A case of over-exposure?

The world seems to be falling apart. Everywhere you look there is something going wrong. People fighting with each other over ideologies or plots of land (or both) while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Some estimates say that nearly 1/2 of the world's population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Yet there are some 1,645 people in the world classed as billionaires. It can be depressing if you think about it.

But is the world getting worse, or are we simply able to see more of the world's problems? 

24 hour rolling news means that you are never short of the news. And the need to keep these channels on the air 24 hours a day has resulted in more and more stories that were probably deemed to not be newsworthy 15 years ago being picked apart at length. As the most "compelling" stories (to use a popular phrase from a well-known 24 news channel) tend not to be happy ones we seem to be bombarded with constant reminders that the world is, in fact, going to hell.

And it may very well be going to hell. There certainly does seem to be enough problems to go around two or three times over. But it is probably incorrect to assume that the world is definitively worse off than it was, say, 40 years ago. Since the early 20th Century we have seen two huge World Wars, a Cold War which could have sparked at any time and the Nuclear Arms Race. Now that sounds like trouble.

Contrastingly, from about 2007 onwards, the "Doomsday Clock" (the symbolic device which predicts how close we are to a potential global catastrophe) has actually been held pretty stable at around 23:55 (Doomsday being set at midnight). 

Hence, while it is possible that the world is getting worse, it seems much more likely that we are simply being over-exposed to its problems on a more regular basis. And the biggest problem about this over-exposure is that it seems to be heavily biased in favour of bad news, as I mentioned before. 

Yet there are fantastic, GOOD things happening out there every day, all over the world. Sure it often seems harder to finder the good than the bad but if you go looking for them I promise you will find them.

So next time you look up at the news and it seems that something else is going wrong with the world, how about this for a plan? Go find something, anything, that makes you smile. Something that makes you remember that the world is not all about wars, poverty and inequality. Something that reminds you, even for a short while, that it's not 24 hour bad news out there. 

Till next time,
DT