June 29, 2025 • 16 mins
Depending on your algorithm, you’re being fed death, destruction, calamity, chaos, fire, floods, and horror more and more and more.
Chatting with Sally Gold the other day. It’s pretty clear we only really have so much room between our ears for stuff like that.
So when a friend who lives in Africa reached out to me the other day asking, “How do we stay sane when everything’s such a mess?” I sent her a voice note, which turned into this podcast.
Pre-Order 'So What, Now What?' here
Get tickets to Story Club here
Get more from Osher here and send him an email here
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Thanks for downloading the show. It's better than yesterday. Useful tools,
useful conversations here to make your day to day better
than yesterday. Every week since twenty thirteen. My name Josha Ginsburg.
I'm glad you're here. Every morning usually starts about the same.
I shuffle out of bed, flick on the expresso machine.
Have we grind my beans as I wait for the
(00:27):
thing to heat up, which is good because my feet
are cold on the kitchen floor. Flick open a news
app the other day, as I'm grinding my beans, thinking
about my cold feet, I read in very bold font
us attacks Iran Now like you probably did. I had
quite a physical reaction to this because I know that
(00:51):
as a world, as a planet, we don't really come
back from something like that easily. The last three years
or so, though, has been a steadily escalating level of
chaos in our news feeds, no matter where we look
or try not to look, And depending on your algorithm,
you're getting a perspective on death and destruction, calamity and
(01:12):
chaos and fire and flood and horror and more and
more and more and more and more and more and more.
It can be a lot. The other day chatting with
Sally Gould. She's a paramedic who's written a book about
her job and the things she's learned doing that job.
She talks about keeping a bucket empty and that there's
(01:36):
only really so much space between our ears for all
that kind of stuff, and you've got to actively work
to keep that bucket empty, and that is really important.
So the other day when a friend of mine who
lives in Africa, she's Dutch, she lives out of there,
she reached out to me the other day It's gone,
how the fuck am I supposed to handle all of
(01:58):
this at the same time as raising my door? I
love to a voice note, but I thought, you know what,
this might actually be useful. That's what I want to
talk about today. Right after the break gooda, thanks for
being here. Just really quickly. We have a live show
(02:19):
coming up on the sixth of July. Phil O'Neil, Mary Watt's,
Marley Silver, Nadia Townsend, Zoe Don't Lodge and myself will
be telling stories at story Club. It's a live comedy
storytelling show. We do it once a month, six point
thirty on the sixth of July. Tickets are in the
show notes it's a super fun show. It's really really great.
I'd love you to be there. There's also a substack
for that as well as that. In the show notes,
(02:40):
there is a link where you can pre order my
new book, So What Now What, illustrated by Campbell Walker,
also Not as Truthless. It's an incredibly powerful book, and
there's a little bit from that book. I want to
talk to you about today because I got a text
the other day from my friend she lives in Africa, Osha,
how are you are you finding ways to saying these days?
(03:01):
It's all such a mess? And she and I kind
of had a bit of a back and forth, mostly
voice notes and stuff, But the core of what I
was telling her is that, look, it takes work. It
takes work to say sane in these days and ages,
this day and age, these days and ages. I don't
know what the grammatically correct way of saying this, but
at the core of it is a willingness to be
(03:22):
with how messy things are and still go about your
day in alignment with what you value. You can notice
those emotions, you can still enjoy the delicious cup of coffee,
the call of a bird in the morning, the smile
of your child, because when I was really, really sick,
I know what it feels like. When I was really sick,
I couldn't hear the giggle of a child. Or I could,
(03:44):
but I wouldn't do anything to me. I couldn't see
an azua blue sky just peerless and just piercing. I
couldn't notice the beauty of nature and physics and symmetry
that exists in a flower. I couldn't appreciate how incredible
each of those things is because I had such a global,
catastrophic sandbag of doom stuck on my brain with just
(04:06):
like ruminating anxiety and terrifying paranoid delusions. It was fucked.
