Finding quiet in a world of breaking news
A little beauty amid chaos.
Have you ever woken up one day and just not wanted to add to the noise?
It’s been a crazy week—and if you’re American, I’m sure you’ve experienced emotional whiplash in a span of mere hours this past Sunday. Our brains may have adapted to the gunfire of breaking news firing at us multiple times a day, but I question our capacity to process all this information without going into psychological and emotional overload.
We’re adapting because we have no choice; it’s a matter of survival because everything is consumed as it happens, in the moment. I see posts and memes circulating of how we’re “sick and tired of living in unprecedented times,” but this is life now. Media, tech, and news moves too fast for it to be otherwise. But it doesn’t mean it’s healthy.
Like many of you, I jumped on social media Sunday afternoon (Threads is the only place I’m at, currently) refreshing and scrolling my feed. Yes, in this historic moment of a president stepping down from a re-election bid and endorsing a woman as his successor in candidacy, I wanted to be part of the energy shift as we collectively processed what was happening together, in real time. And it was amazing. We moved from shock, anger, panic, and eventually to hope.
Maybe this is how we’re learning to cope with unprecedented levels of unprecedented events, processing it together in a collective act of connecting while doom scrolling (or joy scrolling, as I’ve seen it called as of Monday—the vibe shift!).