Queer nonwhite woman, I really really hope I am just overreacting. Nothing bad happened to me personally at all during the first Trump presidency, and I hope that privilege and/or good luck holds out.

And even still, that is just my selfish emotional reaction which is entirely controlled by what happens to me? and not at all by the fate of more at-risk people. Even if I make out well, that does not mean other people will continue to have their rights respected. I really hope that we’re all overreacting, because being wrong and annoying online is so much better than being right and having things go very poorly for us in reality.

Although I understand how negativity and doom and gloom online, even justified doom and gloom, can get to you. I, as a member of several demographics likely to be affected, would also like to stop hearing about this all the time. It is certainly not helping me cope or do anything productive about the situation. Especially when it invades spaces that were very topic-focused and that you did not expect to be dooming and glooming about world events. I’ve had that happen to me and it was very very frustrating. In an ideal world I’d care and be mad and fight against whatever injustice is happening, but in reality I often have no more capacity to care because there are so many issues to be outraged about and to care about and causes to fight for that you get burnt out, spread too thin, too much negativity. I pick and choose my battles and close my ears to other ones, and I’ve decided that is ultimately okay because I need to do this so I have enough capacity to fight any battles at all.

I do take the strategy of trying to keep to topic-focused places. I never explore All and on most instances I’ll also avoid Local, because even without politics there is probably some depressing meme about how the world sucks that’s on Hot. Instead I keep to my topic-focused communities. I curate my online experience so I can avoid that kind of thing. (And if these kinds of memes make you laugh or otherwise feel better, then more power to you! This is aimed at people who it makes feel worse, like myself.) And if depressing world news starts to invade places not designated for world news (even if only in comment sections and not the general posts)… at this point, I’d just say screw it and go to places way more likely to be free of this. Hello new recipe, hello webpage for learning a new programming language; goodbye social media in general. (Yes, I recognize that replying on Lemmy is not exactly avoiding social media. I took a calculated risk by going on programming.dev, a topic-focused instance I deemed less likely than other social media to have this. You see how it turned out, especially given I chose to click on this post at all, let alone read the comments and reply. But even still I would bet programming.dev has less doom and gloom about world news than more general purpose instances of comparable size.)

I get people need spaces to feel their feelings about world events, to talk them out, to bring them up when relevant. People also need spaces free of this kind of talk and those are increasingly getting harder to find as more people feel hopeless and need to express it somewhere and oh look, this community does not have rules against it… I empathize a lot with the person you replied to, as someone who is also trying to avoid that kind of doom and gloom content. I know perfectly well that both people like and unlike me are having an awful time and often in ways that I cannot do anything to stop (in the sense that, say, donating to a domestic abuse charity and volunteering helps victims but it also does not stop that specific victim in that specific place from suffering RIGHT NOW—you can often do something to help in some small way, but your individual power is indeed limited), I do not need constant reminders to ruin my day, thank you very much.

I usually try to feel my feelings and then look for what I can do about a situation, but this one had me too overwhelmed with the feelings to remember my second step of doing something about it, so I thought I might mention at least one thing people can do about it that I found (I guess this paragraph is less specifically directed at anyone in the above chain and more at others reading the thread). Volunteering with charities or organizations meant to help certain affected demographics such as people of color, women, and queer people, is a nice way to gain back some sense of control, and is supposed to make you feel good, but I understand not everyone has the time or capacity to do that. Donating to causes can also help if you have the money but not the time. A quick online search for what you can do given x situation might be helpful.