Somehow this post ended up way longer than intended. Apologies, I haven't the time to write a short one! But rather than tuck some link down at the bottom of this post (which I expect many will disagree with), this [1] piece from the Guardian is an absolutely phenomenal article on this exact issue. Now onto the disagreeable!
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/03/how-the-news-to...
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A major problem with the news is that it thrives on the negative, and you will never run out of bad news. And so it creates a rather severely distorted representation of society. How safe, worldwide, do you think the Earth is today? Is it getting safer or less safe? By approximately how much...? Many people would be completely unable to answer these questions because they focus on nothing but the negative, and so never receive any sort of perspective on the positive.
For instance today we live in what is, by many orders of magnitude, the safest time in our species entire existence. And I mean this worldwide. We literally cannot conceive of how bad things were in the past. For instance during WW2 about 3% of the world was killed. Scaled to today's population that's about 231 million people. Since we suck at intuiting really big numbers let's put that in terms of 9/11s, as it was considered a practically unprecedented scale of destruction given our sweet luxuries of modern times. 2,996 people died there, including the 19 attackers. WW2 had the equivalent of a 9/11 scale event happen every single day for, literally, 211 years.
If your family each has a child, on average, when they're 30. Then your great great great great great grandchildren would all have grown up in a world where every single day of their lives - from birth to death, there was a 9/11 scale event happening. Now compress all of that death and suffering into 6 years!! This is why I'm completely serious that we cannot even conceive of how bad things were in the past. And that's just 3%. The reason I picked it was not it's magnitude, but it's relative recency. The Mongol Hordes wiped out as much as 10% of humanity using little more than arrows and swords, the black death killed about 20% of the world's population, and so on.
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This doesn't mean you shouldn't care about or should not get involved with contemporary issues. But I do think it's important to put things in perspective. And nearly all issues that we find of critical importance today are, relative to anytime in our species' long past, not that important. It's like from today's perspective if we could look into the future and saw them arguing, vehemently and very seriously, about whether pine or oak should be the normal for city beautification efforts. That seems quite silly from our perspective, yet if you go back in the past nearly all of our issues would seem similar to them.
And I think always focusing on the negative is not good for peoples' mental health. Not just psychological but also their intellectual health. In times past people would get bored and find creative ways to fill that time. In modern times now if you're bored you can click on any news site and there will be numerous new negative article you can obsess about. And your view of the world suggests that not only can you do this, but you should do this as a civic responsibility. Just look at the NYTimes right now. On their front page:
- That Beloved Hospital? It's driving Up Health Care Costs
- My Parents Broke The Rules of the Church Out Of Love
- No One Threatens the Environment Like Donald Trump
- No, Your Kid Shouldn't Get a Gold Star for Reading
- Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy
You'd think this was some cherry picked selection over an extended period of time. No, those are all literally on the front page of the NYTimes at the exact moment of this post. And it seems every single one of those articles was written within the past 24 hours. Nonstop 24/7 negative news on demand. That's what news has become. And I would say that doing without that nonsense is not only not irresponsible, but far healthier both individually and socially.