Ice Age Brains in a Doomscroll World

A collective resolution for the year of our Lord 2026

Dear Nadia, how can I find the good in people? It’s becoming harder and harder.

-Susan

Dear Nadia, there is so much beauty and love and miracles in the world. I am going to look for them today. Sending you healing love.

-Kathy

Dear Susan and Kathy,

Several months after my first memoir was published, I discovered a website I had not previously heard of: Goodreads.

A book-centered social media platform for readers? Wild.

Now, what you need to know is that I had made a rule for myself not to read reviews of my book. Not because I didn’t care—but because I cared entirely too much. A good review would make me prideful; a bad one would make me despair. No good was to be had either way.

But when I saw Goodreads, I thought, I wonder if my book is on here.

It was.

And so were the reviews.

I couldn’t have prevented my sweet little hand from clicking on them if Idris Elba himself was standing there offering me cash and chocolate not to do so. I clicked. And then I scrolled.

It was like a relapse.

Most of the reviews were four and five stars. Did I read those? Um, no. I scrolled right past them until I found the one- and two-star reviews—and I read every single one. After all, the five-star people are clearly undiscerning. But the one-star people? They know things.

Within an hour, I called my editor and told her I was pretty sure I should stop trying to be a writer.

Why do we do this? Why does a single negative comment outweigh a hundred affirmations? I used to think it was just because I’m neurotic. And I am. But social psychologists have a name for it: the negativity bias.

Our brains are wired to keep us alive, not happy. When something feels threatening (physically or socially) we get a rush of cortisol and adrenaline. This was useful when we needed to remember where the saber-tooth tigers were. It was also useful when our belonging to the group was at risk. Humans cannot survive alone.

But now, bless our hearts, we get the same neurochemical dump from comment sections and streaming news services as we used to get from wooly mammoths.

Same hardware. Completely unregulated software.

For some reason our brains just don’t have the same urgency around compliments and thank you notes.

While pleasant things involve some oxytocin and serotonin, the impact long term is not the same. Plus if you’re anything like me, you ruminate on the negative shit more than the positive and it sort of calcifies in my brain like plaque.

So if you are having a hard time finding the good in people, I wonder if this, in part, would be why Susan.

Don’t get me wrong, people suck. They do. We do. We seem to have a perverse inclination toward the cruel and selfish and find endless ways to demonize others while valorizing ourselves.

There’s little sense in pretending otherwise.

But bless our little paleolithic hearts, but people are also all we’ve got, my friend.

And sometimes—astonishingly—we are heroic and tender and hilarious. We do unbelievably kind things for one another. I wish I knew the actual ratio of good to bad we put into the world - not what it feels like, but what it is. Because I suspect the good still outnumbers the bad.

And if that’s the case, then I think our friend Kathy is onto something.

There is so much beauty and love and miracle in the world.
I am going to look for them today.

As so many of us are taking social media apps off our phones, and realizing that consuming “news” all day – and by news I mean, media accounts of the very worst things people are doing to each other every minute of the day across the globe, is not in fact good for our spirits or mental health, then the question becomes, to what do we give our attention?

Perhaps this is the spiritual question for this new year. To what and to whom shall we give our attention?

I’m not a new year’s resolution kind of gal, but I got up this new year’s morning and thought maybe it IS time for a resolution, but the kind that is collective, not personal.

A Collective Resolution for the year of our Lord 2026.

(Maybe this is just for you and me Susan, but here we go…)

Whereas we find ourselves in a time in which it is increasingly difficult to see the good in people, and

Whereas people suck but are also unspeakably beautiful, and

Whereas we all, for reasons of still having ice age brains, are more easily impacted by the negative than the positive even if the later far outnumbers the former, and

Whereas we are exposed to content that rewards the loud, the divisive, and the alarming (even when those things may distort reality), and

Whereas we live in an economy in which our attention is our currency, and

Whereas we can no longer afford the cynicism about each other which keeps us numb and scrolling, and

Whereas we are still hunter gatherers who need each other to survive,

Therefore,

Be it resolved that:

We the people of 2026 will look for beauty.

We will write down the good things about each other.

We will call our friends just to tell them what we love about them.

When it is we who suck, we will admit it and move on.

We will refuse to be manipulated into believing that we do not need each other.

We choose attention as an act of love—and of resistance.

(I am deeply indebted to my big sister, Barbara Lehr, for all our conversations and her insights about attention")