ChatGPT creating overwhelm
We are living in a moment where tools designed to help us think are increasingly shaping how we cope with overload. Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerates the loss of our scarcest natural resource: water, as Forbes published in 2024. The AI boom has caused the same CO₂ emissions in 2025 as New York City, The Guardian reports. Algorithms reinforce discrimination against women and racial minorities, as published in several reports in recent years. And still, the technology is here to stay and can also benefit solo entrepreneurs or freelancers as a thinking partner or affordable editor.
I’ve experimented with ChatGPT quite a lot lately. Not to ask the Large Language Model (LLM) to write my content, but to help me brainstorm and find ways out of the polycrisis happening on our planet. It’s quite ironic to ask for help from one of the factors contributing to the problem.
It has helped me structure my work and set goals for the coming months, but I also recognize its shortcomings. LLMs often produce ideas that don’t challenge you, unless you write a prompt or build a GPT that specifically asks it to do so. The result is that all your ideas will be welcomed or given constructive feedback. Even after prompting this smartly, you will still be overwhelmed with changes in strategy and new ideas on a thread-by-thread basis. Using it regularly without training makes you tired.
Why then use it at all? The world has become so chaotic that instead of bothering colleagues, friends, and family with sense-making questions, it can feel easier to try to find a way out with a tool like ChatGPT. It says something about the moment we are in: always analyzing, always anticipating, even when it doesn’t actually help us see more clearly in the long run.
When constant exposure causes damage
If you’re working in journalism or in any role that requires constant interpretation of the world, especially on a managerial, advisory, or leadership level, you ought to be on top of the latest developments. It starts with following the news and geopolitics closely, which in itself is already like a top sport. Memes on social media with the question “What a year, huh?” are answered as “It’s the first week of January,” which says everything about the speed of current affairs. What is less often acknowledged is that this tempo is not neutral: it shapes how decisions are made and which values are prioritized under pressure.
Add to it the technological progress, the call for media to design specifically for LLMs to keep up with audience demands, and responses to internet blockouts in the form of Bluetooth messenger services (Bitchat, for example). Top it up with the mental health burden that almost everyone is carrying at the moment: from junior editors and journalists being confronted with violent and bloody imagery popping up in their timelines, via mid-level management being overwhelmed by the news and feeling responsible for their teams, to top-level management feeling the reputational responsibility and trying to navigate ever-growing complexity. At some point, constant exposure stops being professional and starts causing damage.
You probably don’t hear anything new yet, but the solutions aren’t widely discussed either, even though there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, the geopolitical situation is kind of crazy, but if you follow important thinkers of this time, people like Indian author Amitav Ghosh, who writes about the interconnectedness of issues, the overlap between climate change challenges and US military strategies, and the ongoing influence of colonialism, or Canadian writer and scholar Naomi Klein, who has been tracking how capitalism has been flying off the rails for decades, it becomes clear that things don’t happen in isolation.
Researchers like Jason Hickel, who focuses on inequality and post-growth alternatives to capitalism, offer a way of reading daily news against deeper structural patterns rather than treating each crisis as a separate event. And journalists like Mehdi Hasan, who launched Zeteo, show what independent media can look like when it refuses both false balance and platform dependency.
Seeing these connections does not make the work easier, probably more complex at first, but also more honest, with a better understanding of the world in the long term.
And yes, technological progress is reminding you daily of your job being at stake, but the call for on-the-ground reporting and human-centered events and experiences is also becoming louder. And for sure, mental health might be the largest challenge, but a holistic approach to health is gaining momentum, as is the awareness of what a truly healthy work life looks like. The question is not whether this consciousness exists, but whether institutions are willing to treat it as a systemic issue to act on, instead of a personal responsibility.
So, how do you stay sane in journalism?
The way forward
Maybe the first step is to take information consumption seriously and stop reading, watching, and listening to everything everywhere. A content diet is not about newsavoidance or withdrawal from work, but about editorial judgement and responsibility. Just as leadership in the media and other institutions should protect their employees from exposure that does not meaningfully serve their work, people in public-facing professions also carry responsibility for how much they ask of their audiences. Restraint, in this sense, is an editorial choice that helps prevent overwhelm.
Practically, this means choosing a limited number of reliable sources to follow closely, and paying attention to whether reporting is rooted in decolonial and constructive perspectives. It also means insisting on parts of life that are not organized around interpreting the world and responding to geopolitics: time away from the screen, physical movement, and other activities that aren’t related to work. These are often framed as personal coping strategies, but good leadership makes room for them. An Indian startup founder once told me he actively encourages his employees to spend time with people who are not colleagues and do not work in the same profession. An entrepreneur from New York told me he makes sure everyone in the organization actually takes their holidays and regular time off. That, too, is leadership.
The solutions aren’t rocket science, and that’s precisely why they are uncomfortable. Where your daily work asks you to perform at a top-sport level in analyzing and rationalizing, staying sane depends on intuition and boundaries. Without those limits, sanity becomes an individual problem in a system that remains untouched.
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