Almost everything in the news is either gonna trigger anxiety or nothing. Outrage, maybe. That's about it. Farther away from local news, the more true that is.
Luckily, keeping up with that stuff day-to-day or even week-to-week is pretty pointless, so easy to avoid.
The knowledge of all those problems just goes on the pile of shit that I can't possibly deal with, so just have to try not to think about, along with things like existential dread, the fact that my living the way I do (so, like a normal developed-world person) is probably indirectly causing misery for someone somewhere (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, like much good speculative fiction, not about a fictional place but rather our current world), my hunch that cosmic horror probably comes about as close to capturing the nature of our existence and place in the universe as anything does (if only metaphorically), all that and the rest of the unhelpful crap that's probably true and real but also not especially actionable short of "kill yourself, or else devote yourself body and soul monk-/batman-like to some cause all the time every day, probably to no real effect except personal satisfaction".
That's exactly the point of those news: to trigger the viewer. That's all they care about. Now that we pile up on those anxieties or whatever, not the news channel's problem.
War breeds connection and community. Many of the greatest minds in the world came from these wars. Hemingway, St. Francis of Assisi, Konstantin Batyushkov, Whitman
are some who are top of mind for me today. What other great thinkers were breed in war environments?
Watching television / using the computer isolates us from real meaningful human connections and causes depression / cynical world view. It is often hard to have meaning or purpose in the world and hard to interact with others in a real life meaningful way. As the internet and media continue to be front and center in our life depression and sadness are inevitable.
Old friends? As if I had any of those. I agree with you hits home. Father of 3, between work and family it is hard to connect with anyone. I have no father, mother, grandparents, uncles aunts etc. Alone is the new normal it seems. My local church has male gatherings but I am the only one under 60. Fun!
No - they're saying that what we call "drought" isn't actually drought, in historical context. It just seems that way if we're looking at too short of a timescale.
Another interpretation is, that the drought is part of reverting to a trend line that is not as convenient to what we've been trying to do in the SLC area, as the past couple of centuries were.
A human lifetime is a very short timescale. It is possible for something to be "short lived" in a geological sense, but still be devastating to multiple generations of humans.
