Find the Green Grass

As I look out at my lawn, it looks mostly green. Most individual blades of grass are green, of course. As a percentage, few are brown. Yet simply because there is so much grass in total, if I told my kids to go out and find all the brown blades of grass, they’d never run out.

Imagine if every person in your neighborhood sent you a picture of every brown blade of grass they found in their own yards. Your phone would melt from all the texts. Despite the fact that most grass is green, you would start – very rapidly – to get the sense that the opposite was true.

Now imagine if everyone in the country sent you pictures of their brown grass. Everyone in the world.

This is more or less a good approximation of what we actually do. Most things are good – most people, most events, most situations. Despite this, there is an endless amount of bad things to pay attention to – but if you do pay attention to all of it, non-stop, you’ll start to really, really hate the world.

I do not think we should ignore injustice or turn a blind eye to suffering just because the world is mostly good. But I do absolutely believe that we do very little good – for ourselves or the world – by simply becoming inundated and overwhelmed with misery. Let me give you a 7-step detox program that will not only make you happier, but will also make you better at actually helping improve the world:

1. Figure out how much time per week you spend absorbing information about the world outside of your own neighborhood – how much time you spend watching the news, reading social media, etc. For this example, let’s say it comes to four hours a week.
2. For one week, stop. Don’t do it at all. No news, total unplug.
3. At the end of that week, spend those 4 hours all at once in a place where people are, just watching. A park, a train station, a mall. Just sit somewhere and observe people. Talk to them if the opportunity arises, but don’t force it. Important: if this seems arduous, miserable, even impossible, then you need it very very badly.
4. You will see an enormous amount of good. You will witness people being people, which almost always means people being good. You will hopefully come away with a greater understanding that bad things happen despite the generally good nature of humanity, not because of it. That bad things make the news precisely because they are an affront to the status quo, which is people helping each other. Keep that feeling, and renew it with this method as necessary.
5. Now, consider – there is still suffering and injustice in the world, certainly. And you, being a capable person, can lessen it! But in order to do that, you must focus your effort. You cannot simultaneously be upset about everything in the entire world and expect to make any kind of difference at all. So instead, in the calm of this moment, think: “What one problem would I like to make a dent in?”
6. Find the smallest, most local, and most immediate way to make a dent in that problem. Tweeting about the indignity of worldwide hunger is so much worse a thing to do than going and donating a few bucks or an hour at a local soup kitchen. Do the local, immediate thing first.
7. Rinse and repeat.

There. You’re happier, you’re making more of a difference, and you’re aware of both of those truths. It’s watering your lawn and appreciating it at the same time. A lot of the “rage machine” of society and media tries to build a wall between you and both happiness and effective altruism, but the grass really is greener on the other side.