upset about the state of the world. Even in the freaking blitz they were having more sex and kids and fun than Generation Eeoyore.

I don't know how to comment on how much sex the kids are having these days without sounding like a creep, but if you weren't there, you'll need to take my word that the cold war had its highly bleak moments involving fear of armageddon and the AIDS epidemic, with which nothing today really compares. Today has more ennui and blatant idiocy, perhaps, but we were pretty good at that too.

Perceptions are subjective, though, and in many ways defined by the baseline. When you've been living with constant fear of a nuclear war in the background for 30 years (or for new kids, since you were born), it loses its edge. I'm from the USSR originally, and I remember the shelter drills we had occasionally in the kindergarten - we all had our own tiny gas masks that we had to locate, put on, and then orderly proceed to the shelter. Then there were civic defense classes in school, with diagrams explaining in detail the effects of a nuclear weapon on a city, how far away you have to be to not be exposed to the blast wave and the burns, how deep of a shelter one needs to have to avoid irradiation, how to seal the apartment windows against immediate fallout etc. I can't say that it wasn't depressing, but we didn't panic about it either - it was just a part of life, things being usual, just like they have been when we were born.

OTOH for someone who lived in a world where a full-on nuclear exchange was not considered a serious possibility for decades, suddenly facing this possibility for the first time in their life, panic should be the expected response.

I attended a school assembly in middle school (!) which featured an emaciated woman dying of aids that had gotten from being raped while jogging in a public park.

People weren’t walking around refusing to be teenagers because look at this terrible world we live in. This combination of sanctimonious, depressed, and boring probably hasn’t been seen on this continent since the 1700s in New England.

Forty years ago, Threads aired. Watch it if you dare.