IT’S OKAY TO BE HAPPY
I need to get off of social media. I know.
One day I was scrolling through Twitter. Maybe it’s because I follow a lot of activism and think-piece accounts, or because the people in my age group are generally going to be more passionate about things (I say that as a compliment), but I get a lot of messages that are all about how much the world sucks and how we need to fix everything.
Yes. There is a lot of awful stuff going on right now. It is my opinion, in fact, that it is our moral obligation to speak up about injustices in the world and not let them drift into obscurity. We need to shine a light on these things in order to make mass change.
That said, we’re not in unusually awful times — the level of bad that our world is experiencing is probably relative to what we’ve experienced in all of human history, give-and-take some pluses and minuses. Again, this isn’t to say that the bad in the world is not bad or not worse than what we’ve experienced in the past — but compared to the World War II era when people had to ship their sons off to the most deadly war of the time or the Black Plague in Europe where about a third of the population died, our times are far from bad.
I think our culture is negative. Negativity sells. According to a study done at McGill University by researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, they found that people naturally gravitated towards articles and news stories with negative headlines, despite the fact that when asked, the participants thought that there were too many negative news stories and preferred there was more good news.
This is negativity bias in action. We are evolutionarily wired to be hyper vigilant to bad news because it could signify danger.
We’re in a field of sunflowers? Well, things are just fine!
There’s a smoke smell in this field of sunflowers? Okay, run.
Bad news, scary headlines, online insults, rudeness, bad days — they’re all alerts to us. Remember this. Look out for this. It’s danger — it hurts us, our community, our world. That’s what our brain tells us.
Here’s what I also see, though. We get bad news overload.
When we’re constantly being told that the world sucks, the “alert” side of us dulls. Instead of being adrenalized by this bad news, we become exhausted and depressed from it.
In the world of 24-hour news cycles and social media, everyone is competing for your attention, and bad news doesn’t fail. Eventually, though, bad news becomes news. We can only feel so much about something awful — we’re all living our lives.
When we take a moment to say that everything is going to be okay, though, we take a break from these constant alerts. It’s not going to get as many likes or views or whatever, but it is going to give respite.
It’s a balance. We need a reminder that things are going to be okay if we’re going to have even a morsel of hope to make the change needed to fix these bad things we constantly see. Also, we need to live our lives — we all have problems. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good once in a while about life.
I think we’re out of balance in the world. Let’s even things out and post some happy stuff.
