Bad news, good news, no news

What’s the antidote to bad news? Or should I say: ‘the news’. Because pretty much all the news lately is bad news. Pandemics, climate change, racism, mass shootings.

It can’t be healthy to be exposed to these things day after day. So I stopped following the news. Or at least, I tried. I still get nuggets of news via Twitter.

And it was via Twitter that I stumbled upon ‘Goodable’, a news app that promises to only serve you good news. I had been wondering for a while why there wasn’t such a news app. Only good news? It sounded like exactly what I wanted, so I immediately downloaded it.

Goodable serves me messages like “This Hero Pup Helps Other Dogs Recover and Heal From Abuse” or “These Firefighters Rescued a Baby Elk From a Wildfire”. While it’s all nice, it’s not the kind of good news I was looking for. Not because it’s not ‘good’, but because it’s not really ‘news’.

It’s not the app, it’s me. I realized the kind of ‘good news’ I want is not what Goodable can give me. The good news I want is “Right to Abortion Becomes Federal Law in All of US”. Or “Stricter Gun Laws Implemented in Texas”. Or “Shell Decides to Stop All New Oil Projects”. The good news I want is the opposite of the actual news. But that’s not very realistic, is it?

So in the mean time, I’ll try to stay away from the news as much as I can. But I will also keep following Twitter accounts like @buitengebieden, as my antidote to world events. This one is particularly good: