How the media causes us to suffer
Endlessly scrolling through events we cannot control is a form of self-inflicted pain
I gave up the news. Completely.
And it feels great.
Just before Christmas I was feeling overwhelmed by all the news I was imbibing from the world’s forever wars. All those conflicts in faraway lands, involving distant people I would never meet. The thought of strangers’ suffering was really affecting me. To say I was ‘overwhelmed’ is perhaps inaccurate. The words suggests a feeling of suffocating anxiety; a state of panic, even. When the truth is I carried a dull sense of gloomy, pervasive distraction.
My world is actually a lovely place.
I have a beautiful family, and a well paid white-collar job (something I truly appreciate after growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and leaving school with no qualifications). My ample free time is spent roaming the Suffolk coast with my loved ones, meditating with my spiritual friends at the Sangha, and practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Reading is another great passion of mine; with my lifestyle affording me ample free time to delve into all the hardbacks I can get my hands on, all of which furnish the house I bought with my loving wife.
I am truly blessed.
Sure, my house could be bigger. My work better paid. My fighting skills sharper. But I am still squarely in the top one per cent of most fortunate humans who ever lived.
And yet the media gets me down. While I should use the news as a happy benchmark for my own life, I see it as a miserable account of all the dark happenings I cannot affect. A reminder of the world’s great tragedy. The heartbreak that is woven into the fabric of existence. Children are pulled from the rubble. Societies collapse. Families starve. Innocents are abused. Indeed, murdered in needlessly barbaric ways. It is all there in my phone. The planet’s horror all there in a pocket-sized, glowing rectangle.
And I look on, helpless.
They call it ‘doom scrolling’, but it is more than that. It is the feeling that I have to know, that there is a purpose in having these dark facts inserted into my skull.
Consuming the news gives us the false comfort. It deludes us into thinking that, by bearing witness to the earth’s multiple calamities, we are somehow ‘doing something’. The media would have us believe that it is our democratic duty to be informed citizens. Yet it is precisely this sense of duty that is so disarming. For once we have read that article, or watched that clip, we believe we have made our contribution. Job done. When we have, in fact, done precisely nothing.
Siddhartha Gautama, the young prince who would become the Buddha, had an altogether different reaction to the suffering of the world. His father, a great king, kept him sheltered in a grand palace in an attempt to keep the boy off the spiritual path. Consequently, Siddhartha did not see the outside world until adulthood.
What he saw horrified him.
On leaving the palace, Siddhartha’s charioteer, Channa, explained the visceral sights. They encountered an old man, a sick person and a corpse. The old man was withered, his skin sagging under the years. This was the terror of life up close. Siddhartha was repulsed. Likewise, the sick person projected a gruesome aura. It was the corpse, however, that was to prove most shocking. What was once a bright-eyed human was now an inanimate thing.
Siddhartha saw the suffering of others and felt compelled to act. Indeed, the ‘three sights’ as they came to be known drove him into his lifelong search - the search for the meaning behind such suffering, and the way to alleviate it.
If only the news could have such an impact on us.
We simply scroll on.