The headline in my news feed today read: “Best & Worst Moments of the 2020 Music Awards.”
I admit, I was tempted to click on it, but then I had a realization that this headline is what is destroying us.
Sadly, this is all we get now: the best and the worst of everything, from YouTube, from social media, from marketers, from news stations.
The people with the stories, they know what we’ll click: Epic Fails, The President’s Biggest Mistake, Heroic Effort of Neighbor, Largest Crab in the World, Most Devastating Earthquake, 5 Things You Must Do to be Happy…”
It’s either all bad or all good. That’s what’s killing us: the piled up weight all on one side. That’s what’s tearing us apart from our friends and family, what’s opening up the ground and putting us on separate sides.
Everything’s all good or all bad. Mountains on each side. And in the middle a giant abyss, nowhere to stand.
The stories we feed on are never in the middle.
And yet that’s where we live, walking our dogs, eating dinner, playing on the floor with our kids.
All is boring and balanced, a beautiful life, and then we pick up our phone and we’re yanked to the side by provocative storylines we can’t resist.
What might happen if we stop clicking?
What would the storytellers do without our hunger and thirst for the extraordinary?
What’s so bad about being ordinary, when that’s what most of us already are?
We are what we eat.