Is your news feed making you miserable? In this episode of How to Be a Person, Giuliano Grimaudo sits down with entrepreneur and Rally News founder Sam Brooks to explore how negative news, doomscrolling, and social media algorithms can shape the way we see the world.

Most people want to stay informed. But there’s a strange problem with being constantly plugged into everything happening around the world: the information getting the most attention usually isn't an accurate representation of everyday life.

Bad news grabs attention. Anger gets engagement. Arguments generate comments. And social media algorithms learn very quickly what keeps people staring at their screens.

So what happens when the tiny slice of reality we consume every day is overwhelmingly negative?

Sam experienced this firsthand. While working a job that already left him feeling unfulfilled, he would come home and try to unwind by taking long walks and listening to news podcasts. Instead of helping him relax, he noticed a constant level of stress that never seemed to disappear.

That experience eventually led him to create Rally News, a free news aggregator designed to surface positive stories from respected publishers that might otherwise get buried.

Giuliano and Sam explore the strange balance between staying informed and protecting your own well-being. How much news do you actually need to consume? Does knowing about every terrible thing happening around the world help the people involved? And if the news disproportionately shows us what’s going wrong, can we really say it’s giving us an accurate picture of the world?

They also dig into our natural tendency to notice problems while taking good things for granted. Improvements become normal. A great experience becomes expected. But when something goes wrong, suddenly it deserves our full attention.

Social media can amplify that tendency even further.

Giuliano and Sam also discuss whether we could approach social media differently altogether. Instead of mindlessly accepting whatever an algorithm puts in front of us, what would happen if we deliberately trained our feeds around the kinds of information, ideas, and emotions we actually want more of?

And maybe there’s an even bigger question underneath all of this:

If none of us can possibly consume more than a tiny fraction of everything happening in the world, what deserves our attention in the first place?

This conversation gets into doomscrolling, negative news, social media algorithms, positivity, attention, mental well-being, gratitude, fear of loss, and how the information we consume can influence our perception of reality.

And if you enjoy this episode, hit subscribe to drop in on more of these conversations.

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