But I have some bad news for you about all the bad news you watch that’s making you angry: no matter how much of it you consume, they’re going to keep making more of it. You’ll never catch up. And so, if it’s throwing your system off-kilter, you’re faced with a dilemma: how many shots of poison can you drink in good health per day?

There’s plenty of good news out there as well – acts of kindness and friendship, feats of generosity and sacrifice. But as my friends in the news racket like to say, “Good news is no news.” A hard reality of the news trade is that ratings and clicks don’t get generated, for the most part, by telling an audience how you might’ve stopped on the side of a busy highway to help an old lady change her tire. Now if you hit the old lady with a tire iron, that’s news they can use.

And therefore, bad news doesn’t just exist, but it so often becomes amplified out of proportion to the frequency with which it actually occurs. Lately, of course, plenty of the bad news has not been fabricated or goosed. It’s been real and pervasive. You’re not imagining that baby formula has disappeared from supermarket shelves, that you’re paying five bucks a gallon for gas, that everything everywhere costs more than ever, that a worldwide pandemic completely altered the way we lived and interacted with each other, that a new World War could trip off at any time abroad, and that plenty of our politicians and the death cultists who revere them seem to be itching for civil war here at home.