> adapt the timing of my escape plans accordingly

No offense but unless you have at least $1b or are incredibly lucky you're screwed no matter how prepared you are.

Menial and positive stories aren't as engaging resulting in the "news" being nothing but a list of all the awful shit that happened recently.

Enjoy life while you still have it. As another commenter already said, important stories will find you anyways.

Very off-topic here, but no, money is not the key when trying to find a spot on this planet that nobody does have on their radar when it comes to fucking up the planet on short notice :)

Also: Different people, different coping strategies. I don't want to wait until the "Active Shooter!" cell broadcast message finds its way to my phone. :)

For some people, potentially especially those on the spectrum, having as much information as possible to work with might bring mental security and stability.

People are different, brains are diverse.

I'm also on team Keep An Eye On Things™, and approximately none of it really feeds into an anxiety loop. (There's a tiny sliver of the pie that does, but it's easy enough to talk myself off that ledge and go engage in a Weltschmerzspaziergang[0].)

I know it's stuff I can't control, and that's sort of the point. I want to know what I can't control so that I can know what I can control, if that makes sense.

0: Otherwise known as "touching grass."

Spot on.

Closely tracking things you can not control may provide a sense of control to some.

Or the other way round: Crunching enough data and building reasonable predictions based on that takes away the element of surprise, and the element of surprise for some translates to anxiety.

For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.

It's all part of the actuarial mindset. The entire point of the exercise is to arrive at a model of reality that has some degree of predictive power.

> For me the only things that scare me are in the "I have no data on that" category.

I feel exactly the same way. It means that I have no idea what those things will wind up costing me, and that's the anxiety trigger as far as I'm concerned.

That's a fair point, I just want to call out no one except you can tell you what you can control, since you're able to just "do things."

I found the off hand implication that civilization is disintegrating to be sophomoric.

Civilization might not be disintegrating, but we sure are living in “interesting times” compared to the life two or three decades ago. It definitely feels worse, so I can empathize. I certainly struggle with home affordability, or lack thereof. Plus other things but home ownership is a big one.

Maybe you’re better off financially and emotionally, so you find it sophomoric - like a parent looking at a kid in high school struggling with their emotions.

While I do think wealth inequality is a big issue of our time, I don't think it is an issue of civilizational level disintegration -- that would look like the total amount of wealth in our society decreasing, which by all accounts doesn't seem to be happening.

While I'm far from rich, I have done well the last couple years after many years of being poor. But even when I was poor I looked around and saw lots of people who were wealthy and doing well, which I took as a general measure of how society was doing, instead of using my own situation or those in my immediate circle as a measure of that.

Understood, thank you.