I am extremely fatigued with the constant negativity

Get off all social media you can.
On the social media you can't, block anything politics and news related. They are designed to keep your attention with psychological triggers.
Start a hobby, reading is cheap to get into assuming you have a library. Drawing with pen and paper, colouring in books. Honestly anything that takes you away from a screen.

Just deciding to be gay all of a sudden isn’t a thing, and right wingers use this misunderstanding to advance bigotry and restrict rights.

Also start a physical hobby if you can. Exercise, besides the mental benefits, is going to be a more powerful distraction than anything intellectually adjacent IMO.

Go skate

Thank you for your answer and I'm glad you found peace in discovering your sexuality but I'm afraid "try being gay" doesn't really help lol

Stop reading the news. You rarely if ever get any information that will change your decisions anyway.

Get off any social media or other that feeds you negativity.

Ideally, outside, in nature. This too has been shown to have mental health benefits. Go walk in the woods.

Get off all social media you can

This means Lemmy and the greater Fediverse too. It's nice being part of a network of people that share similar views on things but damn this place can be depressing. Kind of just a byproduct from the state of the world but humans weren't designed to be aware of every horrible thing happening on this planet

It's better if you limit your feed to subscribed communities. Not perfect, but without that it's like a hundred negativities per minute.

Today I was about to post on here about basically the same thing, and, well, I don’t know, I guess I want to talk or at least write it out. I’ve been blanket blocking politics and news ever since Trump got elected - as black and white as it gets. If a sub I see says “Trump”, it is blocked, and that is also applied everywhere else, including people I used to interact with. I completely left TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and mostly left Reddit, because I thought it would make me feel better. Between here and Reddit my blocklist probably has multiple hundreds of places that do nothing but wallow in misery or post about how everything sucks. Long story short I’m way less on social media now.

Anyway, it didn’t make it better. I’m still on here, occasionally, and now I’m finding that I also fucking hate it; everyone sounds miserable, no one is kind to themselves, there is a lot of hostility in general in relation to a bunch of severely inconsequential stuff—like serious heated arguments about which flavour of sponsored diarrhoea is less disgusting when consumed—I’ve even started noticing it in myself hanging out here. What I realised is that all the platforms I’ve left, I did so because they went to shit and lost any semblance of what I liked them for. It would’ve been fine if it was one facet, but it’s fucking everything, everywhere, and all at once, IRL and online.

Everything is invented, perfected, sometimes repeated and remembered, gentrified, commodified, sold for a profit, repackaged, dropshipped, consumed, regurgitated, optimised, dopamine fracked (shameless self promotion), ran through ChatGPT, summarised by Claude, and then I get to interact with it - maybe. If I subscribe for $9.99/wk. Just… so many things have become like that, it’s insufferable to ingest and even harder to create, because you have to meet that standard if you want the herd to see you, and for me creating for no audience at all is no fun, and empty proclamations of “just create!” help very little.

I have about a billion different hobbies (ADHD) and they don’t help or pay off at all, maybe just to distract myself and burn time faster, but there’s no enjoyment anymore. Everything kind of sucks there too.

And taking myself away from screens only serves to make me feel even worse - here a lot of my friends and a lot of my hobbies live one way or another; that’s why I used to love computers. Out there, people hate me for being gay, I have to mask constantly, and I faint from the summer heat. And now I can’t even love computers in peace at home, because even they have been mercilessly slopped by our sacreligious overlords.

I don’t _feel_ depressed - I have a great job, friends, money, stuff, hobbies, social norms say I’m not really supposed to be depressed with all of that anyway. But I’m really struggling to actively enjoy anything anymore, and I’m honestly beginning to think it’s not me but everything else lol, as egotistical as that is. Except it’s not just me, it’s very prevalent - everyone knows everything sucks, and that’s another reason everything keeps sucking even harder. Oh well. I enjoyed writing this, a little, for a moment.

Sorry for rambling.

