Kyle MacDonald: I'm exhausted by social media, how can I manage it better?

The constant anger on social media is overwhelming. Photo / Getty

Q: I had a moment this week, I got really overwhelmed and frustrated with the constant anger in the comments on social media about the local body elections. Sometimes it feels like everyone is losing their minds. I don't remember it being like this before Covid, but now it feels like it's about more than Covid, it's about everything. I can't even talk to my friends anymore about politics or daily events, it always ends up in an argument. I'm exhausted by it, is it just me?

A: No, it's not just you. To me it also increasingly feels like everyone's angrier, more on edge, more likely to argue than listen, to disagree than hear a different point of view.

I don't pretend to not be like this myself at times. I'm passionate about what I see as our depressingly inevitable slide towards climate disaster, while we argue about how to keep doing what we've always done, kicking the can of cleaning up the mess - if that's even possible - to our grandchildren.

However, it's not just that, nor is it just Covid and its impacts. It's also the conflict in Europe and the fact the threat of nuclear war keeps getting thrown into the headlines. It's social media, with its algorithms that drive more and more extreme views and a media model driven by the need to sell eyeballs to stay afloat.

"It" is fear and uncertainty - and it's real. Like any complex human reaction, it's overdetermined - caused by many things and different combinations of those things for different people - but it is most certainly real.

I think back over the events of the 20th century and wonder how people living under the very real existential threat of World War II managed. Or think back to the bits of recent history that I'm old enough to recall, and when I first recall genuinely feeling afraid of nuclear war as we lived under the threat of the Cold War.

But what's different now is the speed of it all. Our hunger to know - to engage, to stay up to date, to have a view and to share it with everyone.

And how hard it is to look away.

Generally speaking, as an emotion fear makes us look. To pay attention to the threat makes sense from a survival point of view. It also naturally leads to anger - fight - as we try to manage and control the threats we face.

And both anger and fear make us more rigid, more certain and less able to entertain nuance as we naturally seek solid ground upon which to stand. Upon which to feel safe.

We also tend to naturally seek validation for how we feel and what we think. This is also human nature and also can lead to silo-ing, where we increasingly only engage with people and information sources that agree with our worldview and reinforces what we already think, often by pointing out, through anger, what the people who are "wrong" think.

We end up polarised, distressed more of the time, and ready to fight for our point of view.

So what can we do? It's too easy to say don't watch the news - and not always practical. But we do need to listen to the feelings we each have and use them as data to decide how much to turn away, today.

And when we turn away, we need to bring the horizon in, to deal with just what's in front of us - our family, the events of the day, our immediate tasks. It s a form of mindfulness, but we choose to make our area of focus small - small enough we can cope with it on that given day.

And when you have more energy, more emotional gas in the tank, look up. But don't feel you have to, the world will go on without you trying to keep up with it all, for good or for ill.