Beyond Selidor

It sounds as if you've made the healthiest decisions for your own personal circumstances when it comes to Twitter and Facebook — sometimes the right choice for you is just to abandon a platform altogether. To be honest, I'm almost at that point with Twitter, and it's those connections and friendship that I have only there that are forcing me to remain.

For me, I'm very good at avoiding doom-scrolling. Since Trump was elected I skew perhaps too far to staying out of the news cycle; but hey, even if I'm a few hours/days late, I do learn about what's going on and take action if I can.

I'm not convinced that learning about news through doom-scrolling is the healthiest or most effective way to learn about it. By its very nature, most of the news you encounter on social media is going to be either fragmentary, discussing events as they unfold (and often wildly speculating about them while having no real idea what's going on), or both. I actually think unless you're a journalist, or an activist or politician specifically working on campaigns that involve real-time unfolding of events, there's no need to engage with the news in this way — better to do so more along the lines of a morning newspaper (even if that newspaper is online) or an evening news bulletin, where everything is contained, contextualised, and presented in detail.

I don't know what to suggest about the fannish stuff. I posted a similar thing to this Dreamwidth post on Facebook, and a friend there was saying that this drive to constantly remain aware of awful current affairs and other things that cause anger is like a form of self-harm, and I can really see her point.

tl; dr: The less I'm online, the better I feel. It's too bad, but true for me.

Sometimes that's the truth of it. We have to make the right decisions for our own situations and based on our own understanding of our mental health, and it sounds as if you've done exactly that.