Happiness: we have liftoff
in living your own unremarkable life you have caused such destruction, and then to feel helpless and hopeless at the seeming impossibility of undoing what we as a species have collectively wrought?
Jonathan Franzen touches on hope, or rather its lack, in his essay What If We Stopped Pretending? ‘‘You can keep on hoping that [climate] catastrophe is preventable’’ he says, ‘‘and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.’’
For the optimistic, technology promises hope. For the pessimist, technology shrinks hope: a means to surveil and control, misinform, corrupt democracy, incite violence, and to murder from afar.
Rolf Dobelli argues that even the way we receive news about the news is bad for our health: it’s addictive, increases cognitive errors, inhibits deep thinking and creativity and makes us passive.
And anyway, he says, most news is irrelevant to our everyday lives: ‘‘People find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new.’’
Dobelli suggests that accumulating facts does not help us understand the world. In fact, ‘‘the important stories are non-stories’’ says Dobelli, ‘‘slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar, but have a transforming effect’’.
The more ‘‘news factoids’’ you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.
Although the media wants us to believe that there’s some advantage to consuming the news, ‘‘in reality’’, says Dobelli, ‘‘news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.’’
Last weekend during the Kite Festival, brilliantly coloured kites filled a cloudless sky above Neale Park in The Wood.
The sight reminded me of a song much older than When You’re Smiling, a hymn we used to sing at school assemblies. It’s based on a poem written by Joseph Addison in the 1700s, and which begins ‘‘The Spacious Firmament on high / With all the blue Ethereal Sky’’. For Addison the wonders of the universe – the sky, the ‘‘unwearied sun’’, the moon and ‘‘all the stars that round her burn’’ are all ‘‘For ever singing, as they shine/ The Hand that made us is Divine’’.
Although it was human hands that created the kites in Neale Park – a whale, a lizard, winged pigs, a dragon, a teddy bear, a bare-breasted mermaid – which fluttered and turned in the blue sky, there was still something intoxicating, and perhaps even divine, about them.
Experienced, not on a screen or labelled as ‘‘news’’, but on a green field in my own neighbourhood, human beings at harmless play: warmed by the ‘‘unwearied sun’’, sharing food, laughing, talking to each other, running back and forth, revelling in the tug of the breeze on their kites, faces upturned to the ‘‘spacious firmament on high’’.