Little panel of gloom

I’ve reached a point where I land on some social media sites with my hand held up to cover the little panel of news headlines. That’s how destructive they can be. Each morning, despite enjoying Scott Mills as the new host of BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show, I prepare the family breakfast each day bracing myself for the latest update on which leading global dick head has said or done something outrageous and frankly stupid.

Calculated, yes. The news and the reported action. Do I have my head in the sand? Maybe. I picked this cause of elevating and teaching creativity because this daily bombardment of bad news was pushing me close to some kind of personal collapse. Collapse. That’s the title of a record I’m designing the artwork for. In a creative exploration sense, that’s a juicy brief. But too many people are battered incessantly with this abandonment of morals and head-scratching lunacy until they can no longer create. Not sustainably, at least.

This came up during an interview with LOVE Creative founder David Palmer. He pointed to the bleakness of the Manchester scene out of which emerged Joy Division, The Happy Mondays, and so on. And he’s right. The negative emotion spectrum is incredibly valuable and the bedrock of so much great art of all kinds, ideas, and innovation that could not have been brought about any other way. But I also believe that this is unsustainable in the long run. We are human and there are limits to our resilience and the kind of responsive creativity our pain brings on.

On my bad days, I cannot access this at all, and this doom overload leaves me sat grinding my teeth, staring out of the window.

So, I hold up my hand. Sometimes, I lunge for the plug when the radio news comes on. I have to curate my news consumption, and be kind to myself, even though our evolutionary negativity bias makes it so easy to heap on another ladel full of big tech presidential politician prickery.