"When All About You Are Losing Their Heads..."

Reports of doom are everywhere.

Schools closing.

People in lock down.

Toilet rolls going, going, gone. GONE!

Updates by the minute, hour, day. Each report elevating the seriousness, the urgency.

Every new report an escalation. Every headline more shocking.

Is it proportionate?

About 150,000 people die every day. Every day. I don’t want to die. Nor do I want people I know to die. But 150,000 will die today anyway. It was true yesterday. It was true last year. It’ll be true next year too, no doubt.

But that’s not news. “More people dying like they did before” isn’t a good headline. It doesn’t sell papers. Or get me elected.

We are hooked on a frenzied machine which demands more and more talking heads. More and more people feeding us news to click on, to read, to consume.

The reporting has no choice but escalate. It can only look for new hooks.

But the new hooks invite new responses. New experts to comment. The new experts create more noise. More noise and we demand more action from our Governments, from our leaders. Then they act, thinking it important they are seen ‘leading’, taking tough decisions, doing what is right. And so the wheel spins.

I’m not saying this is all a crazy over reaction. I get that our overly pressed health services carry no flex. Adapting to an influx of unforeseen patients would be near impossible.

But I see and hear claims which quite plainly don’t stack up, extrapolations, guesstimates, assertions dressed up as fact. From experts too.

It takes a courageous leader to be asked an opinion and say nothing. Or I don’t know. That doesn’t make for good news.

Is this all an over reaction?

Like I said, I don’t know.

But I do know that unhooking from news, from social media, from the playground merry-go-round, for even a moment, feels good. That’s not head in the sand. My life is richer without the noise. And if I get a virus I get the virus. Hopefully I’ll recover. And if I don’t, I won’t. And the news won’t matter then either.

Irrespective, unhooking from the constant cycle of news noise can only be a good thing.

Try it.