When things feel fragile and frightening – when even PR emails refer to “this clusterfuck of a year” – it’s hard to know where to focus your energy. 

One answer comes from something the comedian/musician/actor Tim Minchin said not long ago. Explaining why he had switched off from social media and breaking news updates, he said:

“I noticed I was doing less good, because I was so distressed by the world… counterintuitively, you think, ‘I’m not burying my head in the sand – look at me, observing and acknowledging the distress of the world’. That is ethical only if you put it into action – only if it increases the amount you donate, or increases the amount of pressure you put on your local MP, or if it makes you buy a plane ticket and get over there and grab a medicaid kid… if it makes you do nothing but feel distressed, then you have to ask yourself the question: who else is suffering from my distress? And if you’re a father, it might be your kids.”

Minchin spends only about 20 minutes every other day reading the news, he said. Asked by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy if that was enough to form opinions, Minchin seemed to agree that perhaps it wasn’t – but reckoned that, on balance, forming opinions wasn’t worth the downsides. Being informed is only ethical if it “makes you better in the world”, he said. If you’re better informed but paralysed by indecision, or so agitated that you start yelling at taxi drivers, then it’s time to switch off.

I like this position; it feels somehow freeing from the pressure that we’ve created for ourselves in the 24-hour news cycle and the never-ending scroll of social media – most of which, as Minchin reminds us, isn’t news, but other people’s views on the news. I like it also because it puts the ball back in our (i.e., we news consumers) court: by all means, follow what’s going on, but then do something about it. (Do something. Anything, as campaigning expert Paul de Gregorio urges.)

Rebecca Solnit warns of becoming so attached to despair that it becomes a habit – despair becomes a sort of “teddy bear” that you refuse to let go of. That achieves little other than letting you off the hook. “You can go be bitter and idle on your sofa if you’re already comfortable and safe,” she writes in her book, Hope in the Dark. Meanwhile, the people in the most dangerous positions, or those most aware of what is at stake, frequently describe despair as a luxury they cannot afford.

Here’s another way to look at it. The author Oliver Burkeman suggests ensuring your “psychological centre of gravity” is in your real, immediate world – “the world of your family and friends and neighbourhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies”. Not that you ignore the latter, but that you see it more as “a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about”. Burkeman knows a thing or two about what makes a meaningful life, having reminded us that we only get about 4,000 weeks to figure things out.

It’s surely not a coincidence that he mentions neighbourhood, which has been described as “the unit of change”. That’s because encouraging others to take action is often most effective when it’s local-level action. That’s the level that we can relate to – it’s wider than family (so it still offers us a group to feel a part of) but not as wide as the nation, which starts to feel abstract and disconnected to our lives. It’s also the scale at which we see how things directly influence us, and how we can influence them. 

Seemingly small things matter. Echoing that point is Nick Cave (quoted in the wonderful Marginalian blog) when he talks about facing down cynicism:

“Hopefulness… is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like… keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.”

Small as you like: it’s better, surely, than news-induced paralysis.

Photo by Jachan DeVol on Unsplash