I’ve realized that I check the news several times a day but not because I’m curious about what’s happening on the grand scheme of things, but because my brain wants to check something that keeps changing with new, evolving information. It fills a slightly different niche than social media, and I don’t watch sports so I don’t have that to check. Can anyone think of something else that could fill this need? I could read blogs but they just don’t feel current. And the news is making be stress about information I didn’t need to know.
Now that is someone who has thought about this question a lot
This looks like it deserves my time, I will give it a read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Only very short summaries of what happened, linked to Wikipedia article for more reading.
Is there any chance you’d want to, at least in part, get away from the instant hit of info? It’s possible to train your brain out of that habit if you’d rather be doing something else. No judgment if you’d really rather find something Iike you described.
I’m definitely a news junkie and I used to spend many hours per day on that other Platform because it made for such an effective news-media aggregator. It sounds like your seeking out a replacement for that dopamine hit you used to get from checking the news all of the time. There are plenty of bad alternatives out there as others have already mentioned. Regardless of what you choose to do, I hope you periodically take stock of your own mental health. Personally speaking, this habit has sent me into major depression more than once in my life.
There’s always the weather. I check that plus an app I have for the guages on our local rivers as I am a fly fisherman.
How about deep diving? It’s not easy and consistent with one app, but it’s pretty satisfying to be the one figuring stuff out.
Or local city planning. Future plans on what to build and where. Doesn’t update as frequently, but it’s something to circle back to on occasion, or you might want to get involved and go to a meeting.
Some people like to listen to police scanners, or alternatively there is usually someone with a social media account who posts just the most important or funniest transmissions from the city/county/whatever
Or you could get an idle game app that you occasionally need to pop into to collect money and upgrade.
Start day trading?
Metafilter!
atrioc
my Lemmy feed. Google Scholar sorted by most recent.
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
Don’t bother with the 24 rolling news updates. It is much better to watch a video news summary a few days later. A really really good YouTube channel called TLDR news (they have a number of subchannels) that I would highly recommend.
The other thing is to use RSS…never news websites. RSS presents news chronologically. Websites curate to put absolute shit on their front-page so avoid that. If you use an RSS app like Pluma, then it lets you set a blacklist (like I’ve excluded news about Biden, Trump, Covid, vaccines, Israel, Ukraine, Superbowl, football, etc)… It really let’s you exclude what you don’t want to see and improve what shows up in your list.
coupla blogs and lemmy subscribed ordered by top day; once I’m done with it, that’s it, no doomscrolling no more. all news and sports are filtered out, along with memes and similar stupid shit.
if im really craving something, read a book (thanks Anna!), reinstall one of the cheap laptops I got, go for a run/walk/bike ride etc. works most of the time.
This may not be the type of answer you are looking for, but personally I check on my friends and family. It helps me somewhat avoid overly browsing Lemmy. I’ll send them a text asking how they are or what’s new.
I tell my brain that this is a local and personalized news source. 🙃
If you want a summary of science events, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_science.