It doesn't have to be that bad, though, because there's
a bit of a trap rolling around, And so I
was telling my friend, there's a bit of oh, how
can you blank when children in blank ah blank every
(04:27):
single day, And that's a bit of a trap, and
I would advise you to not fall into it, because
there is a space to grieve the horror of the world,
the horror of war, the horror of starvation, the horror
of inequality, and there's also space to connect with the
(04:48):
world around you and enjoy delight and joy in your
actual life, the life you can touch, not the far
away life that people are upset at you because you're
not being upset. Because I think that is bullshit. All right,
I'm done with that. It's a lie. It's a trap,
(05:10):
and I don't like that. I don't like this trap
because it does feel it's got a controlling element to it.
I kind of need to model it over a bit more.
But this is what I was telling my friend. It
feels a bit controlling, a bit. No, no, no, you
have to be upset and mad and sad or outraged
at this thing, and if you don't, you are just
as bad as those people over there. That's fucking bullshit.
(05:31):
Don't fall for it. We can feel sad, we can grieve,
we can be present to enormous tragedy, horror, sadness, unfairness, inequality,
and we can also giggle and enjoy the sound of
a rainbow lorikeet twiddling by. It's not a zero sum
game to be able to hear the giggle of a
(05:52):
child enjoying something and feel that joy. Because you can
feel that joy, that does not mean that you do
not care and feel sad and grieve and be aghast
at the horror of the tragedy of a stranger's child
who is suffering on the other side of the world.
You can have both of those things. I've been a
funerals where people laugh their ass off at the same
(06:12):
time as having just buried their child. As humans, we
have the capacity to do both. We can do both,
and it's okay to do both. And you're not betraying
one or the other by doing both because we can
do both. So don't believe that bullshit, all right, don't
fall into that trap, because it's just going to rob
your life of fucking joy. To be honest, what good
(06:35):
are you to anybody if you get stuck in that place.
If you get stuck there and your kids like, come on,
let's do this thing, or your partner's like, come on,
let's do this thing, and you're like, but I can't.
I've got to read and scroll more about this horrible thing,
because if I'm dit, I'm going to be and people
looking upset at me that I like, fuck off. You
can be upset and sad about one thing and still
(06:56):
connect with other people with joy and happiness and enjoy
watching the football team when or your kid dance or whatever.
But if that position sounds familiar to you and you
find yourself stuck there, how do you get out of
that spot? Well, I'll take a leaf out of my
new book and I'll chat to you about it in
just to mate. So, what's a way that you can
(07:26):
get unstuck when you're trapped in a spot where staying
sane and trying not to be crushed by all the
negativity in the world is staying to feel beyond your reach. Well,
it starts by understanding the part of your brain that
is trapping you there, and then using that part of
your brain and the thing that it does very well
(07:48):
to help you get back out of the hole that
you're in. Let me explain. So, our brains evolved to
survive in a world where avoiding death was the priority.
You and me and everyone you know. We are pretty
much identical to fossils found three hundred thousand years ago.
Nothing really has changed about us. We are exactly the
same as these human beings that lived, and so when
(08:11):
we have this fight or flight thing, it's a very
valid evolutionary response because unlike your appendix, or if you're
a man, your nipples fight or flight was really important,
and it kept us alive. We evolved in a time
where death was all around us every day, not just
from other humans who wanted our food as shelter, but
creatures that would stalk the earth, that would eat us alive.
(08:31):
Not just saber tooth tigers, but all kinds of horrific,
bloody beasts. Not just that there was no CPR, there's
no antibiotics. A cut could kill you dead, all right.
