Change of Pace
The most difficult thing about Nobody In Particular recently has been pushing back against my tendency to use the news of the day as my primary inspiration for topics. That was a more or less workable strategy for most of the past 18 years, but now that the news tends to be a breathless recitation of the things that the Trump Administration has done in the past 30 minutes, it's all become rather one-note.
But I think that I'm the odd person out in all of this. News media is a business, after all, and businesses are set up to cater to the desires of their customers. Not that for most news outlets, their audiences are the customers; that title belongs to the advertisers, but the overall effect is the same, everything becoming all Trump, all the time brings in attention, and that attention can hopefully be diverted towards purchasing some or another product (like those weird "Bunby" toys I keep seeing advertised with the generative automation created video loops). For all that it's called "doomscrolling," I think that more people actively like it than are willing to admit to it.
I suspect that part of it is the feeling (if not always the reality) of being informed. And I think that's what's starting to wear at me; I no longer feel that I'm informed. Sure the Trump Administration is doing all kinds of stuff that's going to have repercussions for years, if not decades to come, but there's not really a whole lot to be done about it, and much of it comes down to small details of how the President is attempting to push the world into something that looks a lot more like what he wants it to look like; basically (as I see it) a slightly updated version of the 1950s, with substantially more of the United States openly forcing other nations to heel than was taking place at the time. While he's doing a bang-up job of shaking up a status quo that a lot of people felt wasn't working for them, and, frankly, was never going to work for them, I suspect that his random way of going about things isn't going to create the rising tide that he (sometimes) claims that it will. But this is the great thing about scapegoats, they mean never having to say that one has screwed up. And besides, the public has a short memory... the trash fire that was Donald Trump's first term was pretty much forgotten by this time last year; Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were doomed by their own aggressively lackluster term in office, where they seemed to decide that doing nothing of importance to the public at large passed for a strategy.
In any event, I'm just going to have to find other things to pay attention to... and it's not like they aren't out there. It's just going to need a bit of looking. Because even though the Trump Administration dominates the domestic news market doesn't mean that they're the only game on Earth. But it may entail dialing back my news consumption for the time being, to focus on other things of interest.
