It's all noise
"The president did this." "Oh, some lunatic stabbed people, it's on the news." "The Iran war is escalating. Might go nuclear." "This celebrity has had an affair." "Here are five things you need to know about blue-eyed people." "Why is modern dating so complicated?" "Oh, so-and-so went on a trip." Videos, photos, all over their socials.
It's all noise.
I found myself inexplicably anxious and irritable when I was always tuned to the barrage of not-so-useful information coming my way every second of the day.
Particularly from watching current affairs on TV, opening X posts about trending topics in my locale, viewing stories of people I barely knew but somehow had their contacts saved, devotedly reading digital and print media pieces (at the time I thought it was fashionable and a marker of intellectualism).
There was always this low-grade background buzz in my head and my thoughts were clouded. From processing this and that. I was in fact, processing nothing of consequential importance.
For a change, I stopped watching the news religiously, following up on all the talk shows and 'entertainment business', muted politically inflammatory accounts on X, uninstalled Facebook and TikTok several years back, changed my location settings on X to Japan so that I see trending topics in unintelligible Japanese which kills all interest in opening them, and eviscerated my contact list, by like 98%.
I replaced all this with long walks, sitting in nature, physical exercise, coding projects, reading long-form fiction and non-fiction, and writing.
Never felt better.
I'm an advocate of the live and let live philosophy though. Don't take this as some attempt at persuading you on how to live. If you like your slop, so be it. I'm just saying that attention is a valuable currency that is best spent on refining your living and bettering your position rather than senseless consumption of sensationalist or pointless or status-signaling content designed solely and specifically for that purpose.
Less is more.