We as humans evolved with everyone around us dying horribly
all the time, so we were rightly quite averse to
that happening to us, and anything that might possibly give
(08:53):
us clues that this sort of thing was coming towards us,
that a death was coming for us. We wanted to
get out of there, all of us. We're all the
descendants of the most jumpy and the most frightened of
our ancestors. This evolutionary survival trait, this fire or flight thing,
also gave us a wonderful gift, the negativity bias, which
is the thing our brains do. It's really great for
(09:14):
survival and it delivers fantastic results for reactionary news outlets
coming up. The devastating scam targeting podcast listeners claims, get
another victim with police powers to stop it. How you
can protect yourself and your children. Next, here's an ad
for some shit that you didn't realize you need until
just now, But now that you know it's there, you
(09:34):
can't sleep at night until you own it. It's a
good business model, man. Here's how it works. The more
we see terrible things happening, the more we get this
false view that we live in a world where terrible
things happen everywhere and all the time. But that is
not actually true. Yes, it is true. The most awful
(09:57):
things you could imagine are probably happening as we speak.
And at the very same time, somewhere there is a
basketful of labrador puppies making little cooing noises, waggling their
tails because a little family of toddlers have just walked
into the same room as them and they're starting to
pick up these little puppies. Both of those things exist
(10:17):
in our world at the same time, and they can
exist at the same time, and they have to exist
at the same time. Now, we shouldn't eliminate this negativity bias.
It's quite useful. We do need to manage it, however,
we need to manage it so we don't make poor
decisions that are based in fear. But when that negativity
bias is really hammering us, it can be almost impossible
(10:38):
to see the beautiful things and the good things all
around us. So when we start to believe that all
the world is terrible, we become susceptible to a thing
known as the frequency illusion. This is the idea that
this is a bad thing, and that's a bad thing.
Oh my god, there's bad things everywhere. Now you know
the frequency illusion. There was a time where as far
(10:58):
as you were concerned, there was no one anywhere on
the street ever that ever walked anywhere with a stroller.
And then you peed on a stick. There were two
stripes on that stick. And now everywhere you look you
are being stalked by the upper baby two point oh like.
It's a terrifying monster from a Stephen King novel. It
follows you everywhere. It's in every car park, over, every shoulder,
every left and ctinema whatever. It's called a frequency illusion.
(11:22):
Now we can deliberately exploit this thing. Abrain does this
frequency illusion to get a brain to start to see
more of the wonderful things around us and start to
get things back in balance. And it's all got to
do with getting lucky. And I'm not talking about the
Pharrell Williams Daft Punk getting lucky. I'm talking about luck.
And this is the thing I wrote about in the
new book. So what now what? It's a very simple trick.
(11:43):
I do it at nighttime when I put Wolfgang to bed.
Just try to notice three times every day when you
got lucky. I don't know, you caught a green light,
you got an excellent casp Today, Audrey and I got
a bang shotgun Rockstar park right in front of the
Vinnie with us bootful of stuff. We did a big
toy clean out. While Wolf is at school. He doesn't
(12:03):
notice yet that the do blow's gone. Well that's fuck
off park right in front, like amazing. I don't know.
You heard a moment where two magpies were having a
conversation from two different trees. And there's beautiful melody in
the morning, like little lucky moments like that, just beautiful moments.
Just look for three. Find another person at the end
of the day, tell them this is the three you know,
(12:24):
ask him what three things happened to you? Here's three
things happened for me is where I got lucky, because
by starting to notice when things go well, we start
to notice when things go well, and overtime, our experience
of the world changes because when we get stuck in
that negative version, oh my god, we just start to
see how terrible the parking is, and how magpies are
(12:45):
terrible and they swoop everywhere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But to make it happen, you've got to do it regularly.
And to do it regularly you need to make it
a habit, which is why I do it. At night,
when I'm putting Wolf to bed, I either ask him, Hey,
what went well for you today? Or you know, did
you get like you did? I got really lucky today.
This happened. It was incredible. And by doing that every day,
it starts to help remind us that, yes, while terrible
(13:06):
things do happen in the world, I'm not saying they don't.
They absolutely do. The world in itself is not all terrible.
In the words of Hans Rosling from the brilliant book Factfulness,
it's this great line, things are bad, but they're getting better.
