Good News.

 ‘Bad news sells’ is an old but true cliché, reading all the news websites, doing your daily, time-wasting, social media tour, it’s all doom and gloom out there (I covered this in a previous post), but is it? Of course, there are some really frightening things going on, threats to our way of life and our planet are real, but should we, therefore, lose faith in humankind? What’s more, should we lose faith in human kindness? 

Our society is built around an economic system that needs us to consume and not just the things we need to survive, we need to buy, buy, buy, whether we need the stuff or not, in order to get us to consume, companies need to advertise and get us hooked on the instant gratification of something new and preferably ‘shiny’, the dopamine hit that makes real drug addicts look like amateurs. 

Bad news sells, we seem to seek out bad news items more than the good news ones, why? Well, it could be evolutionary that we humans have always had to be on the lookout for danger to be able to survive, so bad news attracts us like flies to a pile of sh.. (you get what I mean). Advertisers sell their products through the media outlet with the biggest circulation and well … so the system automatically feeds off its self. Bad news comes with ads for nice little shiny things etc. A simple explanation of an intricate system but it’s roughly correct. 

So we consume bad news like I eat chocolate and believe me it's bad. 

The danger is, we forget how much ‘good’ there is out there, we forget how many people are out there every day doing their utmost to help, aid, and comfort their fellow humans. I’m not just talking about the professional services here, there are, around the world, millions of people who risk their own lives or fill their spare time helping fellow humans, from volunteers feeding the hungry and the homeless (probably in a town near you) to young people helping out on development projects in the third world to retired people going back to their jobs to help out during this pandemic. When we concentrate on the bad we forget to see the good. Take for example a terrorist attack, we focus on the terrifying acts of a few individuals, as we should, but at the scene the reaction of the good swings into action, people donate blood, comfort and help the wounded, people come together in acts of solidarity, etc, for every one terrorist there are hundreds of people who rush to the aid of their fellow humans. When you look you see it when we concentrate on the bad we remain blind for the ‘random acts of kindness’ that give hope to the future existence of us ‘Humankind’ - Human kindness. 

Good news, positive stories and the day to day positive acts are never first in line when news services and media put together their product they need to sell, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. So next time you get overwhelmed with all the negativity being thrown at us, remember, there is more good than bad, there is hope, Human solidarity is real and out there.