Yes, I know, good news doesn’t sell. But seriously, there are days it seems like no one is happy, that no one has anything positive happening in their lives, and everything is conspiring to make human existence as miserable as possible. Everything we say is outrage fodder, and everything we do is viewed in the most damning context we can devise. And if we ever cross someone’s arbitrary line you can bet there’ll be video, edited, posted, and spun, and gone viral before we even have a chance to respond.
And it’s ironic. We claim to be all about privacy. Everyone should keep out of our business. Because clearly our business is being in everyone else’s business. We’ve become the anti-Diogenes, dishonestly looking for a dishonest man. Truth and context are irrelevant; only the snippet of reality, as devoid of context as can be contrived in order to imply the worst interpretation is what matters.
We’ve become a society of blinkered misanthropes.
I sometimes wonder if we’ve decided that tearing everyone else down is less work than actually becoming better ourselves, or that true equality means descending to the lowest common denominator.
The thing is, that’s not the world I actually live in. Yes, there is friction, there are unpleasant people. But on the whole, at least where I live, people are generally decent. My neighbor offered us the apples from their tree. If I need to get over into another lane I usually don’t have to wait long for someone kind enough to let me in. People hold doors for me. People give money to the beggars at the freeway offramp.
People do amazing, generous, kindly things. People invent and create and change our lives for the better. People become doctors and nurses and firefighters and policemen and teachers, and do their jobs well even though they’re tired and underappreciate and even maligned. People get up and go to work and do all the things that hold society together, even though other people are laying in wait to capture them in a moment of weakness and destroy their lives.
Good things don’t get much press, and that’s a pity. We need more headlines like “Nearly 500 people gather to paint homes of the elderly” or “Stranger pays for car repairs for family stranded along freeway” or “Teacher retires, having made a difference in the lives of over 1000 student.”
Yes, bad things happen, and there are some truly bad people out there. And there are a lot of people who make at least one really bad choice in their lives. But the bulk of people are not bad people, and are nowhere as terrible as their fifteen seconds of viral video make them out to be. The ubiquity of camera phones haven’t made us more accountable, only more vulnerable. It’s made us less forgiving, less understanding, less patient. The Perpetual Outrage Gang have made us less willing to stick up for one another, or even to merely point out, “I don’t think this is entirely in context and may be misrepresented.”
My experience with life is that you find what you look for, but that’s not entirely true, obviously. Whenever we engage with media of any kind we are more likely to find what other people think we want to see. Perhaps its time we began looking for better media. Or perhaps it’s time we became better media, focusing more on getting the positive side of life out there.
No.. There is no good. Go into your garage, fire up the car, and stay as long as it takes.