You have to be careful in life to make sure that your scale of perception aligns to your scale of action.
We live in a world where it is very, very easy for those to fall dramatically out of alignment. In fact, a lot of entities try very hard to do that to you on purpose.
If you’re Superman, it makes sense to pay attention to the entire world and choose the worst, most horrific events to respond to. Since you can observe the whole world at once and be anywhere in a matter of seconds, you have the ability to impact the entire world with your actions. Since your scale of action is thus worldwide, it makes sense for your scale of perception to be global as well.
But if you’re not Superman, then guess what? It doesn’t make sense to do that. Let’s say you’re a local, small-town police chief and you truly care about peace and order. You would love a crime rate of 0, or as close to it as you can get. In that case, it not only isn’t helpful for you to read global or national crime statistics, it’s actively harmful. That information is noise, and it will cause you to perform your job more poorly. Imagine your small town has never had a murder. If you read about a “national crime wave” of murders related to the international drug trade, what good is that to you? At best, it’s just clouding your judgment. At worst, it causes you to enact policies to counter something that isn’t happening in your town – and such policies are not without cost in blood and treasure.
Life is actually very good in most places, for most people, most of the time. We need to look at larger and larger scales in order to find the same amount of tragedy we could find yesterday, and humans’ appetite for the tragedies of others is bottomless. But if you spend all day taking in information about things at a national or global scale (information that is probably not accurate, to boot), then you’ll forget just how good life actually is.
I promise you, there are few more certain ways to make your life worse than to believe it to already be bad. One of the very best things you can do for yourself and your family is cut out information that doesn’t directly relate to whatever scale of action you operate at.
People who never travel more than three blocks from their home read national news every day, and never read local news – they don’t attend community meetings, don’t read the local school’s newsletter, don’t do any of it. It’s an addiction to tragedy, and it kills you a bit every day.
Break that habit! There is wonderous life all around you, at a scale you can truly touch and experience. Your life will be better if you do.
The Opportunity Machine 