presented at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts
August 11, 2024
As most of you probably know, I write a weekly news and politics blog called The Weekly Sift. I’ve been doing it for more than 20 years.
And all that time, people have been telling me the same thing: “I could never do that. Following the news is just too depressing.”
While some people say that in a matter-of-fact way, UUs typically say it in a tone of self-criticism. Because Unitarian Universalism is a this-world religion, we feel like we ought stay informed about this world. But too often we end up bouncing back and forth between obsessive anxiety and depression when we do follow the news, and guilt when we don’t. So many, many UUs have an unsatisfying relationship with the news.
That’s what I want to talk about today: How could you relate to the news in a healthier, more positive way?
I want to start with a couple of simple suggestions. Then I’ll look back to a bad period in my own recent relationship with the news and draw some conclusions from it. And finally I’ll close with some general observations
on what I think of as the “spirituality” of the news.
First the simple stuff. The reason the Sift comes out weekly is that I believe most Americans consume news at the wrong pace. The 24/7 news cycle tempts us into frequent, shallow interactions with the news rather than fewer, deeper ones. So in the course of a week you may spend an hour on some particular topic or event, but probably you’ve just processed the same five minutes 12 times. You’ve heard the same facts, felt the same emotions, and thought the same thoughts over and over again.
For example, think about watching coverage of a mass shooting. In the first five minutes you’ll learn where it was, an estimate — possibly wrong — of how many people were killed or injured, and whether the shooter is dead, in custody, or still at large.
At that point, you know all the information that is publicly available, and there may not be anything more for several days. If you want, you can keep watching the continuous coverage for three more hours. But you won’t learn anything new?
That pattern is more common than you probably think. Surprisingly often, you’d be better off following a story week by week rather than minute by minute.
My second simple suggestion is to be wary of speculation. It’s a rare day when the news networks actually uncover
24 hours worth of information. So they pad their schedules with panels of “experts” who try to guess what will happen next. Very few of these pundits predict the future all that well, but they fill the time.
Sometimes, speculating about what’s going to happen next is fun. That’s why we do it in our personal conversations. Do you think the Red Sox will make the playoffs? Will that couple get married eventually? How is the final season of Stranger Things going to wrap things up?
We have those speculative conversations because we enjoy them. And so, if you enjoy watching TV talking heads speculate, feel free. There’s no harm in it.
But it also has no value. So if you’re not enjoying it, if it’s making you tense or agitated, you can walk away and do something else.
So those are my two simple pieces of advice: Consume news at a slower pace that allows you to think about it
rather than just react to it. And walk away from speculation that you aren’t enjoying.
Now let’s go a little deeper. Often mistakes have a lot to teach us, so I thought I’d tell you about a recent time when I mismanaged my own relationship with the news.
Back in February, as you may remember, Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report on Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents. He found no justification for pressing charges, but along the way he made gratuitous comments about President Biden’s mental competence. Biden responded with an angry press conference that made things worse. As he was leaving the room, he answered an unscripted question about Gaza, and said “Mexico” when he obviously meant “Egypt”.
That started a media frenzy similar to the one this summer that led to Biden dropping out of the race. That next week,
the Annenberg School for Communication counted 26 unique articles about Biden’s age in the New York Times alone. And only one of them pointed out that Trump might also have an age problem. So for an entire week,
Biden’s age blotted out all other considerations: his administration’s accomplishments, January 6th, and even Trump’s criminal indictments and plans for authoritarian government. None of that was worth discussing, because Biden was old.And I thought: “This is it. We’re going to replace democracy with authoritarianism because one man said ‘Mexico’ instead of ‘Egypt’.”
And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. I felt it physically, as if I were carrying a weight around. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again.
And I don’t think it was just me. In Paul Krugman’s subsequent column he seemed to be carrying a similar weight: “I am,” he wrote, “for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.”
OK. At this point we could go down at least two long sidetracks and never find our way back, like Biden’s actual mental competence, exactly how bad a second Trump term would be, and stuff like that. But talk to me about that some other time.
Right now, I’m more interested in that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. If you’ve ever felt something like it, you know that the triggering information doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change or the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.
