The joyous news that seven-year-old Yamato Tanooka has been found alive and very much unabducted, unmurdered, and uneaten by wild bears, will have brought smiles to many a face this morning. The child, who disappeared after he was made to get out of his parents’ car on a mountain road for misbehaving, has been found bunking down in a military hut after spending six nights out alone. “I’m overcome with emotion,” said his father in a public statement, “Really, thank you very much.”
Tanooka’s story serves as a reminder of how, despite living in a 24-hour news-obsessed culture, we rarely get to see things turn out well Instead, news outlets emphasise the horrific, the lurid and the depraved in an attempt to maximise audiences and therefore profits. The result is a skewed view of the world as dark, depressing place in which positive things rarely happen. To look at any tabloid news website, for example, is to be faced with reports of rape, murder, poverty, famine, violence, terrorism and war. Anything positive and heartwarming inevitably goes uncovered or gets lost in the sea of negativity, and the rise of the internet and, more specifically social media, as a purveyor of news is only making the distortion worse.
“Good news is rare these days,” said the late great Hunter S Thompson, “and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.” It’s testament to the negative outlook one can develop if confronted with too many awful news stories that I assumed Thompson’s good news diamond had been flogged in order to finance the rapacious, murderous, torturous rampage of an African warlord (perhaps a holiday is in order.) But he is right; we must gratefully guard these glimmers of good in the world.
A colleague of mine once told me that three of the best things you can do for your mental health is to cut down on alcohol, take up some kind of exercise, and to stop reading the news. His statement, in some ways, could be seen to be that of a journalist calling for his own obsolescence, but I firmly believe that we’d all be better off if we exposed ourselves to less negativity and, as opposed to focusing on painful events that we can rarely control and at risk of sounding like a total hippy, just lived a bit more in the moment (man). It’s for this reason that I am also a robust defender of fluff in newspapers. Imagine if publications such as the Guardian were to heed the advice of some grumpy below-the-line commenters and decided to cover only hard news. You need some whimsy or you’d become completely depressed.
I’m not saying, of course, that we should eliminate the negative entirely, just that we need a better balance. The fashion for happy clappy positive thinking has rightly been criticised as largely unhelpful from a psychological perspective. Oliver Burkeman’s brilliant book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking makes the point that forcing yourself to always look on the bright side is not necessarily the path to fulfilment. Indeed, catastrophists such as myself can take comfort in the idea that negative thinking can actually be beneficial. “Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power,” writes Burkeman. “Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.”
But too much negativity can get on top of you rather, especially when you are experiencing difficult emotions in other areas of your life. It can be helpful, or at least it has been for me, to remind yourself that the world can be a beautiful place filled with good, kind people, because the news is never likely to perform that service for you. The Guardian has just started a series of positive stories – called Half Full, sites like the Huffington Post have good news sections, and the Good News Network brings us such cheering stories as “Woman graduates from university where she was abandoned as a baby”, “12-year-old boy sews 365 Teddy Bears a Year for the Grieving” and “Baby Boom Brings World’s Rarest Cats Back From Edge of Extinction”.
None of these stories, and certainly not this article, will are likely to get as many hits as the latest Isis execution video, but still, positive headlines are likely to give us a boost. Three days ago, I was convinced Yamato Tanooka was dead, but he has been found alive. Monty Python had it right. We need that brighter side of life, perhaps not always, but at least sometimes, for all our sakes.