No News is Good News
Remember from our old lives — four or so weeks ago — this light and happy saying? No news is good news. You could be out to dinner with friends, give your phone a quick check, and your spouse would catch you and ask, “What’s going on with the kids? What did the sitter say?” And oh the beauty: you had a blessed clean slate of no unread texts. Apparently everyone was off just doing what they do, being fine.
Intellectually, you understood this lack of news probably didn’t mean everything was exactly perfect. One kid might at that very minute be trying to extend a curfew, or sneak a put-away phone, or REFUSING to put on pajamas. But you wouldn’t hear about that until you got home. By that point, the sitter would probably report it like a sweet little bit of folklore while you looked down adoringly at your sleeping-like-an-angel-here-on-earth kid. Worst case, you’d chuckle and think, “What a little rascal” — because it’s much easier to be breezy and lighthearted about any annoying or bad behavior you don’t have to deal with firsthand. Plus, I’m not a scientist, but I think kids sleep more hours than adults just to give us more opportunities to see them in this perfect, lovable state and erase challenges presented by days upon days of raising them.
Anyways, back there at dinner, you get to report “Haven’t heard anything. No news is good news!” And then you return to your fun, maybe doing something incredibly dangerous like clinking glasses with your friends with nary a thought to which side of the glass your lips had touched. Honestly, how did we live so recklessly such a short time ago??
But now that trusty no news is good news has been recast. I guess sick of only ever getting called back for fluff roles in feel good pieces, the saying’s now totally redefining itself. In this moment, it’s found its truth, its essence (just like my daughter, just like me — if this reference feels like an Easter egg you can’t crack, you’ll have to double back and read my last story right after this one. I know, I know — it feels good to have plans).
Here’s that saying’s new, darker persona: NO news is good news. As in 0.0% of news is good. Truly, only 0.1% is even mediocre right now.
Obviously, there are humanitarian moments shining through, and those feel like life preservers in this ship-wrecking storm. Italians singing on balconies, artists sharing their music and doodling in new ways to lift spirits, essential service providers continuing to provide, and health care workers trudging to a front line day after day, a front line so many of us cannot really even imagine despite a steady tidal wave of visual proof.
But actual news about what’s actually developing is plainly not good — because even if we’re succeeding at all with flattening the curve, we’re still in a pretty meaty place under that line, and that holds aside the massive outbreak disparity from state to state.
The news is an onslaught of graphs and articles detailing our circumstances: testing is up, the spread is very real, and so, of course, it follows that positive cases numbers are up. Way up. Hot spots are getting ravaged. Hospitals are getting overrun. The race for a vaccine or treatment is on, but even in hyper-fast-tracked times, that is going to take time. I mean, truly, if only time worked like a cell phone plan, and we could all just donate all of our l-o-n-g rollover minutes of lockdown to a giant international repository of time. Imagine how much quicker we’d have a solution in hand.
Right now the news is disturbing and there’s a vacuum of anything else to distract us. Think of the typical segmenting of the evening news. The old divisions are gone. It’s just one big unsliced pie of awful. Local stuff: grim and real. National stuff: same, with a strong strain of breathtakingly-lacking leadership and incredulity-inducing press conferences. International stuff: see local and national. Sports: nothing really, just players who show symptoms and get tested in nano-seconds, and a smattering of other gut-punching stuff, like Tom Brady leaving the Patriots. Weather: it doesn’t matter. Traffic: there is none; but also, did you not hear us: Stay home.
The Internet is like our modern day Paul Revere — or at least the canned version of Paul Revere we learned in history — blazing from house to house, warning us all. But this time, the message is telling us not to leave, but to stay. Corona is coming! Stay home. Sit on your couch (which, by the way, is a delightful characterization of lockdown that describes an existence exactly nobody I know is presently having — if there’s any one thing I’m excelling at maintaining social distance with, it’s my couch). Just like that ride in 1775, the message of coming doom breaking our weird midnight is jarring and tough to reconcile with the daily, still lives of those of us lucky to be stored away, in healthy (for now?) lockdown. Or again, just like we were taught that ride went down — you guys, Paul didn’t even yell “the British are coming!” — I guess fake news is nothing new.
But tuning out the steady stream of warnings and dire predictions feels next to impossible. We can hear the frantic hooves of the messenger at all waking hours, and sometimes even during the hours we’re supposed to be asleep. We’re searching for answers but there isn’t a single certainty — other than things look bad.
Super smart experts are weighing in across the board, but it’s difficult to know what part of the news is even good — and not in like the happiness-inducing way, but in the quality way. What numbers are good to heed? What predictions are good to believe? What economic forecast is good to invest in? And what about our sources? Who are the final and definitive set of go-to experts we should be listening to? Scientists have dire predictions and they love the science. Financial folks have dire predictions and they love the markets. Our president has, curiously, sometimes dire predictions and sometimes rosy predictions and, in the truest proof that love is blind, loves only himself. Honestly, Netflix did not have to go to the trouble of putting all those singles in pods to prove the adage — proving love is blind could be the only thing Trump’s actually done — but, then again, given our current circumstances, we can all be grateful that show got made.
