Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

One thing is read the article, not just the headline. Get the nuance, learn what’s actually happening, see what people are doing to react. You’ll not feel as frozen if you understand that a fluid situation has many directions it can take and it’s not set in stone.

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"

Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how thrilled they are about it.

The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.

Platforms are basically running an animal domestication program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and status for extremely low cognitive work.

So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes, clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"

As one of the seemingly few people who actually do read the article and not just the headline, it makes all the discussion people have around news infuriating.

Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time, and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the details, etc.

Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through the article carefully and following through in factchecking outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all that, it feels like no one else does the same.

If you ever read an article about something you are knowledgeable about you might find that the content is just as misleading or downright wrong as the headline.