Figure out why you feel compelled to constantly look first because there's a variety of reasons why we can be stuck in a rut. Mine was indoctrinated into me. 1990's school and family taught me to feel shame for not keeping up with current events. My dad seemed to think it was his duty to watch cable news.

Your reason(s) could be different. I had to learn that disconnecting isn't shameful and isn't actually harmful. I'm a peasant with very minority progressive points of view in Alberta. I can't really affect very much at all with knowledge not even through voting under a FPTP system. Nothing peaceful anyways and anything else is taboo still since things haven't declined far enough yet. If my mood is particularly sour, I can disconnect entirely up until I have to make a potentially important decision. Then, I already know where to go looking to get caught up on relevant information immediately. You would too, I'm sure you're well practiced.

I replaced corporate algorithms and content aggregators with RSS feeds for news. I replaced short form video content with nothing since I don't think there's a healthy form of it. I lost word of mouth information especially when it comes to entertainment and local activist information. That's replaced with email newsletters. Took a lot of time to set up but I feel locally connected in a healthier way now.

I word filter Fediverse. Not always, just when I feel burn out. I can with this instance or I could use an app for Lemmy based instances lacking the feature. I have a separate browser extension called FilterBubble for platform agnostic filtering. Again, I toggle my lists on and off depending on my mood. I don't sub to too many meme or news communities here, peace of mind. My RSS feeds are higher quality and match my tastes. I really don't need to see anything posted by media owned by American billionaires or Post Media. Stuff like that.

Lots of folks say to cut news intake (however it is happening). This is correct. Everyone suggesting you pick up other things, very wise.

If you are burned out of all these topics entirely, this is probably enough/right. If you still, for whatever reason, wish to engage with the unending crisis:
Sit down and prioritize. Pick a narrow issue, find good sources on Precisely that, and read/engage with only things that fit. RSS feeds support keyword filters.
Find longform content related to what you care about. Books, long podcasts, etc. Shortform only has time to make you panic. Longform can actually give nuance, solutions, and an honest accounting of the situation (it doesn't always. But you have a chance.)

I've radically cut my news intake and it's helped, but the side effect is a worry about being uninformed and ignorant to what's happening. There's that famous quote about how "withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy" and I try to hold on to it.

Social media is also, of course, awful - but in a different way than it was. I used to have friends, family, colleagues and aquantances on it and yes, their curated profiles and posts, which were often at odds with my real world knowledge of who they actually are as people, could be jarring.

However, actual humans have all but disappeared from my feeds. Now it's just click-bait, based on whatever the fuck the algorithms have decided I want to see - which apparently is no longer friends and family posts (which, granted, folks have largely stopped doing), but weird corporate news stories and AI generated articles from sites I've no interest in.

Worse still, if I make the mistake of clicking on a story and find myself reading the comments, the feeling of disappointment, frustration and anger I get from reading the ignorant brain farts that pass for opinions, espoused by a seemingly endless sea of selfish, deluded morons is genuinely disheartening.

I foolishly clicked on a Sky News link yesterday about Musk's soon to be trillionaire status (don't ask me why) and the comment section was just teaming with idiots baying for 'lefty tears' and brazenly bootlicking the billionaires. I'd like to think that a lot of them were bots, but who even knows.

Any faith I had in democracy has completely evaporated. I don't consider myself massively intelligent or particularly special, but it seems like there's a surplus of proudly hateful and stupid folk out there and they seem to be in a majority. These fuckers vote, so it's hard to imagine that we'll ever have a government that has any real decency or compassion at it's core.

Anyway, I wish you well. There is good in the world and maybe we all need to rise above the morons, disengage from the media and just try and do our best by our fellow humans. Maybe that's the key. That, and Ice Cold beer at every opportunity.

I find that 99% of the negativity is online. Interacting with people in person is way more pleasant and upbeat. And basically on youtube ignore all videos with clickbait titles like "We were Wrong about [whatever] - and it's NOT GOOD!", they're all bullshit.

Hosting one or two regular game nights a week in my house has made a world of difference in my attitude.