That doesn't mean that the bad parts are bad. They
are bad, but it's not all bad. There's good everywhere,
(13:28):
And that's the part that we can actually have some controlling,
Because when there's everything bad and there's far away, you're
looking on the telly, you're looking on your phone, and
it's it's often very far away or not immediate to you,
and it feels so uncontrollable and you can't do anything
about it. The only part of all this that we
can control is what we choose to put into the
world around us, the immediate world we live in. Worrying
(13:50):
about things we can't control and can get us caught
in a loop that's very hard to get out of.
What we can control is how much good we put
into the world around us. Are we giving the benefit
of the doubt to our spouse? Are we being kind
making sure we're calm around our kids and trying to
understand that the air they're tired, their brains are growing,
they don't have any impulse control. Are we holding the
(14:12):
door open for a stranger. Are we offering to grab
a coffee for somebody when we're heading down the shops?
Are we helping out the people around us because helping
other humans and being kind to other people. That really
is the only thing that we can control. It puts
good into the world that we live in, that we
exist in, and makes the world that we exist in
a better place to be. And also it unlocks things
(14:34):
inside us that make us feel good. Helping another human
really is one of the only things that helps bring
sustainable happiness. That's another wonderful evolutionary trait we are wired
to connect. It's survival of the friendliest. In the words
of Richker Brickman, like I said, I'm not saying terrible
things in this world need be ignored. That's not the
(14:55):
case at all. But I am saying it's no good
to get caught in a trap of like cyclical morning
and then feeling your pressured to write something a comment
or a post or whatever, and you get stuck and
like trying to one up yourself on how bad can
you get and scratching that itch, and it's like ex
mera and blur. It's a fucking trap. Man. You are
(15:19):
capable of having something good and something hard in your
brain at the same time. You are. You have the
space inside of you. The more we practice it, the
better we get at it. The better we get at it,
the less the news can destroy us. And that's the
long version of what I sent to my friend in
a voice note far far away in Africa. I hope
(15:42):
it was helpful. If you want to get that book,
where a Little Better is from The Getting Lucky Trick,
you can find the link in the show notes. If
you want to come and hear me tell a story
about my neighbors when I was fifteen, because that's the
theme of our next Story Club show, Everybody Needs Good Neighbors,
you can find that link in the show notes as well.
(16:03):
Get on substack. If you need to email me, send
us your email at gmail dot com. I'll see you
back here on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for downloading the show. It's better than yesterday. Useful tools,
useful conversations here to make your day to day better
than yesterday. Every week since twenty thirteen. My name Josha Ginsburg.
I'm glad you're here. Every morning usually starts about the same.
I shuffle out of bed, flick on the expresso machine.
Have we grind my beans as I wait for the
(00:27):
thing to heat up, which is good because my feet
are cold on the kitchen floor. Flick open a news
app the other day, as I'm grinding my beans, thinking
about my cold feet, I read in very bold font
us attacks Iran Now like you probably did. I had
quite a physical reaction to this because I know that
(00:51):
as a world, as a planet, we don't really come
back from something like that easily. The last three years
or so, though, has been a steadily escalating level of
chaos in our news feeds, no matter where we look
or try not to look, And depending on your algorithm,
you're getting a perspective on death and destruction, calamity and
(01:12):
chaos and fire and flood and horror and more and
more and more and more and more and more and more.
It can be a lot. The other day chatting with
Sally Gould. She's a paramedic who's written a book about
her job and the things she's learned doing that job.
She talks about keeping a bucket empty and that there's
(01:36):
only really so much space between our ears for all
that kind of stuff, and you've got to actively work
to keep that bucket empty, and that is really important.
So the other day when a friend of mine who
lives in Africa, she's Dutch, she lives out of there,
she reached out to me the other day It's gone,
how the fuck am I supposed to handle all of
(01:58):
this at the same time as raising my door? I
love to a voice note, but I thought, you know what,
this might actually be useful. That's what I want to
talk about today. Right after the break gooda, thanks for
being here. Just really quickly. We have a live show
(02:19):
coming up on the sixth of July. Phil O'Neil, Mary Watt's,
Marley Silver, Nadia Townsend, Zoe Don't Lodge and myself will
be telling stories at story Club. It's a live comedy
storytelling show. We do it once a month, six point
thirty on the sixth of July. Tickets are in the
show notes it's a super fun show. It's really really great.
