Ignorance is bliss, even if it is a cop out

Let me preface how I'm about to describe myself by saying, I have slayed the demons.  Truly I have.  I mean it took a lot of self delusion and other mind tricks but I haven't had a slump in well over a year and that to me means progress.  However that doesn't mean I don't have depressive tendencies, it's just that they are no longer dangerously despondent, which is nice.  What a lovely way to start a Saturday morning blog post. Bet you can't wait to read on.  I mean if it's this uplifting at the outset, goodness only knows how much higher it could possibly take you.

It's just that lately I've been making the mistake of reading the newspapers and boy are they ever filled with despair and suffering. I stopped reading them a while back and now I remember why.  Stories of child abuse, animal abuse and human suffering of unimaginable depths.  I do sit there after reading these awful stories and think about how it makes me feel - how alien it all seems and try to look at the flipside of this.  The fact that it's alien means it's really not part of my day to day existence and I'm grateful for this.  We really do live in a sort of paradise in the developed world for the most part. Don't get me wrong, many of these awful stories are perpetrated by people who live in the luxury of the West.  That just pisses me off.  But for the most part, we don't know we're born.

For example, I was rumaging around my favourite vintage shop in Soho when I overheard the salesgirl (I say overheard, she was broadcasting it) telling her colleague how her mother was bi-polar and her father had abused her as a child - in lurid detail.  I looked at her to see what an abused child grows up into.  She was the size and shape of someone who has "issues".  I felt terrible for her but I also knew she was lost to the part.  She was enjoying telling the story.  This is what you need to do to make the whole sordid thing palatable to yourself and those around you.  I'm sure her guilty parents too had their fair share of childhood abuse - it's a well understood vicious circle and it takes a lot of courage to break the cycle because it means facing up to your reality.  When it's that ugly, who really wants to?

So what can the rest of us do?  The ones who have really done OK.  Well, we can live our lives in an attitude of gratitude is what we can do and never miss the opportunity to be kind to someone.  And I personally need to stop reading the news. 

As I like to joke with  my PR colleagues, I don't read the news, I MAKE THE NEWS...if you read the more niche publications of the technology trade press...sort of....ahem.