The radio thing is interesting but this is the first I am hearing of this quake, so here is a Reuters article with basic facts. Thousands of lives lost. A serious tragedy.
Breaking news is rarely on HN (guidelines: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."). So users don't submit it. It doesn't mean it's ignored by users. It's just assumed that people also read mainstream news websites besides HN already.
Please, and I do not mean this offensively - I wish I could be as disengaged from world events as you are - can you tell me how you manage it? It used to be useful for me to be on top of everything, but I've been questioning that lately.
You just... stop caring. The only two good reasons to pay attention to news are if it affects you in some way, or if you can do anything about it. The vast majority of news is in neither group.
That's the first pass. From there, you adjust your definition of "affects you". I'm in the US, for example, and our government does plenty of bad things I do not approve of. But most of them, even the ones that ostensibly should affect me, don't actually noticeably change anything in my life. After a while, it all blurs into "my team scored a point" or "the other team scored a point".
Is this privileged? Of course. But it's also a requirement for my mental health. Paying attention to it wouldn't even improve anything for the people who are suffering, so there's not even any sort of utilitarian tradeoff. It would just be making my life worse for no reason, so I don't.
Works until it doesn't - see the high amount of dead Russian soldiers, especially the mobilised soldiers. They delegated political decisions until someone literally grabbed them from their workplace and sent them to die in a ditch. I.e. somewhere along the way they found out that despite them not having an interest in politics the politics found some serious interest in them.
Your personal opinions, feelings, thoughts, and emotions aren't going to matter in the least bit to someone who is going to send you off to die in their war.
Also this would not have happened had they actually acted on time and had they cared. The level of depoliticisation and degeneration of that society is insane. Consider the practice of hiring an ambulance to get through traffic quickly. Yes, it is a thing. Now you and me would think that it is completely unacceptable to abuse the system in such a way and protest. But many Russians see that and think "gee, I should have that kind of money too".
Timothy Snyder half-jokingly asks whether Russia is even a country. Sure, it exists as a state (for example it can wage a war, ineptly but still), however the civil society is nearly entirely demolished. It wasn't always so.
I think this is helpful and honest. For example this kind of disengagement is much harder for my female friends of child birthing age in certain states, but it is also emotionally exhausting for them even when they feel like they can’t disengage because… yknow… lol
As someone in another often-politically-attacked group... yeah. It sucks when it's things that actually do affect you. Those are the times I'm glad I saved my mental energy so I can properly deal with it.
I'll admit to sometimes taking this too far and continuing to ignore things that I probably shouldn't. Eventually, someone mentions the actually important things to me, so I continue to get away with it.
People are apparently really surprised but I simply had a busy day today. I have not been sleeping well so I was tired this morning. I woke up and worked on a programming problem that had been on my mind all weekend, listened to one of my favorite youtube channels that talks about news usually a day or two after it happens, posted an update on my programming project to mastodon without reading the feed, entertained my cat before leaving the house, ordered lunch from a local takeout place, made my partner a matcha latte, picked up lunch, brought my partner the matcha and gave them a beanie I knit last week, then drove to work listening to a couple podcasts. At work I got a delivery of circuit boards and I am now debugging a hardware problem and listening to the latest episode of Well There's Your Problem.
Idk one thing I do not ever do is open a website like CNN or NYT and read the front page. Please don't misunderstand that statement of fact as a judgement, but you asked about my media habits so I am sharing that. I will hear about major news events, as this very post makes clear. It seems I am hearing about this major earthquake in Turkey 14 hours or so after it happened... which seems fine. There is nothing I can do.
I tend to get news from youtube sources (not major outlets though) and these creators take a day or two to produce their videos. Sometimes I listen to Democracy Now or the KPFA evening news (available online), but I do not regularly consume that kind of thing. I am doing as much as I can to help the world with my little nonprofit thing. I learn about things like the police killing in Memphis police killing, the situation with the police training center outside of Georgia, and various foolish things politicians do. But I don't have much appetite for the firehose of details that come out of major news outlets.
> Idk one thing I do not ever do is open a website like CNN or NYT and read the front page. Please don't misunderstand that statement of fact as a judgement, but you asked about my media habits so I am sharing that.
You're not the only one. I like only occupying my mind with stuff that affects me and I can do something about. Or things I can create.
I see more and more people around me doing the same by the way. A lot more since the pandemic, I think everyone got a bit fed up with bad news every day and after it was over started focusing more on the real life they'd been missing out on.
It's funny because when I was young everyone would sit down for the 8 o'clock news every day and most would read the paper in the morning. Now news is everywhere and I consume less of it than back then.
I also want to be direct with intent to offend. What is it about world events that demands your attention? Are outcomes going to be worse for your lack of awareness? Will people be hurt if you stop paying attention or be helped if you do?