I'd love you to be there. There's also a substack
for that as well as that. In the show notes,
(02:40):
there is a link where you can pre order my
new book, So What Now What, illustrated by Campbell Walker,
also Not as Truthless. It's an incredibly powerful book, and
there's a little bit from that book. I want to
talk to you about today because I got a text
the other day from my friend she lives in Africa, Osha,
how are you are you finding ways to saying these days?
(03:01):
It's all such a mess? And she and I kind
of had a bit of a back and forth, mostly
voice notes and stuff, But the core of what I
was telling her is that, look, it takes work. It
takes work to say sane in these days and ages,
this day and age, these days and ages. I don't
know what the grammatically correct way of saying this, but
at the core of it is a willingness to be
(03:22):
with how messy things are and still go about your
day in alignment with what you value. You can notice
those emotions, you can still enjoy the delicious cup of coffee,
the call of a bird in the morning, the smile
of your child, because when I was really, really sick,
I know what it feels like. When I was really sick,
I couldn't hear the giggle of a child. Or I could,
(03:44):
but I wouldn't do anything to me. I couldn't see
an azua blue sky just peerless and just piercing. I
couldn't notice the beauty of nature and physics and symmetry
that exists in a flower. I couldn't appreciate how incredible
each of those things is because I had such a global,
catastrophic sandbag of doom stuck on my brain with just
(04:06):
like ruminating anxiety and terrifying paranoid delusions. It was fucked.
It doesn't have to be that bad, though, because there's
a bit of a trap rolling around, And so I
was telling my friend, there's a bit of oh, how
can you blank when children in blank ah blank every
(04:27):
single day, And that's a bit of a trap, and
I would advise you to not fall into it, because
there is a space to grieve the horror of the world,
the horror of war, the horror of starvation, the horror
of inequality, and there's also space to connect with the
(04:48):
world around you and enjoy delight and joy in your
actual life, the life you can touch, not the far
away life that people are upset at you because you're
not being upset. Because I think that is bullshit. All right,
I'm done with that. It's a lie. It's a trap,
(05:10):
and I don't like that. I don't like this trap
because it does feel it's got a controlling element to it.
I kind of need to model it over a bit more.
But this is what I was telling my friend. It
feels a bit controlling, a bit. No, no, no, you
have to be upset and mad and sad or outraged
at this thing, and if you don't, you are just
as bad as those people over there. That's fucking bullshit.
(05:31):
Don't fall for it. We can feel sad, we can grieve,
we can be present to enormous tragedy, horror, sadness, unfairness, inequality,
and we can also giggle and enjoy the sound of
a rainbow lorikeet twiddling by. It's not a zero sum
game to be able to hear the giggle of a
(05:52):
child enjoying something and feel that joy. Because you can
feel that joy, that does not mean that you do
not care and feel sad and grieve and be aghast
at the horror of the tragedy of a stranger's child
who is suffering on the other side of the world.
You can have both of those things. I've been a
funerals where people laugh their ass off at the same
(06:12):
time as having just buried their child. As humans, we
have the capacity to do both. We can do both,
and it's okay to do both. And you're not betraying
one or the other by doing both because we can
do both. So don't believe that bullshit, all right, don't
fall into that trap, because it's just going to rob
your life of fucking joy. To be honest, what good
(06:35):
are you to anybody if you get stuck in that place.
If you get stuck there and your kids like, come on,
let's do this thing, or your partner's like, come on,
let's do this thing, and you're like, but I can't.
I've got to read and scroll more about this horrible thing,
because if I'm dit, I'm going to be and people
looking upset at me that I like, fuck off. You
can be upset and sad about one thing and still
(06:56):
connect with other people with joy and happiness and enjoy
watching the football team when or your kid dance or whatever.
