Our brains and bodies weren’t built to hold the weight of the world’s suffering all at once. Yet that’s often what we face. Scrolling through newsfeeds or watching headlines, we are inundated by disasters, crises, and pain from every corner of the globe. This can feel overwhelming. We are living with global awareness in bodies that were formed by hundreds of thousands of years of human history, where people lived with local awareness, caring for the people and places closest to us. We aren’t physically designed for this.
Maybe in times like this, we need to widen our view, not just to the world’s pains, but to its loves. We need our loves—people we hold dear and people who hold us. We need the many relationships that sustain us, near and far.
This week, Southern California is devastated by wildfires, and this has had a massive impact on people I know personally. I want to spend less time on the news and more time in communication with them, holding them close in thought and action. Maybe our greatest gift is to tend to our connections and to let them tend to us.
— Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 
That’s the problem with mass media, and it’s getting worse, in that we learn more about what we can do less about. If people want news they can do something about, they should watch more local news and get involved.
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This is a great point and suggestion.
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