Every time I’m tempted to proclaim the era that we live in as the most depressing ever, I remember that I never had to fight in a war or live as somebody’s slave. Then again, I do live in an age where Celine Dion is allowed (even encouraged) to sing, so maybe I’ve seen my share of suffering.
Don’t get me wrong: global economic meltdown, rock fall in Duweiqa, a six-point lead for Republicans in the US elections qualifies as a bad day in anybody’s books. But are bad things really happening at a higher frequency or do we just hear about them more, thanks to up to the minute nature of the web and cable TV?
Why is everything so effing depressing?
I’ve always defined depression as the inability to see any kind of beauty, either within you or around you. So maybe the reason the news makes us depressed is because good news is an oxymoron; it doesn’t exist. When good things happen, we’re told about them once. When bad things happen, we’re inundated with every gory detail and we welcome it. Schadenfreude is the new black and every one of us owns a full wardrobe.
(Incidentally, I bet you didn’t know that the word ‘news’ comes from: north, east, west and south. N-E-W-S. See, this column is provocative AND informative.)
So what’s making the way we receive news a source of major stress to us? Firstly: We live in a global village, where things that happen on the other side of the world are no longer things that happen on the other side of the world. They’re beamed into our homes through satellite TV and cable internet, so our connection and sense of empathy to any kind of suffering is instantaneous and on a higher emotional scale. It hurts more because we’re more immersed in it.
Secondly, there is almost no delay in news delivery. As recently as when I was a kid, sometime in the mid-70s, you got the news from the morning paper and an evening news program. And that was it. No podcasts, no RSS feeds to news websites, none of that stuff. By speeding up the flow, our rate of absorption of bad news (I should stop calling it bad news since we’ve established that all news is inherently bad) has exceeded our capacity to process it, and the time we spend waiting for the next piece of bad news is composed of sheer, unfiltered anxiety.
Quite a life, huh?
But not only that, the rate of constant updates on news developments is now bordering on the comic. I remember watching a local US news channel during the 2000 presidential elections and every 20 minutes, they would stop whatever they were showing, to cut to a reporter on the scene who would inform us, in more words than I’m using now, that nothing had happened and that we hadn’t missed anything!
Thirdly, the world has become a much more complex place, which contrasts sharply with the kind of messages that the media bombards us with under the veil of entertaining us and enlightening us on the choices available to us as consumers.
In other words, the issues are becoming more complex, while we’ve become morons who watch reality TV and memorize catchy ad slogans and are therefore no longer equipped to understand anything that hasn’t been reduced to a memorable sound bite.
Government? Civil rights? Democracy? Don’t bother your pretty little heads, sheep.just buy another Coke. Go to Sharm for Eid. Who’s your favourite Desperate Housewife?
And this is in the US, that bastion of freedom and democracy, never mind Egypt, where the only “freedom we have is a cinema I used to go to in Heliopolis.
Not only that, the so-called experts can’t even agree on the validity of most of these issues and spend half their time crossing swords armed with a combination of indignant scientific jargon and Ad Hominem attacks. With us watching them and baying for blood, like at some ancient Roman Circus.
Take global warming, for instance. No reasonable person would deny it exists, right? Why? Because it’s been repeated in our presence, again and again, until it’s become part of the cultural dialogue. But do any of us really understand the science or are we merely parroting the talking of points of experts on the media who appear to know what they’re talking about?
Check out this quote from Time magazine, in 1974:
“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing [and] may be the harbinger of another ice age.
I say them all in a Hadron Collider and maybe something intelligible will emerge.
Lastly, the reason the world appears to be more depressing than ever, is because a lot of it makes so little sense. We don’t understand why bad things happen or how to go about preventing them. We place our trust in systems and institutions that we rely on to represent us and when they fail, we let them get away with it. All because we’re distracted by the bright lights and shiny objects on TV.
Pei Mi says that real change only happens when the shameless become afraid of the desperate. Maybe we’re not yet desperate enough. And the shameless? Tune in next week and I’ll name and shame them. With my name on top of that list.
Mohammed Nassarwas kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him. Feel free to email him at [email protected].