But if that position sounds familiar to you and you
find yourself stuck there, how do you get out of
that spot? Well, I'll take a leaf out of my
new book and I'll chat to you about it in
just to mate. So, what's a way that you can
(07:26):
get unstuck when you're trapped in a spot where staying
sane and trying not to be crushed by all the
negativity in the world is staying to feel beyond your reach. Well,
it starts by understanding the part of your brain that
is trapping you there, and then using that part of
your brain and the thing that it does very well
(07:48):
to help you get back out of the hole that
you're in. Let me explain. So, our brains evolved to
survive in a world where avoiding death was the priority.
You and me and everyone you know. We are pretty
much identical to fossils found three hundred thousand years ago.
Nothing really has changed about us. We are exactly the
same as these human beings that lived, and so when
(08:11):
we have this fight or flight thing, it's a very
valid evolutionary response because unlike your appendix, or if you're
a man, your nipples fight or flight was really important,
and it kept us alive. We evolved in a time
where death was all around us every day, not just
from other humans who wanted our food as shelter, but
creatures that would stalk the earth, that would eat us alive.
(08:31):
Not just saber tooth tigers, but all kinds of horrific,
bloody beasts. Not just that there was no CPR, there's
no antibiotics. A cut could kill you dead, all right.
We as humans evolved with everyone around us dying horribly
all the time, so we were rightly quite averse to
that happening to us, and anything that might possibly give
(08:53):
us clues that this sort of thing was coming towards us,
that a death was coming for us. We wanted to
get out of there, all of us. We're all the
descendants of the most jumpy and the most frightened of
our ancestors. This evolutionary survival trait, this fire or flight thing,
also gave us a wonderful gift, the negativity bias, which
is the thing our brains do. It's really great for
(09:14):
survival and it delivers fantastic results for reactionary news outlets
coming up. The devastating scam targeting podcast listeners claims, get
another victim with police powers to stop it. How you
can protect yourself and your children. Next, here's an ad
for some shit that you didn't realize you need until
just now, But now that you know it's there, you
(09:34):
can't sleep at night until you own it. It's a
good business model, man. Here's how it works. The more
we see terrible things happening, the more we get this
false view that we live in a world where terrible
things happen everywhere and all the time. But that is
not actually true. Yes, it is true. The most awful
(09:57):
things you could imagine are probably happening as we speak.
And at the very same time, somewhere there is a
basketful of labrador puppies making little cooing noises, waggling their
tails because a little family of toddlers have just walked
into the same room as them and they're starting to
pick up these little puppies. Both of those things exist
(10:17):
in our world at the same time, and they can
exist at the same time, and they have to exist
at the same time. Now, we shouldn't eliminate this negativity bias.
It's quite useful. We do need to manage it, however,
we need to manage it so we don't make poor
decisions that are based in fear. But when that negativity
bias is really hammering us, it can be almost impossible
(10:38):
to see the beautiful things and the good things all
around us. So when we start to believe that all
the world is terrible, we become susceptible to a thing
known as the frequency illusion. This is the idea that
this is a bad thing, and that's a bad thing.
Oh my god, there's bad things everywhere. Now you know
the frequency illusion. There was a time where as far
(10:58):
as you were concerned, there was no one anywhere on
the street ever that ever walked anywhere with a stroller.
And then you peed on a stick. There were two
stripes on that stick. And now everywhere you look you
are being stalked by the upper baby two point oh like.
It's a terrifying monster from a Stephen King novel. It
follows you everywhere. It's in every car park, over, every shoulder,
every left and ctinema whatever. It's called a frequency illusion.
(11:22):
Now we can deliberately exploit this thing. Abrain does this
frequency illusion to get a brain to start to see
more of the wonderful things around us and start to
get things back in balance. And it's all got to
do with getting lucky. And I'm not talking about the
Pharrell Williams Daft Punk getting lucky. I'm talking about luck.
And this is the thing I wrote about in the
new book. So what now what? It's a very simple trick.