One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, “Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll probably be OK.” And then you hear or see something. Maybe it’s a big thing, like the Dobbs decision or the October 7 attacks. But it doesn’t have to be. Maybe you hear about a heat wave in Asia. Or see police fighting with protesters. Or maybe a personal friend, somebody you’ve always respected, surprises you by repeating some hateful talking point about trans people or immigrants.
And in an instant the bottom falls out. That guarded confidence you felt a minute ago is gone, and suddenly all you can think is: “We’re doomed. We’re on a track to some unthinkable dystopia, and nothing I do makes any difference. People don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to them, because I can’t figure out what they were thinking to begin with.”
I experienced this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so gullible or self-centered or short-sighted?
We don’t usually talk about these experiences, because it feels like confessing a weakness, or like a virus we don’t want to pass on. If I’m panicking inside, I don’t want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to panic too.
But I think we do need to talk about this, for at least two reasons. First, because when this happens to you, it’s really unpleasant. Despair is one of the most painful emotions out there, so the less time you can spend in it, the better.
And second, it’s debilitating. When that sinkhole opens up or that volcano of rage erupts, it’s hard to keep doing any of the constructive things you ordinarily do. And if you do manage to keep doing them, you probably aren’t doing them very well. I know that when I’m coming from a place of fear or anger, when I’m running away from an internal panic, I have bad judgment and find it hard to connect with people. In situations where I’d like to communicate confidently and persuasively, what tends to come through instead is my anxiety. So despair, depression, and anger
tend to be self-fulfilling prophesies. If you and everyone like you are panicking, that can easily turn into something to panic about.
FDR famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But that quote skates over the fact that fear itself can be pretty fearsome.
After I surfaced again, I started asking people if they recognize this experience and, if so, what they do about it. I’ve learned two things from those conversations: First, not a single person has told me that they don’t know what I’m talking about. And second, from the remedies they suggest, I gather that most people experience this as a passing mood, a short-term unpleasantness that they just need to get over. So I’ve heard suggestions like: Eat something. Go walk in the woods. Watch a movie. Get a big hug from somebody.
And if you have a minor case, that works. Treat yourself like a malfunctioning device: Unplug yourself, wait a little while, and then plug yourself back in again.
But sometimes that only works for a few days, or until the next triggering event. News-induced despair or anger can be a recurring injury like a bad back or a trick knee. And if that’s the case, you need more than just a reboot, you need a strategy, a training regimen. You need to look for patterns in the outbreaks, to see what you need to strengthen and what you need to avoid.
One pattern in my life is that my blog gives me a weekly cycle. Monday mornings I put a lot of energy into getting the posts out, and that puts me in a vulnerable state Monday evenings and into Tuesday. So I’ve learned not to expect much of myself until Wednesday. Another thing I don’t do is double up Sunday services and Monday blogs. So you may have noticed that I’ve cancelled tomorrow’s Weekly Sift. I just don’t have the stamina to do both.
But I was doing all that in February, and it still wasn’t enough. And that got me looking at these sorts of crashes more deeply: What causes them? Is there some kind of mental hygiene that can prevent them?
Now, it’s tempting to say that the News itself is the cause, that the bad state of the World is making us feel this way. And if that’s true, then the only permanent solution is to stop paying attention altogether, or stop caring. That’s what Jackson Browne is wrestling with in the song. [Earlier in the service, we had listened to Jackson Browne’s song “Doctor, My Eyes”.] Maybe I should have closed my eyes rather than leaving them open for so long.
As you can imagine, I don’t want to go there. If we all do that, then the American experiment in self-government really is over, no matter who wins our elections. And if we stop paying attention to anything beyond our own private lives, our own loved ones and our own circle of friends, then our UU values become empty. Are people starving in Gaza? Is the planet going to be unlivable for future generations? Too bad for them. I’ve got my own problems.
So I was highly motivated to take a closer look at my February collapse and see what I could learn from it.
Think about the list of symptoms I experienced and that I’ve heard other people report: — paralyzing fear, despair, depression, and annihilating anger. To me, those are all symptoms of broken denial. You keep telling yourself that some unpleasant thing can’t happen, and then you get reminded that it can. So you get angry or depressed or fall into despair.
