by James Wallace Harris, 6/27/24
This essay is about how keeping up with current events is hard on our mental health. Is there a point in becoming informed that turns self-destructive? Happiness seems to be a balance between knowing and not knowing, between learning and ignoring.
I’ve always been amazed by the amount of fiction we consume in our lives — the books, movies, television shows, plays, video games, role playing, comics, fantasizing, bullshitting, and so on. Is fiction our way of regulating our awareness of reality?
I’m trying to decide in this essay just how much news I should consume. I believe I have three basic choices:
- Ignorance really is bliss.
- Learn enough to maximize my own survival.
- Learn everything I can to answer why and maybe know what can be changed.
I also consider the first three lines of the Serenity Prayer practical advice:
God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.
Mental health depends on knowing what can be changed and what cannot. I believe the old saying, “ignorance is bliss” is merely advising people not to try to change things. Eastern religion and philosophy are all about acceptance, and that might be one path to happiness, or at least contentment. Western religion and philosophy have always been about control, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. However, Western religion and politics have always been delusional because they don’t know enough to wisely make changes. Too many people think they know, but don’t. And too many people pursuing ignorance follow the people who don’t know. In other words, even if you learn everything you probably won’t be able to do anything.
For most of my life I hoped humanity would evolve into a global humanistic society that was ecologically sustainable, maximizing freedom, and minimizing inequality. That’s obviously not going to happen. Instead, we’re returning to nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. The growing consensus advocates: get all you can, protect what you have, and let the losers lose. Even Christians have become Darwinians.
The main message in the movies and television shows we consume is the good life is eating, screwing, buying, and travel. But hasn’t that made us the most invasive and destructive species on the planet?
I believe the fiction we consume, and the fantasies we chase, is our way of self-medicating a deep depression caused by seeing too much of reality. If I read or watch too many news programs, documentaries, or nonfiction books about what’s happening around the world I get bummed out and need to retreat. Is that the best thing to do? Or the only thing to do?
How much of learning about reality is educational, soul strengthening, and enlightening? Billions of people are suffering. How important is it to know that the majority of people on this planet spend a good deal of their lives in misery?
If you only watch NBC Nightly News, Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, you’ll only end up worrying about problems in the United States. And that’s enough to depress most people. But if you take in news from around the world, it can deeply threaten your mental health.
I watch a lot of news from all over, and I’m convinced that our civilization is in decline. The number of failed nations grows every year. The number of weather catastrophes increases every year. Wars and famines are increasing. Life expectancies are declining. Economies are breaking down, and people are dying, becoming homeless or refugees, and suffering in ever-growing numbers. We’re lucky in the United States that we don’t suffer as much, but that’s why millions want to come here.
Decades ago, I stopped watching local news so I wouldn’t be depressed about crime. Even though I live in a high crime city, I seldom hear about it, and thus seldom worry. I could do the same thing with national and international news. That would be good for my mental wellbeing, but shouldn’t I do something?
Liberals believe society should alleviate suffering through laws. Conservatives want to solve the same problems by convincing everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The reality is liberals want to solve society’s problems by spending the conservative’s money, and the conservatives just want to ignore the problems and keep their money. And it seems the only problem politicians really want to solve is how to get reelected and feed their egos.
Civilization is coming undone. That’s all too obvious if you watch a lot of news and study local, state, federal, international, and world events. However, knowing, and even understanding the problems we face doesn’t empower us to solve them. We either solve them together, or not at all, and if you’re an ardent news watcher, you’ll know we’re living in an age where we don’t work together.
Here’s where I’d love to list and catalog all our problems and assess their chances of being solved. But that would take a book length bit of writing. I’m sure you see enough of the news to know about all the problems we face — or do you? Would knowing more help or hurt you?
I could construct a detailed taxonomy of all the problems we face. I could stop reading novels and watching television and study the heck out of current events. But other than finding enlightenment about why civilization is collapsing, are there any mental, spiritual, or psychological benefits to learning how and why we’re self-destructing?
The real question is: Can we do anything to stop our self-destruction if we all agreed to work together and knew the right solutions? Even if we banned all airplane travel, reduced car travel to a minimum, rebuilt the energy grid that maximized renewable energy, and we all became vegetarians, we’ve already put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to radically change the climate. We may have already destabilized the climate so it can’t be reversed.
And we don’t have to wait until the seas rise above New York and London before climate change will do us in. We’re about to see the collapse of the home insurance industry which will completely destabilize the economy around home ownership. Just that might bring about economic chaos.
I could go on. Aren’t we like cattle in a stockyard? Would knowing about the captive bolt pistol offer any personal benefit in our lives? Or is there a kind enlightenment to be achieved by figuring out how the system works?
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Oh I so agree with everything you say…and yet I find myself watching too much news..I do other things too, to escape from the so called “real” world…mostly gardening and watching animals in nature etc. I also love to go out with my few like minded friends, have a drink and discuss the world’s problems and have a scrumptious meal.
I also think being old (77) helps with not giving a damn about most of it because we know our time is short anyway and there’s not much you can do about any of it. And I feel it’s short for humanity, as well.
I do hope for a long view I will never see, that even with more wars, climate change, plagues and man possibly dying completely off, that the earth will heal. Life will adapt or change, the climate will settle as natural flora and fauna growth resumes and it will flourish again in the far distant future. This is just the first go around…
First off, I really REALLY like your summing up of liberals vs conservatives! I’ve pasted it into my journal because I’m going to be sharing it with friends. 🙂
Learning about worldly affairs is depressing and yeah, you’re right, we use entertainment to take breaks from all that. But surprisingly the news can occasionally lift my spirits. The other day I had just left a small local garden center where I purchased garden plants specifically for pollinators; it’s a hopeful thing to do and helps divert my thoughts away from the state of … all that awful stuff you so accurately described.
On the car radio (yes, I have an old car) I heard a report about horseshoe crabs on the Massachusetts coast and efforts being made to increase their numbers. A volunteer crab-counter, a great admirer of horseshoe crabs, exclaimed “they’re our ancestors!”
Another interviewee, a field tech at the Mass Audubon, commented that the horseshoe crabs have survived mass extinctions, have seen continents come and go, have remained largely unchanged through it all, and they’ll survive this stage of our planet’s history.
Just think! Those small “ancestors,” our neighbors who share the earth that we tend to refer to as “ours,” will stick around to experience who-knows-what new life that rises up in the future. Thinking of these little “relatives” carrying on after we’re all gone is somehow comforting.
As maryplumbago commented in her reply to your post, “the climate will settle as natural flora and fauna growth resumes and it will flourish again in the far distant future.”
I will never give up my “drop in the bucket” efforts to make the world a better place, but yes, without positive input to balance all the negative, I’d be too depressed to carry on.
As always, thank you thank you thank you for sharing your thoughts! No matter what you write about you’re a welcome tonic.