(11:43):
I do it at nighttime when I put Wolfgang to bed.
Just try to notice three times every day when you
got lucky. I don't know, you caught a green light,
you got an excellent casp Today, Audrey and I got
a bang shotgun Rockstar park right in front of the
Vinnie with us bootful of stuff. We did a big
toy clean out. While Wolf is at school. He doesn't
(12:03):
notice yet that the do blow's gone. Well that's fuck
off park right in front, like amazing. I don't know.
You heard a moment where two magpies were having a
conversation from two different trees. And there's beautiful melody in
the morning, like little lucky moments like that, just beautiful moments.
Just look for three. Find another person at the end
of the day, tell them this is the three you know,
(12:24):
ask him what three things happened to you? Here's three
things happened for me is where I got lucky, because
by starting to notice when things go well, we start
to notice when things go well, and overtime, our experience
of the world changes because when we get stuck in
that negative version, oh my god, we just start to
see how terrible the parking is, and how magpies are
(12:45):
terrible and they swoop everywhere, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But to make it happen, you've got to do it regularly.
And to do it regularly you need to make it
a habit, which is why I do it. At night,
when I'm putting Wolf to bed, I either ask him, Hey,
what went well for you today? Or you know, did
you get like you did? I got really lucky today.
This happened. It was incredible. And by doing that every day,
it starts to help remind us that, yes, while terrible
(13:06):
things do happen in the world, I'm not saying they don't.
They absolutely do. The world in itself is not all terrible.
In the words of Hans Rosling from the brilliant book Factfulness,
it's this great line, things are bad, but they're getting better.
That doesn't mean that the bad parts are bad. They
are bad, but it's not all bad. There's good everywhere,
(13:28):
And that's the part that we can actually have some controlling,
Because when there's everything bad and there's far away, you're
looking on the telly, you're looking on your phone, and
it's it's often very far away or not immediate to you,
and it feels so uncontrollable and you can't do anything
about it. The only part of all this that we
can control is what we choose to put into the
world around us, the immediate world we live in. Worrying
(13:50):
about things we can't control and can get us caught
in a loop that's very hard to get out of.
What we can control is how much good we put
into the world around us. Are we giving the benefit
of the doubt to our spouse? Are we being kind
making sure we're calm around our kids and trying to
understand that the air they're tired, their brains are growing,
they don't have any impulse control. Are we holding the
(14:12):
door open for a stranger. Are we offering to grab
a coffee for somebody when we're heading down the shops?
Are we helping out the people around us because helping
other humans and being kind to other people. That really
is the only thing that we can control. It puts
good into the world that we live in, that we
exist in, and makes the world that we exist in
a better place to be. And also it unlocks things
(14:34):
inside us that make us feel good. Helping another human
really is one of the only things that helps bring
sustainable happiness. That's another wonderful evolutionary trait we are wired
to connect. It's survival of the friendliest. In the words
of Richker Brickman, like I said, I'm not saying terrible
things in this world need be ignored. That's not the
(14:55):
case at all. But I am saying it's no good
to get caught in a trap of like cyclical morning
and then feeling your pressured to write something a comment
or a post or whatever, and you get stuck and
like trying to one up yourself on how bad can
you get and scratching that itch, and it's like ex
mera and blur. It's a fucking trap. Man. You are
(15:19):
capable of having something good and something hard in your
brain at the same time. You are. You have the
space inside of you. The more we practice it, the
better we get at it. The better we get at it,
the less the news can destroy us. And that's the
long version of what I sent to my friend in
a voice note far far away in Africa. I hope
(15:42):
it was helpful. If you want to get that book,
where a Little Better is from The Getting Lucky Trick,
you can find the link in the show notes. If
you want to come and hear me tell a story
about my neighbors when I was fifteen, because that's the
theme of our next Story Club show, Everybody Needs Good Neighbors,
you can find that link in the show notes as well.
(16:03):
Get on substack. If you need to email me, send
us your email at gmail dot com. I'll see you
back here on Wednesday. Thanks for listening.
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