Disclaimer: All articles published under this section are the opinions of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Cor Chronicle
Most of us have probably heard from parents or our own research, that social media compares others’ highlight reels to our own behind-the-scenes. People post their happiest moments online; we see it, we compare it to our own ordinary or downright difficult lives and we perceive ourselves as worse than we really are.
The “highlight reel” is common in the digital era, but on the flip-side lies another, less-discussed lens of seeing the world beyond your own: the news. If social media is a highlight reel, the average news channel can be compared to a worst-moments compilation. It shows the worst of the world and makes us assume that is the average.
Some say America, or our world as a whole, is worse off than ever before. Many are hopeless about the future because of the constant exposure to bad news. But the truth is that there has always been both bad and good on earth.
Every era that we idolize, from the simple pioneer’s life to the beautiful Victorian age came with its own cruelties, such as high mortality rates or child labor. And even with all the evils of modern America, there is good as well, such as the fact that hospitals are normalized and people believe that children should be protected. The difference nowadays is not the magnitude of evil but that we see a whole lot more of it.
Most of those who control the news want us to despair. For politicians, talking about the worst of the world makes people more reliant on them; for news corporations, it makes people interested. For both, highlighting everything that’s going wrong increases passion and gets people to return to politics or the news for more passion.
While knowledge of current events is, of course, not inherently evil, it is dangerous to be immersed in the tragedy of all the world. It’s good to know about current events and politics, especially if you act on what you know, but it’s unhealthy and pointless to keep up with it if you do nothing but despair and complain.
One might argue that we have a duty to know what is happening in our world, or that being ignorant of current events is like running from something that you should face head-on. But in reality, most people who give too much attention to the news end up complaining about it rather than acting on it.
Nobody can solve every problem in the world. It’s practical, not unhealthy, to ignore some of them. No soldier is expected to fight every enemy at once; it would be a hopeless and impossible task.
People will rise and fight against problems, and hopefully you will be among them, but you don’t have to be all of them. The world will continue.
Scrolling social media every night or keeping up with every political issue can lead to spiraling down an imbalanced view of life. We despair at the happiness everyone except us seems to have in their personal lives and the misery which the world as a whole is going through. In reality, the majority of our time on earth falls in the in-between and average of human experience.
Social media and the news are both designed to keep you interested. Euphoria sells, darkness sells, but the mundane falls flat.
Once we start to internalize this idea that the world consists of nothing except the far extremes, our own lives become bleaker, because we don’t realize just how much of life consists in that middle ground.
It’s impossible for life to always be interesting, but we can’t help yearning for that when it’s all we see on our phones or laptops.
We have more bad days than we would like on this earth, and that’s just the way it is–but rather than take this as something to despair over, we should accept the flaws, accept the fact that the world isn’t going to end because of them and find the beauty in reality, however simple that beauty may be.
Mary Cavanna is a sophomore English major.