No Stupid Questions
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I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.
Nobody is making the world a better place by paying daily attention to every possible thing that's wrong with it.
This sounds like the "don't make everything political" rhetoric which is naively hilarious. If you're encouraging moderation for the sake of mental well-being, sure - but that is just that, like many other things.
Information is a well; people will come and go. How much any one person consumes, like food and drink, is their choice regardless of consequence. You can argue diet, drugs, alcohol, entertainment, masturbation all the same.
Personally, I'd rather take on the mental burden of being informed over being as clueless as some. Ignorance leads to many problems, higher costs when you're not much of a problem solver etc.
A counterpoint here, if people don’t talk about a problem, or in this case share, then the problem may go unresolved or intensify.
Multiply that by how many problems affect masses of people.
Imo the problem is that social media is one of the worst possible places to foment political change, yet is by far the most popular.
If people actually have a shit about this stuff, they'd be out campaigning for it, or helping people affected by it, instead of just clicking a button and patting themselves on the back.
Not to say social media can't bring change of course, but I mean, the people posting the most are pretty much by definition doing the least.
Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We've have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:
In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.
In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.
In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.
Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn't upset advertisers.
Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn't allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.
It's suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don't really know what to do about it.
I completely agree that "third places" have been all but eradicated in favor of revenue-generating spaces. This trend alone has lead to the death of a lot of things, including a sense of community and local engagement. (Edit: Worth noting that I also agree with your point about atomization)
I think it also has a lot to do with how abstracted we are from reality. We've built all these systems to replace actual face-to-face communities, and people would rather surround themselves in that than to expose themselves to the unpredictability of real life - for better and worse.
It's a hard sell to get people to reverse course because it's so much more painless/numbing to engage with these systems. (Not to even mention AI promising to give every person their own personal Yes-Man.)
Seriously. I wonder how many of those doomers actually volunteer in their community, or are active in their local politics. If the answer was any more than "basically none," I don't think we would have most of these issues.
It almost seems like people want to feel enraged. There's a difference between activism and slacktivism. Complaining about things on social media has next to none effect on the real world. If one wants to make the world a better place, then choosing an issue and actually doings something concrete about it seems more productive.
The idea is that you spread the knowledge to others and occasionally do something about some if them, even if it's only a small contribution.