I think the correlation between going viral on Twitter and mental illness is very high.
It’s not original to say that algorithms reward high engagement, and it’s well known that the emotions that get engagement the best are rage and despair. The people that do the best on Twitter and other sites like Reddit seem to, as a rule, think that the literal apocalypse is descending on us, and SOON. They have no problem expanding on how any given recent phenomenon is the last straw before literal genocide in the street. I think that the effects of reading this stuff on the daily is disastrous for your mental health, particularly if you’re a sensitive person.
We don’t have the mental machinery to take in every terrible thing that happens in the world every day. Doing so long term can erode belief that anything can ever be good, regardless of what your immediate surroundings look like.
So why do people do it? “You need to be informed” is something that a lot of people point at, but what does reading about every tragedy worldwide do to help? If anything, it turns you into a less effective, more anxious person that can’t do as much to cause positive change.
In fact, positive change is not emotionally possible if you don’t believe in the future. That is why I think this is so insidious: smart, driven people are spending all of their energy on panicking about the state of the world instead of feeling like there is something they can do about it.
It’s wild to me that we’ve gotten to the point where hope for the future is seen as naive. Hope for the future is all we have! All we’ve done as a species is fight for a better tomorrow; it’s who we are. I’m not sure where we lost that identity, but we need to pick it back up.
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