I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive.

Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports.

So you'd come back to the states - and you'd have to catchup on everyone who had said terrible things.

Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider).

Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale, true, but living without internet doesn’t create perfect world.

My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.

Did you try just... not following the outrage parts? Not getting outraged? If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The problem is that whoever you follow (whether they're friends, family or just interesting people) they ARE following the outrage parts.

And of course there's the "trending" sidebars, and ads and other stuff that gets injected into your timeline without you asking for it.

So things bleed in no matter how careful you are. The platforms are designed to drag you in and outrage you. Trying to avoid that is a constant battle - and you're going to give in to it from time to time.

Exactly this.

My current move is to delete Facebook completely (well, deleted that years ago). I just didn't find as much value there as elsewhere on the internet. And the psychological cost wasn't worth the little value there was there. So, complete deletion.

Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click on their profiles.

This keeps me out of 90% of the drama and into 90% of the worthwhile content.

It's hard to not look at "trending" but I'm trying. I wish there was a way to turn off "trending" and "timelines" completely.

End result: hugely more productive and psychologically lighter.

I use

twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]

In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.