A trending topic on Facebook on July 27, 2016 was that of an explosive noise near a refugee and Migration office in Zirndorf, Germany. The noise was later deduced by the police to be a suitcase filled with aerosols that had accidently exploded. There was no public threat in relation to what was essentially an unforeseen chemical reaction in the hands of a Lysol Sunshine Wheat aficionado though that did not deter The Guardian from placing the event underneath its “Breaking News” tab boxed in blood red. Such fixations on supposed acts of insanity have now become more routine than shocking, as Facebook, Twitter, Buzzfeed etc. have come up with the surefire formula of generating clicks via accentuating every act of violence or supposed-violence the instant the outlets load up. People see the headlines, feel anxious about them, and then keep visiting different news pages at various points in the day to see whether if 235 people died in a truck bombing in Iraq instead of 335. Does not matter if the information is accurate or not, so long as some progress is being made on the matter so that the issue can resolve itself like a sequence in a Marvel Studios motorcycle chase between Black Widow and Thanos the Destroyer. Inevitably, once the situation loses its initial corrosive sting, we return to our homeostatic internet surfing before that pulsating hole of anxiety needs to be filled up again.

The Facebook trending page is filled with all manners of bloodshed and misery next to Ellie Goulding canceling her concert due to insomnia and DeMar DeRozan attempting a 360 degree dunk in a basketball game between Team USA and Team China. At times, these “trends” can lead us to follow a live broadcast of bombings and shootings on Twitter or on livestreams that can give us a rush of excitement with rapidly beating hearts and cold sweats all over our chests. Sometimes the article clicking can feel automatic as a consequence of Paleolithic survival instinct, whereby reading the news updates of a café bombing can appear to correlate with spear pointing at Mammoths as a means of physical and mental sustainability. These live tragedies can be invigorating in that because the action is happening second by second sometimes with vine’s or YouTube clips intact, you feel as though your entire body has been digitized and shot into the update feed with your college dorm room evaporating for the sake of assimilating yourself into the chorus of status and News Updates sharing all kinds of “thoughts” (i.e “resolutions) on the tragedy at hand. Sometimes these news update treks can feel absolutely apocalyptic, notably whenever North Korea takes part in nuclear missile testing and you keep refreshing your feed to see if Los Angeles has been leveled into a bowl of Rice Crispies yet. Media seems to thrive by coating the various denizens of the web in an aura of fear, Nostradamus, and anarchy.

For some like myself simply seeing these dismal headlines of bombings in Iraq or plane disappearances in the Mediterranean can be enough to set pulsating alarms in both our bodies and circulatory systems that can last hours if not days. I cannot eat a Chipotle Chicken sandwich in Panera without the dried tomatoes between the bacon and cheddar cheese reminding me of my possible charred remains in suicide bombings that the media keeps reminding me have become more prodigious than obnoxious life vlogs about “life in New York!” on YouTube. Every time I look up at the many planes with flashing lights on their bottoms passing over my house to Dulles or Ronald Reagan International Airport, the thought of those hunks of metal spontaneously combusting and their falling broken wings subsequently destroying my house only increase my misanthropic tendencies wherein I don’t leave my house for two weeks on end. I know that typing in “terrorism," “airlines," “earthquakes” or “Kanye” on google will only lead to an article from The New York Post stating how CIA intelligence suggests that Russia could deploy Mecha-Godzilla to devour Ann Arbor, Michigan “at any time.” I skim over that article and others similar to it, and then spend the rest of the day with a spikey knot in my stomach screaming through my guts that “the world is going to end.” “For real this time.”

However Harvard Psychologist and author of the book The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker states that the opposite is in fact true; that the rates of homicide, war, genocide, terrorism have historically been decreasing across the globe. Pinker states that “if you count the number of parts of the world that are violent versus those that aren’t, then you see that the world is becoming more peaceful.” Pinker further elaborates that the rise of Democracies in most of the world is likely to account for this decreased trend of global violence due to the fact that institutions of international trade make it more profitable to trade with other countries than invade them. Yet despite the world empirically being safer than it ever was before, Pinker states that there is “a pathology of journalism that because it is so driven by events that happen in a discrete period of time, it often ignores long standing trends that transform the world that you may not notice on a day to day basis.”

Furthermore, Pinker indicates that because information is so rapidly communicated on such an expansive level, the situation can “create an opportunity for violence entrepreneurs who can game the system by making a presence on the world stage knowing it is the sudden, dramatic, violent events that make it on page one, or get the most clicks.” It’s this very strategy of utilizing singular dramatic events as evidence for the world’s declining quality that have allowed demagogues such as Donald Trump to amass such a massive audience. Trump, in the opening remarks of his Republican National Convention nomination acceptance speech stated that “our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life.” Furthermore, Trump capsizes these statements with a triumphant “beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored," and near the end of the speech Trump trumpets “when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore order.”

Yet Trump's methodology is not solely hyperbolic rhetoric, but rather a tactic to draw anxiety-ridden Americans similar to my own hyperbolic doomsday-waiting self to his breast as he offers an Easy-Bake solution to the various catastrophes plaguing our feeds. The world may be more peaceful than ever before, but since we are exposed to miasma upon miasma of information, most involving cut-limbs and burning metal, in matters of seconds it can be easy to let base instincts dominate our lives. The word “objectivity” is more beaten around than the cheek of a heavy-weight boxer, but the facts must be understood if we are ever to get out of this mental and spiritual muck of flame-ridden anticipatory anxiety. The world is safer than it ever has been since at least 1900, the US homicide rate is at a 51-year low, and for those aviophobes whose chests prick up as though ice shards are stuck between their ribs every time they see the new trailer for the film Sully about a real life emergency landing in the Hudson river in glorious 4k detail, flying remains the absolute safest form of travel, with 2016 poised to be the safest flying year of all! We must do our best to assuage our apocalyptic fears with information as ontological as possible, be more aware of some of the more extreme thoughts pulsing in our brains, and ultimately realize that most of the time our anticipatory anxiety has nothing to do with our and the world’s reality. So don’t be like Newt Gingrich who, when poised with the FBI statistics of lowering violent crime rates and an economy on the upswing on an RNC CNN interview, stated: “the average American does not think crime is down, does not think they are safer. As a political candidate, I will go with how people feel and I’ll let you (the CNN interviewer) go with the theoreticians.”