HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF THE CHAOS AND UNCERTAINTY

Camera phones and 24/7 news coverage have made us really bad at processing big, emotional events in helpful ways. Here's how I do it.

It might seem impossible to make sense of a nation-wide racial revolt being dropped into the middle of a pandemic in a country that’s already seething with bitter cultural divides, but let’s try anyway.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to get political here. Instead, I’d like to use this as an opportunity to walk you through how I go about processing extremely emotional and upsetting public events such as this. I think this is important because right now, due to social media and camera phones and 24/7 news coverage, as a society we’ve become bad at processing these events in a helpful way. I’ve had to kind of teach myself to go about reading about these things in a more objective manner and it’s not easy. So, I figured I’d break down my process here.

• There is little evil in the world, but lots of stupidity and selfishness – With the exception of truly heinous shit, most people are not motivated by evil intentions. In fact, it’s usually the opposite — most people do awful things with the best of intentions. Therefore, we should not assume people’s intentions to be evil, but rather try to understand why they believe what they are doing is good. 
• Everyone suffers. The question is, for what reason are they suffering? – It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that nobody should ever be insulted, attacked, hurt, threatened, etc. Not only is this unrealistic, but if we are going to stand up to dangerous groups, individuals or ideas, we have to be willing to sacrifice. Therefore, the question isn’t whether people should suffer or not, rather it’s a question of whether they are suffering for a good reason.