That tracks with my experience in February. I had been telling myself, and telling my readers, that the American people are basically sensible, and they’ll rise to the challenge of this election. Every voter starts paying attention on their own schedule, so at any given moment they might tell a pollster all kinds of things. But come November,
most voters will look around, figure things out, and do the right thing.
But then for a week in February, nothing mattered but Biden’s age. And I was forced to admit: Maybe not.
Once you accept the diagnosis that the root problem is denial, it becomes important to understand what exactly you’ve been denying. This can be tricky, because the demons of Depression will do their best to fool you about it. Denial typically involves telling yourself that good things are going to happen, so Depression will try to convince you that the way to fix your mistake is to tell yourself that bad things are going to happen: Democracy is over. Climate change is going to destroy civilization. Rational thought can never compete with religious extremism. Humanity will never make any progress on poverty or war or bigotry. In short, we’re all doomed.
I went through that phase, as I imagine many of you have at one time or another.
But this kind of negative thinking is just the mirror image of the positive thinking that got me in trouble to begin with. Because my true mistake, the conclusion that needed replacing, wasn’t that the election was going to have a happy outcome. My true mistake was telling myself that I knew what was going to happen. Jumping from “I know things are going to turn out well” to “I know things are going to turn out badly” doesn’t undo that denial, it maintains it.
Because here’s the scary, humbling, but true thought that I was actually denying: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can guess. I can speculate. I can argue that one outcome is more likely than another. But when you come down to it, I just don’t know.
I don’t know who’s going to win the election. I don’t know if Trump will ever face justice. I don’t know how bad climate change will get before we turn it around, or if we even will turn it around. I don’t know what future wars we might find ourselves fighting. I don’t know what new plagues are out there. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out
how to offer everyone a chance at a good life. I don’t know how long it will take the arc of the Universe to bend towards justice, or if it even wants to bend that way. Pick any problem or issue you care about, and I can’t promise you anything. Because I just don’t know.
And that, I think, is the essence of a problem we all face: How do we keep going, keep striving, keep doing whatever we can to give humanity its best chance to thrive — without falsely promising ourselves that whatever we’re doing is certain to work?
The answer to that question, I believe, is that we need to have a deeper appreciation of the difference between Optimism and Hope,And learn to practice Hope. We often use those two words interchangeably, but they’re actually quite different.
Optimism, like Pessimism, is a belief about the future: It will go well or it will go badly. But Hope is an attitude towards the Present. Hope says that striving is worthwhile. It doesn’t promise an outcome. It just says that trying is better than not trying. The future will always be uncertain, but Hope is what allows us to accept that uncertainty and keep going.
UUs ought to be good at this, because our religion has never offered us certainty. Unitarian Universalism doesn’t postulate a God who promises happy endings. It doesn’t guarantee us a place in Heaven or assure us that we’ll all meet again after death. Unitarian Universalism just says that living a good life is better than living a bad life. Focus on that, and have hope.
I think that’s an important lesson to remember right now, because in recent weeks the news cycle has turned again.
Biden dropping out of the race ended several weeks of what (from my point of view) was a really bad news cycle. And now, suddenly, we’re in a very good news cycle. People like me are excited again and polls are shifting. All the momentum is what I consider good momentum.
So it’s tempting to start buying into Optimism again, to tell myself that everything’s going to be fine, that on election night I’ll have the pleasure of watching good people win and bad people lose. And that may happen, but I don’t want to get attached to it. I don’t want to start the whole manic/depressive cycle going again. The mental hygiene I’m trying to live by is Hope, not Optimism. I want to strive for good things without ever losing sight of the possibility that they may not happen.
I recommend that attitude not just for this election, but for all other political issues, and for challenges in your personal life as well: Don’t spend a lot of time in the future, living in positive or negative scenarios that may never occur. Just keep striving for the best outcome you can reasonably imagine, and then let things happen as they will.
We don’t get to choose the future, but we do get to choose our own actions.
Choose well.
