Yeah, no, it's not about your reaction changing anything. It's that you need to insulate yourself from the insanity until you can get some perspective back.
It's odd. I lived in the same era and it never made sense to me. I grew up watching people pretending to be what the society or they thought they had to be, even if they were not. It's only now that I'm older that things make sense. Human nature now makes sense, where it never did before I was 50.... People now, while they still try to pretend to be who they are not in some cases, don't seem to have that forced by a heavy-handed society. At least in the one I live in. (I'm sure it's different elsewhere.) I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of decades in California, where the motto of the people I was around was "you do you" or "you BE you." It was just part of life out there - you could be who you wanted to be. And whatever/whoever that was was ok. (With, of course, the exceptions being those people who didn't buy into it. And they were definitely around.
)
Part of "understanding things now", I think, was having done the university route. And not for having done it starting at 30 instead of 18. Not strictly for having been at university, really, but having been lucky enough to have good professors who insisted I read books written by authors who had widely differing opinions on a given subject. (It was kind of brutal - three classes a week, each class 3 hours long, and I also had to read at least a complete book per week per class [God save me from ever having to read Leviathan, or anything by Kant, ever again!] plus up to a dozen different scholarly articles, per class, per week, and then write a 10-page paper on a specific topic drawn from the readings, due the following Monday. On a typewriter. I look back and I'm still not sure how I got through school raising a toddler at the same time! I guess I didn't sleep for five years?) So the one big favor they did for me was to teach me to ferret around for the one "red thread" that ran through all those articles/books. And to never buy any one author's viewpoint completely. That has remained part of my observation of the world (and the media). Using that formula, looking for the one thread that runs through it all, has definitely helped focus things.
It's really easy to get sucked into self-reinforcing realities on the internet, you know? Sometimes the best thing to do is the just turn the machine off and do something else for a few weeks.
