I’m sick of it!
Every day, I go to www.yahoo.com and click on the finance section. Every day, I see a chart like the one shown here, where the market has once again moved below the red-dotted line. This means the market is worse off than the day before. Every headline I read is about somebody getting sent to jail for fraud, tax evasion, a company is firing 20% of their workers, the world is about to end, blah blah blah.
A few weeks back I stumbled across this blog by Chris Hardwick, a nerd “jack-of-all-trades” and hilarious writer (read this article in Wired where he attempts to better his life by following the 4-Hour Work Week. Hysterical) Anyhoo, he wrote a great blog about how some people just LOVE to report bad news and how it empowers them. The blog turned me onto this site, www.happynews.com, which only reports news stories that are happy. Honestly, the first time I read it I scanned the articles looking for a steroid scandal, Ponzi scheme, or mention of “recession,” and I couldn’t find a damn thing. It turns out there are still plenty of things that happen in this world that aren’t depressing!
So, bad news, I’m talking to you: I won’t stand for it any more. Especially on Fridays. I want to go into my weekends feeling good, happy, and alive, and I’m not going to let your bad news bring me down anymore. Some might say this is promoting ignorance…and maybe it is. However, the world will still go on whether or not I read that bad news, so why let it drag me down? I like to call it selective ignorance. Life is too damn short, so the less time I spend reading miserable news the better off I’ll be.
I’m pretty sure news websites and stations all try to outdo each other on the doom and gloom scale to compete for your attention. Investors see that doom and gloom, retreat further into their shells, which sends stocks and prices tumbling even further….which then gets reported the next day.
How about this: what if news sites started to report on good things that happened? News is all biased anyway, in one way or the other, so why not put a positive spin on things and see what would happen. Would investors read the positive news, come out of their caves and bomb shelters and start pumping money back into the American economy again? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t…couldn’t be any worse than it is now, right?
There it is. It’s Friday, I have a great weekend ahead of me, and I’m going to read some happy news to remind myself that good things still happen to good people. It’s been at least six months since I posted this video, and now we’re up to 10,000 unique visitors a month, so I want to re-introduce the Sixthman Community to Matt, the guy who travels the world dancing. If this doesn’t make you happy and start your Friday off right, I feel sorry for you. Now go have a good weekend!
-Steve
