What All This Bad News Is Doing To Us

What All This Bad News Is Doing To Us
Activists clash with a special forces police battalion in Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014. . The unrest had started earlier Thursday, following the Kiev authorities attempt to dismantle some of the barricades. Activists confronted city workers attempting to clear a central square, lighting tyres on fire in a protest against the city government's move. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Activists clash with a special forces police battalion in Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, Aug. 7, 2014. . The unrest had started earlier Thursday, following the Kiev authorities attempt to dismantle some of the barricades. Activists confronted city workers attempting to clear a central square, lighting tyres on fire in a protest against the city government's move. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

A terrifying jihadist group is conquering and butchering its way across big swaths of Iraq and Syria. Planes are falling out of the sky on what seems like a weekly basis. Civilians are being killed in massive numbers in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Others are falling prey to Ebola in West Africa. The world, in short, is falling apart.

That’s how it feels, at least, to those of us who sit at a blessed remove from the death and destruction, but who are watching every bloody moment of it via cable news and social media. It raises an important question: In an age when we can mainline bad news 24/7 if we so choose, what’s the psychological impact of all this exposure to tragedy at a distance?

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