Are We Killing Ourselves With Bad News?

In days like these, information is hazardous.Yesterday morning, before my feet had even hit the floor, I opened up Instagram, and sitting at the top of my feed was a video of a group of ICE agents driving a man’s face into the pavement and pepper-spraying him at point-blank range.Just below that, a petrified and screaming child alone, surrounded by masked thugs.And underneath that, a wide-eyed content creator was alerting viewers about a pregnant woman’s wounds suffered under ICE detainment.I instinctively scrolled through, bombarded by one image of staggering inhumanity after another. Click.Share.Swipe.Click.Share.Before I realized it, I was on an algorithm-propelled descent into a rabbit hole of horrors that triggered another fight-or-flight rush of Cortisol into my already taxed system.Suddenly, I was jolted from my phone by a thought: What the hell am I doing here?I’d barely been awake for five minutes, and I was already drowning in the same hellish scenes I’d gone to bed to a few hours earlier. I’d taken a brief respite of broken sleep and stress dreams and had immediately returned to my now permanent waking condition: emotional exhaustion.I inventoried the last few weeks and realized that this jittery internal panic has been my default setting. Day after day, from waking until sleeping, I’d mindlessly absorbed countless hours of video, sounds, and photos that the human mind cannot properly make sense of. Not only that, but thousands of times, I’d reflexively boosted this nightmare fuel to friends, readers, followers, and strangers, contributing untold gallons to the fierce flood of terrible they too have been drowning in.Right now, we are all in danger of killing ourselves with bad news, of willfully dying on the altar of information.When does our noble desire not to turn away from the violence become something self-destructive and injurious, something counterproductive to an effective response to that violence? How do we know when we’ve passed from knowing what’s happening to a crippling fear porn addiction that is doing nothing but rendering us hopeless and overwhelmed? When is our newsfeed doing more harm than good?Please hear me, I’m not advocating checking out by any measure. We’re here in this perilous and heartbreaking place as a nation because tens of millions of Americans of privilege have spent years averting their eyes, turning away from unpleasant news, and burying their heads in the sands of distraction instead of facing the reality in front of them. We sure as hell don’t want to do that. The danger is real, the threat is formidable, and the human toll is massive, and we can’t pretend these things are not true. It’s critically important to be aware of the atrocities this Administration is perpetrating with ICE and elsewhere so that we don’t lose sight of the gravity of the moment. But at some point, we move from being adequately informed to being profoundly addled by the scale and velocity of the bad news. I can throw a bath towel onto a flooded floor, and it will immediately fill its fibers with liquid until it becomes fully saturated, at which point it cannot take anything else in. Once it reaches its capacity, it becomes completely weighed down and useless.You’re probably pretty close to such a state, friend. I know I am.So how do we pull ourselves out of this precipitous spiral into despair?We all need to be asking ourselves the questions:How much devastation can we responsibly hold? What purpose does the doom-scrolling serve?How does it actually help us or anyone else?I can’t tell you how much information you need to be adequately informed, or how much carnage your brain and body can sustain and still function, or when you’ve reached a place of ineffectiveness.What I do know is that every second we spend on social media, staring at the horrors on a screen is a second we could spend moving out into the world and doing something that affirms our agency, something that generates a tangible response to what breaks our hearts, something that helps another human being.My friends, stay informed.Stay engaged.Be aware.Don’t fall into apathy.But please, don’t let the bad news kill you.We need you here to help twist the plot.How do you balance taking in news with not allowing yourself to be overcome? What are strategies and practices that help you avoid drowning in despair? Let me know in the comments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe