Stirring Point

When your eyes find the morning headlines, what’s the first thing you feel? Is it joy? Is it excitement? If so, head over to your local doctor and ask for the big pills. Is it angst? Malaise? Outright rage? Political biases aside, can you feel the steamroller running down your well-being?

We should wake up and feel partially impervious to headlines. The simple gift of living another day ought to drown out some of the toxicity swirling around our state of affairs. But for many, chaos has swallowed any chance of contentment. Even optimists are watching their equanimity fall at the hands of perpetual disorder. The earth’s new wobble is here to stay. So how do we get a grip before we’re flung off into some hapless mental oblivion?

The boiling frog apologue felt particularly apt this week. The water around us is heating up, but the temperature gains are incremental and we’ve yet to feel real pain. Our brains are working overtime to hyper-normalize the chaos and violence, but with the magnitude of madness, it’s a strain to keep up. Tragedies have become white noise. Sweden suffered the worst mass shooting in its history this week. Did you notice? I did, but only with a glance. What horror.

In reality, we must hyper-normalize the chaos; otherwise, there’d be no way to deal with its volume. But hyper-normalization comes with a cost. We build calluses, and while these hardened pads reduce our discomfort, they change us over time. They thicken into layers of normalcy and get squished between our stimulus and pain. One day, we wake up and see a mass shooting in a school and scroll right past the story. Our hearts—like our palms—are hardening. 

One must ask themself the question: What impact will this story have on my life? Our answers will vary based on the measure of our priorities. Does this immediately impact my family? Is it someone else’s problem? Can I do anything about it? I have to get the kids off to school and don’t have time to deal with this now…

Despondence is on the rise, and it drags the dead weight of futility in its shadow. But we have a choice. Our well-being is not a pre-fixed condition, and with effort, we can shift its lean. How we do that begins with identifying our priorities and arranging them in order of importance. Family, a healthy body, community, and humility—these things matter, and likely in that order.

Hyper-normalization may be creeping, but we can slow its progress, and that’s a battle that’s worth fighting. Why? Because our sanity in these circumstances is tied to the idea that the hardship of another may one day be ours. And while tragedies will never stop, we must attempt to see a human face in each story. This is one reliable roadmap to maintaining empathy. We can’t allow every story to be distant; we can’t afford to let every statistic about death and destruction be faceless. 

But we also can’t afford to let our empathy corrupt our balance. We are alive, and if you’re reading this, your life is mostly stable. Don’t steal the hope from your children’s eyes because of doom-filled headlines. And don’t let the world’s despair suck the bliss from a pleasant moment. Try meeting the day with the joy it deserves. The warmth of your bed, the taste of your coffee, your nuzzling partner in the crook of your chest. The world is more than its headlines, and we are more than our reactions. There is a balance, but we must work to find it.