English Summary
Editor’s Letter
Q.: How to stop reading bad news?
A.: Start writing it.
My good friend Roma Super works for Radio Free Europe, is a regular contributor to GQ, and has been nominated two times for GQ Men of the Year — both as a television journalist and as a writer. Roma often updates his Facebook (соцсеть признана в РФ экстремистской и запрещена) with a dry list of the most important news of the month. For example, last month (and I’m almost quoting here): somebody died. Another guy died. Somebody else died. There was a terrorist attack, and then another one and another one. A flood. A death. Taking hostages. Arrests. Somebody was forced to resign, somebody was put on trial. Something was banned.
Of course, there is positive news on the list, too: somebody got out of jail. There was a gay pride parade somewhere. But out of 34 points on the list, at least 25 could be described as “bad news”, and of the remaining nine only four unequivocally fell into the category of good news.
Yes, it’s true that Roma’s thinking is at times eschatological: he doesn’t expect anything good from life, and is waiting for God to finally engulf this world in hellfire. But the point isn’t Roma, it’s that people generally — including those people who are reading Roma’s posts — like the list. 700 people liked it, 100 people shared it. The list elegantly and concisely shows what the most important things were that happened this month — and for the most part everything is awful.
There’s the vicious cycle of the “negativity bias” — with all other things held equal, your brain reacts more strongly, more emotionally to bad news and gives priority to it. As in the majority of things that happen to us, this reaction has its roots in our primeval selves: it’s always more important to detect things that are bad, because they are a potential threat. That’s exactly the way things are now. We never have news about people being born, and yet we always have news about people dying. And if somebody died, we want to know from what —