I’ve always loved the news. One of my early memories is watching the news that came on in our living room TV with my father, and at one point, I could recognise and name every newsreader who’d appear on our favourite channel. Fast forward 18-ish years, news is getting harder to consume every day. With the world hurtling toward climate disaster and a wave of inexplicably strange, sad incidents happening around us, it makes me wonder, is it worth being in the know anymore? Or are we better off turning up the volume on our distractions and getting on with life?

To be honest, not being in the know isn’t an option. It’s difficult to relate to bad things at the scale they sometimes take place, but it’s important to try. Shutting out the painful proceedings around us may seem easy, but doing that would deny us the unique perspective every person is entitled to in their lives. It’s unfortunate that for a lot of people in our generation, this perspective is shaped by frustration, anger, and a sense of hopelessness. But if that’s where the arrow of time has struck us, we would do better nursing the wound instead of ignoring it.

Just be careful with the news out there. There’s a lot of unreliable sources trying to spread information that doesn’t hold up to objective scrutiny. The real news is bad enough already, we don’t have time for fake news.