I personally take a great interest in the challenges my local community faces because I can be directly and verifiably helpful.
Yup. National and world news is mostly a spectacle that lets us feel engaged even when there’s almost nothing of consequence gained from our rapt, immediate attention. If we get meaningfully involved at all, the extent of our consequential involvement is usually captured in a vote or a donation, and it usually takes all of a late minute’s briefing to catch up enough on a news item to hone in on how we’d proceed with those.
The easiest way to disengage is to humbly admit that you’re not important enough to matter very much to almost any issue on that stage, and that the people who do matter probably spend less time soaking up coverage about it than you do.
If you want to be anxious or have enthralling dinner party conversations about big events, by all means keep up your hobby. There’s sincerely nothing any more wrong with it than any other idle hobby.
But if you think the news is important and that your attention is a resource to invest in things that matter, look to the news from your family, your friends, and your community.
Speaking personally, I just don't usually open Twitter or news sites while I'm at the office.
It's not that I don't care. (I do.) I just read everything at a digest at the end of the day. Most news doesn't require a real-time response. Trying to stay on top of everything happening, as it happens 24x7, just leads to emotional exhaustion.
If it's not something I have direct control over, I don't need a real-time feed of it. The news will still be there to read in the evening when I get home.
Yep, just don't check the news. Very little affects your day to day.
Grab the Sunday paper if you want to be periodically checked in. I think I'd be happier if I did this. I don't need to read the nyt opinion section every day, or what lie some congressman from New York just told.
I need to fold my clothes and schedule my vacation and research for work.
It's okay. If you are in the West (Europe) you probably heard of this. If you are in the US or Australia, probably not. I am in SEA and no one has any idea of this going on. It goes the same way though, the Middle-East doesn't hear much about earthquakes in the Philippines or Indonesia.
The only exception I can think of is Japan. It seems everyone is aware of Japan earthquakes/Tsunamis.
I’ve been commenting to my partner all day that it’s crazy how little this has shown up in social media without me actively looking for it by searching on Twitter. I think I saw maybe on post on FB all day and maybe 2 in my main Twitter feed. No company wide email from the thoughts and prayers crowd either. It’s been eerily silent for such a major disaster.
Interesting. For me, this started popping up last night all over facebook and instagram, and every major news outlet in Australia started talking about it during the night.
on fediverse you can search @earthquake@social.yl.ms which is a bot that posts every earthquake that is reported. I saw a 4.5 magnitude sometime this weekend in that country. When i first saw the articles, i was a bit taken aback, both at the delay in reporting and that such a small earthquake had done so much destruction.
It is possible i am misremembering, but it could have been a fore-shock, as well.
Note: i don't watch fediverse or any social network enough to have seen any other reporting or whatever on this. My phone spammed me about it, the first such notification i've received this year, and i live in a Gulf state in the US.
I also didn't find out until this evening. I don't watch TV (only prerecorded series/movies), don't use Twitter at all, and I only really read tech news sites during the day. I don't even have a live TV subscription anymore. Most of it is just so commercial and crap and I was sick of paying for it. :) I have zero interest in sports. And I never do podcasts nor YouTube.
I generally just don't care enough about what happens in the world anymore, though this particular quake is really terrible of course. But there's nothing I can do about it.
Just once a day or so I might check the local newspaper website, for things that might affect me. Which is where I heard about it because something this big will make the front page even there.
But generally I don't miss the world news at all, I don't feel FOMO or less informed. I'm not a boring person either IMO, I just like being active in tech and the creative (maker) community, with things I can actually influence. I'm very interested in people I meet. It's more about taking control of information.
I do the same with instant messaging. I can be quite active but only on my terms. All my group chats are muted, and all but the most important people too. I'll see your messages eventually but when it suits me. If it was urgent you'd have called anyway.
It's good to know about this band assignment though as I'm also a HAM operator. But I don't use the 10m band that this frequency is on anyway.
There's a certain calm that comes from closing the news sites and social networking feeds, and just checking everything as a digest at the end of the work day.
Staying informed is good, but there are relatively small number of things that need a reaction in real-time. Eventual consistency is sufficient, and frees cognitive cycles for things I have immediate influence over.
No need to be amazed. I have had a busy day, I don't use Twitter much anymore, and I haven't checked any news sites today. Anyway there were no comments and I just wanted to add context for anyone who missed it (like me).
Germany has a huge number of people who are either from Turkey or have relatives in Turkey and yet the media coverage of this was surprisingly low-key considering the number of casualties and that it's an ongoing crisis. It was hard to miss if you actually checked news sources but the sheer number of casualties and missing persons is easy to overlook from how it is being reported on.
At the very least even the less hard news consuming folks have probably seen that picture of the street that got turned into something resembling a bowl of black corn flakes.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/major-earthquake-s...