Anyone up for an Empathy Renaissance?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Uninformed

Stop watching the news. It’s bad for your mental health. We don’t live in an unhinged techno-dystopia. Just take my word for it.

Jonah Angeles
The Haven

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Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy…

Despite what you may have heard on the news, it’s a great time to be alive!

Unfurl your brows and quell your doubts.

Everything is ultimately working out for the collective good. No need to check the news to confirm. We don’t live in an unhinged techno-dystopia.

Peel your eyes from the scary news anchors parroting doom and apocalypse.

The world isn’t on fire.

Just take my word for it.

Everything will be Okay

Turn the news off and focus on today.

Like the passing days, the headlines blur and bleed into one another. Trump this, Trump that, some atrocity happening on the other side of the world, a mass shooting occurring with the frequency of an appointment-viewing HBO series, and talks of an official sequel to World War II inundate the psyches of all the news consumers of the world.

Meanwhile, our amygdalae and limbic systems are freaking out. If they could talk, they would tell you to stop because you only have so much empathy to give. (And you’re no Oprah.)

From a storm on the Capitol to a stormy adult film actressthat classified-document hoarding, professional smack-talker is a fan of storms. A modern-day Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest but less eloquent.

And still, all storms pass eventually.

Everything will be fine in due time.

Then, we can all go outside and play and sing and dance together, under double rainbows and atop rain-soaked sidewalks — the way God and Gene Kelly intended.

One day, we’ll be singin’ in the rain, like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, but in a more prosocial way (sans home invasions).

And in those moments, we will look at each others’ smiling faces and know that whenever someone tried to comfort us with a tired aphorism like “Everything will be okay,” we’ll realize they were onto something, weren’t they?

Even today, everything is okay. And it has always been and will always be that way. Even when it seems the news is hell-bent on convincing us otherwise — what with its endless supply of doom-and-gloom and “if it bleeds, it leads”, causing habitual news consumers to go about their days with tunnel vision, convinced the world is dying and dismal.

It’s not.

Tomorrow is coming soon.

I’ve seen the trailer. We should all be excited about it.

Stop consuming media that is trying to suck away your hope, optimism, and capacity to imagine a better world.

Tomorrow is going to be so beautiful.

And if you don’t feel like imagining what it might look like…

Just take my word for it.

Days of Our Lives

Every day, a brand new cast of clouds adorn the skies like some anthology daytime soap opera.

Without pretense, the clouds float far away from the reach of any mortal confined by the laws of gravity.

Even the Harlem Globetrotters, if stacked one on top of another, would be hard-pressed to stroke a single wisp belonging to the nearest cirrus.

It’s almost as if their state of frustrating yonderness makes them all the more awe-inducing. And they couldn’t care less.

The clouds are doing what clouds do best: absolutely nothing. Because clouds have zero free will. Nor limbs. But that’s why we love ’em, isn’t it?

Conversely, technology is evolving and expanding our reach.

We all have the capability of impacting, maybe even changing, the world at large from the comfort of our beds or toilet thrones, without having to leave home.

Sometimes all it takes is one tweet, one Tik Tok or Instagram Reel, or an internet meme (or Medium article) to influence or shift the course of an average user’s day. Then the culture follows, ripple by ripple.

And yet, clickbait and misleading headlines and gossip and flat-out lies, disinformation, and misinformation tend to run rampant like some memetic epidemic.

And — I hate to sound like Rick Grimes here — but I think we’re all infected.

As a society, we have never been more interconnected, never been more in each others’ faces.

And with that territory, it has never been easier for every one of us to hijack attention and influence others’ perceptions of reality.

So why don’t you just throw your phone in the nearest garbage disposal unit?

All the monks have done it. So should you.

It’s one of the first steps to enlightenment in the modern world. A crucial one. But worth it.

The second step is to go outside with your eyes wide open, maybe even say “Hello” to the first stranger you see. Then, you will be relieved when they reciprocate your greeting without brutally murdering you — abandoning your shell-shocked corpse on the cold, hard street before going about the rest of their day.

With time, you’ll start to realize that, outside your home, such a thing as wind exists. It’s kind of like nature’s version of a blow dryer.

If enough people seek out enlightenment this way, ultimately choosing to “live under a rock” and isolating their minds from the constant deluge of news and internet asshattery, society will evolve faster than 5G.

Society will enter a state of collective enlightenment, cultivating within itself a sort of “empathy renaissance”, a levelling up of consciousness.

A revitalization of our human capacity to be genuinely interested in others, and not just the kind of content they make, or what benefits they may confer to us — or whether or not that girl lip-syncing and dancing on Tik Tok has an OnlyFans so you can “empathize” with her breasts.

Humanity will redeem itself from this endless, out-of-sync Tik Tok dance of online absurdity — and our offline lives will feel like they mean something again.

Just take my word for it.

Checkmate, Nihilists

Your life is not meaningless.

You just entered the wrong search query.

Also, as far as your search for meaning goes, you’re far better off using a dictionary than a search engine.

Or better yet, read the book Man’s Search for Meaning by the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. (Don’t let the title fool you. Meaning, suffering, and living with a self-appointed sense of purpose are all gender-neutral phenomena.)

Life in this modern world is far and away from utter meaninglessness. Especially when you throw your devices aside and take meaning into your own hands. Caress it, nurture it. It will give you back your life-force. (Checkmate, nihilists.)

You are not a rat, running around in a so-called “rat race”. You are a human. And you are running around in a so-called “human race”.

And the finish line is death.

It’s important to pace yourself and enjoy life. Pay more attention to what’s around you — the events and individuals that comprise your life. That is all we really need to be concerned about.

Did we humans really evolve the capacity to stretch our empathy to the entirety of the planet?

If something awful happens on the other side of the world, hearing about it just makes me feel bad. There’s literally nothing I can do.

The only news I’d really need to hear is if the war in Ukraine escalates to global stakes or if a nuclear winter was imminent.

If World War III were to happen tomorrow, the news would reach me by the end of the week.

And then what? What else can I do?

Get utterly annihilated on some cocktail of drugs and/or alcohol, and sing Kumbaya around a bonfire with a handful of friends and family, waiting for the world to end?

Or maybe I’m better off not knowing, going from a state of oblivious to oblivion. It doesn’t sound so bad. If all human civilization were to be disintegrated in a giant explosion, I would be none the wiser.

There is much benefit to living life uninformed. And since not everyone has the means to live under a rock, being conscious of one’s media diet is of vital importance.

Too often, users get sucked into these loops of endless doom-scrolling, habitual social media usage — which, ultimately, becomes an unconscious activity that is engaged in for considerable chunks of their days.

Cutting back on news consumption has improved my life, my mental health, and my worldview significantly. I’m sure you will feel the same way.

The average person can benefit from things like a digital detox and/or a carefully curated information diet. Because let’s face it…

The news is an endless pessimism generator.

It’s a bottomless wellspring of bad vibes, and people consume it daily.

Whether it be a habit of appointment viewing the morning or evening news, or doom-scrolling or doom-surfing the internet, it seems the media is intent on making us hate ourselves and each other, cultivating in us a radical fear that any one of us could become a news story or statistic.

Nobody is safe.

Tragedy can befall anyone, anywhere.

It could happen to you or someone you know.

But you can protect yourself if you follow THESE TEN KEY STRATEGIES

More at 11.

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