If you don't have enough bad news then why not import some?

The news has become a 24 hour phenomenon. It is almost as if we would all drop dead without it. Or the world would stop spinning, or something terrible. But this constant bombardment with news only began a couple of decades ago at most. Before that people used to read the newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the evening news and for the rest of the day get on with their own lives.

Consider what life would be like, for most of us, if we didn't ingest so much news every day. Take, for example, a person living in a small town somewhere in England (it could be any small town anywhere in the world, but we will consider one in England). Now what happens in small towns? They don't usually have murders every day, nor do they have rapes, nor earthquakes, or wars, or multiple death accidents, political scandals, celebrity scandals, hurricanes etc etc etc. Such events may happen now and then but rarely. When was growing up in a town in Scotland I don't remember anything momentous happening, save for the death of my father in a car accident.

What is my point? It is this, that we make our lives seem terrible simply by importing all the terrible news from all over the world. We just constantly remind ourselves of all the horrible things that are going on every day and by doing that we just get deeper and deeper into a misconception that the whole world is collapsing around us. Well it isn't. Because when we hear of a murder in a small town somewhere that was probably the only murder they had in the last 50 years. But because there is a murder happening every day or every hour or minute somewhere then we get to hear of murders happening constantly and so we think that the whole world has degenerated and is full of murderers, paedophiles, theives, yobs etc etc. It hasn't. 50 years ago we wouldn't have heard of all the crime happening in every single nook and cranny of the world. We would have heard about the crime happening in our town or county and in cases of sensational crimes, in the country and there would have been a serious crime every now and then and the rest of the time life would have been quite peaceful and normal, which it still is now!

The only difference now is that we immerse ourselves in bad news all day every day and wonder why we think the world is hell.

I tried an experiment for the last few weeks. I stopped listening to any news. I found two things happened. One, that life seemed to go on as before even though I didn't know what was going on (supposedly) and two I felt a lot better about my life. I began to see that life is not as bad as the news channels would like us to think it is. That there are good people around me. That good things are happening. That there are simple things in life that reward me with happiness even though a mass murderer went on a rampage in some obscure province in China and that even though I didn't know what was happening in the rest of the world I was still alive and well and, in fact, happier.

The fact of the matter is that we don't need to know most of the stuff we are force fed with grand journalistic sensationalism. We can get on fine without it. So why don't we go back to one or two news bulletins a day read by a guy at a desk without the special effects and then maybe we might notice that there are good things happening around us and the world is not the terrible place it is made out to be.