Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Statements like this seem to originate in that environment polluted by propaganda that the previous comment mentions. For example, I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain". Sure, there are almost certainly individual programs within that organization that are wasteful and aren't the best use of our tax dollars, but there is (or at least was as of a few weeks ago) broad bipartisan support for this type of investment in humanity and stopping it will clearly inflict pain on people and this administration is at best indifferent to that pain.

Just using your example tho, I feel there are two kinds of framing.

1. This is literally a worse outcome than the alternative you prefer. You should care enough to try to fight it politically, especially if you are well positioned to do so.

2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.

Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.

I think a lot of people walked from a world where they had no idea what the normal tumult of human political society is like, even normal American political messiness, and into the world of 24/7 current political news without any context what came before. It’s like, the sausage has always been made this way, you’re just now finding out.

I say these things and it always pisses people off. But I don’t recommend not caring, the world moves forward one micrometer at a time by caring, it’s just not worth the existential angst I see so often.

>2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.

>Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.

To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while. Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care about what either of us said 100 years from now.

> Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years?

My family could be murdered in front of me and it wouldn't qualify as a trivia question for you or most other people in one year. This feels like a version of stoicism that missed the point of stoicism.

You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally.

99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.

And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would never know about unless presented to you.

As I write this I’m thinking about one of my best friends, who literally has been so depressed because of world news he reads on Reddit this year that he can’t get out of bed, stopped going to work and got fired. There are appropriate and healthy levels to care about things.

How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?

I don’t connect distant political to my own personal experience of meaning in the world, so i can’t follow this line of reasoning.

> I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain".

Maybe try asking people why they think it’s bad?

Here’s people arguing it’s doing all kinds of destructive behavior, - like setting up a fake vaccine clinic for the CIA.

https://youtu.be/wtgT_u2rWs0?si=bFX476_JgC81vJuM

I haven’t seen anyone arguing against these claims. They just say “oh but it’s helping poor people” without answering whether or not it’s been doing covert work for the CIA under the pretense that it’s aid.

>How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?

The primary difference I see between these two is how you define "your immediate experience". At what distance does something become "distant political changes" that can be ignored? Because almost all of us lead "par for humanity" lives that "don’t matter in the long run" so why care about any of it if that is the extent of what matters?

Are you arguing that USAID is entirely some CIA operation or are you arguing for throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Because this is not evidence that the entire organization is a net negative for the world.

It is. It's just tip of the iceberg. All they do is foment troubles in other countries while providing high paid employment for nepo babies. It's amazing how Americans downplay direct interference in other countries internal affairs with long lasting negative impacts (like people attacking government healthcare workers during vaccine drive) while claiming russians spending 10k usd on an election cycle in which parties spent billion+ was WW3.

Al though the current US admin is just bringing in USAID within the admin controls, USAID is massive net negative (as it is with any other american influence/aid) for the world.

I don't think anyone is saying that the US shouldn't have an organisation that distributes aid. But I think it is right to pause it when it is doing things like funding Politico magazine.

> You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally.

> 99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.

What I'm hearing is that if the government kills someone, only their immediate family members are allowed to protest. We shouldn't protest when the government is killing people who aren't related to us, even if our relatives could be next.

I’m not advocating for ignoring the world. I’m advocating for contextualizing it so that your emotional response is sane. I think I put it in another post, but someone I know closely has become catatonically depressed this year because of what political news he reads on Reddit. He makes statements like “there has literally never been a worse time to be alive”. His personal life was great, there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died. He stopped going to work and won’t get out of bed most days, which will actually impact his life and give him things to be depressed about.

Caring should not be binary. If in your life, caring about things is all or nothing, and a political event that is extremely common and minor in the context of political history feels as acute as the death of a loved one, then I’m really sorry for you. The world will always be a miserable place for you.

You seem very emotionally uncalibrated if the first place you go is that the majority of news must mean your family is going to die. I’m not going to stop you from becoming emotionally destroyed by impossibly-worst-case-scenario perseverating any time something doesn’t politically go your way. I’m also not going to stop you from blowing 99% of political events so far out of proportion that you can’t sleep at night. I’m not going to stop you from existing in a constant cycle of mental angst because the world isn’t perfect by your vision (and because someone on the news tells you 24/7 just how imperfect the world is, because your angst is their profit).

That sounds like a nightmare existence to me. But if you really want it, maybe because it makes you feel righteous in your pain and holy in your angst, then go for it I guess.

>there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died.

Do you not realize that you are judging what "decisions affect him" exclusively from your own perspective? You clearly have some established distance in your mind in which you think someone's suffering is immaterial to you. You seem to imply that this reaction might be appropriate for a partner dying, but what about for other people? Would it be appropriate to be depressed because of a friend's suffering? What about a distant cousin? A neighbor? A coworker? An acquaintance? What about the parent of one of your kid's friends who you haven't even met before?

You don't seem to actually be objecting to the reaction your friend is having, you seem to be reacting that your friend just has a larger circle of people he empathizes with than you and therefore more people have the potential to "affect him".

My current understanding is that USAID was not doing funding Politico, but had a subscription (or multiple subscriptions). You can check out the description here: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/media/politico-usaid-subscrip... It sure does sound like Politico Pro is expensive, however. There have certainly some other kind of fishy things going on with USAID, but so far as I can tell, all with full approval of the US government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...

> And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would never know about unless presented to you.

Here in the UK in 2016 we had a referendum to leave the EU, which is a pooled sovereignty union to create a more integrated Europe.

I raised the same questions to those who wanted to leave the EU, who complained about "diktats from Brussels" as if pooling sovereignty meant we now had dictators instead of elected officials.

My questions were about how their daily lives were impacted by these "diktats". 99% of people avoided the question. For them, it wasn't about any practical reality. They just wanted to vote to leave the EU. The reasons for it seemed to be post-hoc justifications of an emotionally made decision.

I guess it is like that for most people.

A lot of political news is that my government is torturing or mass-murdering other people's families in a distant land. I understand your comment to say that I shouldn't feel bad about it unless (until) they're killing *my* family. This idea leads to losing by a thousand cuts, as in "First they came for the socialists..."