Personally, I understand my need to read and watch everything virus-related because this isn’t the first time the Internet has tried to flatten me. In the early days of my youngest’s son’s epilepsy, I spent a ton of time researching his diagnosis. And in that tonnage, I found the same percentage of good news as can be found now relative to Covid19 — in case you’ve forgotten, that number is 0.0%. But you know what I did find? Plenty to fuel my fear and provide building blocks for worst-case scenarios.
After a few months, I hit a breaking point of information intake. But like anyone in the throes of addiction, I didn’t even see that I’d hit it. I was stuck in a terrible pattern, like turning over and over again to your most alarmist, histrionic friend when you’re in crisis, and not realizing that they are dialing you up, not down. One night, after I’d just calmed down and just dressed the mental wounds of another armageddon-style day, I went back to my old frenemy, the Internet. I found another bad story to reaffirm my bad thoughts. I went sobbing to my husband, to both ruin his night and be comforted. And that’s when my husband did one of the very best, most insightful things of our life together: he forebade me from the Internet. I was, quite specifically, no longer allowed to go fishing for doom, browser rod in hand. This kingdom — so painstakingly built exclusively by Al Gore — was wholesale off limits. From that point on, he laid down the law: we would listen to my son’s doctors and, more importantly, we’d listen to the specific story my son and his body were telling us.
In medical speak — I’m like practically a doctor, send me all of your questions — this was what I’d learned to call focusing on his phenotype and not exclusively his genotype. Phenotype was my son’s set of characteristics, informed by his genotype, but also a product of his environment. In my son’s case, his phenotype was all the bright and bubbly, synapse-firing stuff of a typical curious toddler which didn’t fit with his genotype — all the messages, errant and otherwise, coded in his genes. This distinction became my favorite to make. When discussions about genetics got too bleak, I liked to pivot to phenotype, tormenting my son’s all-suffering and ever-serving neurologist with videos and anecdotes of my phenom son’s new words or mad dribbling skills. Genotype was a loser of a story line. It dragged me down. Phenotype was where my son shined. That lifted me up.
My husband preferred this focus too. I remember him saying the only time he felt calm or at all reassured was when he was with our son. Playing with this loving and silly little toddler tamped down all the other terrible facts barraging us. We stopped wanting to hear what the world had to say when we realized the information flow was no longer additive, only feeding the fear. We couldn’t change our son’s genotype, but we could be grateful for and enjoy all the wonders of his phenotype.
Now, as the globe faces this staggering and scary diagnosis, we all know the world’s genotype story — it’s on our screens, staring us down as we shelter in place. It’s bad. But in a weird way a lot of us are living with a pretty manageable phenotype. Sure, we’re sheltered in place, skittish about procuring the necessities, maybe worried about jobs and finances, and definitely mad with homeschooling, but we’re largely fine.
It feels disassociated from the terrible flow of news. How do we reconcile that? We’re scared, we want answers and our screens are some of our only friends right now, so we keep reading the articles, we keep watching the news.
My media consumption reached that familiar tipping point this past week. I read Too Many Articles, half of them just a recanting of what I already knew. I found a graph of every possible stat, and I read the stories filled with scary, harbinger anecdotes. And let me just say, I can forget a graph — I’m actually exceptional at forgetting tons of different things — but give me one horrifying story of a kid on a ventilator and that’s going to stick. I don’t think I’m alone — I read recently that we’re all wired for anecdotes. Starved for connection, we snatch at relatable stories, devour them and pass them on. And when you find anecdotes that feel threateningly close — Wait a minute, I have a twelve year old! — the terror locks and loads, ready to fire.
I’m disappointed — for so many, many reasons — to find myself back in my same old pattern. I am sensationalizing this for myself and I have to stop. And just like my son’s diagnosis, we’re in a reality that needs no help with sensationalizing. The news is bad. But just like my experience years ago, the returns on my news consumption have diminished. I know this deeply.
I’ll share a secret: in all of my Internet searching about my son’s diagnosis, I never stumbled on that single silver bullet cure I set out every time to find. I went desperately seeking, and, well, I never did find Susan. I wanted to find hopeful news, but in a sick way I knew I’d only find bad. And I kept going. And going. And going. Until a brave man finally stepped in and said NO MORE.
Maybe many of us need a similar intervention right now as we try to process this diagnosis? I’m not arguing for being uninformed — that would be irresponsible. But maybe we need to be our own brave person and make sure our intake matches what’s actionable. We can shelter in place and wash hands and donate to hospitals and sew masks if we have the skills. We can monitor updates in case there’s something more or different we have to do. But oddly, right now, we are doing most everything we can by not doing much.
And so, it could be that no news — or at the very least, less — is good.
