Don’t read this article. Seriously. Just deactivate your social media accounts now and go outside.

Still here, you rebel? Okay then.

I made a huge fucking mistake.

After a month off Facebook, I gave in and logged back on. And just like that, I was immediately assaulted by the death and destruction that is the News Feed, plus the inevitable petty, volatile arguments among “friends.” It was a quick reminder of why I’d deleted the app from my phone and logged out in the first place.

I’d started to feel like I was just processing too much—too many names, too many faces, too many stories from places far outside my actual life. It was beginning to affect my mood. I was quick to anger, quick to judge, constantly annoyed. But after just a week offline, things shifted. I stayed away from the endless negativity pumped out by the 24-hour news cycle. And I felt… better. Not glowing-happy or dancing-in-the-street joyful, but noticeably less aggravated. The world seemed okay again.

And that’s when I fucked up and logged in.

Suddenly the world wasn’t okay. Police were shooting civilians. Civilians were shooting police. Everyone was shooting someone. Or so it seemed. I had to fight the urge to jump into online arguments with strangers and opinionated friends alike. Instead, I said “adios” to Facebook again and deactivated.

One common thread I kept seeing online—especially after each new tragedy—was the familiar chorus: people suck. People are terrible. I don’t want to live here anymore.

But they’re wrong. People are awesome. The vast majority of us go about our daily lives not hurting one another—not shooting up schools or blowing up abortion clinics. People cured diseases. People built libraries, bridges, and space stations. We’ve split the atom, mapped the genome, and sent robots to the edge of the solar system. While a few of us with misfiring brains occasionally inflict violence on our fellow humans, most of us are pretty damn decent.

To be clear, I’m not being flippant. The violence is real, and it’s tragic. If you or someone you love has been directly affected, I get it—this world doesn’t feel awesome right now. My heart goes out to you.

But most of us? We’re being emotionally bludgeoned by events that—while very real—are also statistically rare and happening far away. We don’t have a violence problem as much as we have a scale problem. Or more accurately, an over-connectivity problem. Our brains weren’t built to process this much pain, this fast, from this many sources.

In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, cognitive scientist and psychologist Steven Pinker makes a convincing argument that violence in the world has declined in both the long run and the short. I won’t give you the full synopsis, but he argues that the drop in violence is enormous in magnitude, visible across different time scales, and cuts through almost every category—war, homicide, genocide, torture, domestic abuse, criminal justice, racism, sexism, and more. He emphasizes that “the decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue.” But the data paints a clear picture: despite how it feels, we are living in the safest, least violent time in recorded history.

In fairness, I should also point out that Dr. Christopher Ryan offers an interesting counterargument, especially when you zoom out beyond just “recorded” history. In Sex at Dawn, Ryan argues that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were, in many ways, more peaceful and egalitarian than the societies that followed. According to his research, large-scale violence didn’t start escalating until we settled down—until we started growing crops, hoarding food, building fences, and passing down property. Agriculture, for all its benefits, also meant ownership. And ownership meant control. And control meant conflict. So yes, we’re safer now than we were a few hundred years ago during the height of imperialism, colonization, and religious warfare—but maybe not safer than we were ten or twelve thousand years ago, before agriculture and borders turned foragers into warriors.

Either way, the takeaway is the same: we didn’t evolve to take in this much suffering from this many people at once.

And regardless of how peaceful prehistoric humans may have been compared to modern society, it’s hard to deny that we live in the safest and least violent time since the invention of agriculture and cities. Again, it’s a numbers problem. Our tribe has grown too large—both in terms of actual population and our digital tribe. I don’t know what the fuck to do about the former, but the latter is worth a closer look.

So why doesn’t it feel that way?

Because our tribe got too big. Not just in size—but in the sheer number of people we’re plugged into every day. Which brings us back to Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest.

You’ve probably heard of Dunbar’s Number. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that humans can only maintain about 150 meaningful social relationships. That’s the upper limit our neocortex can realistically handle. Relationships built on trust, memory, and mutual obligation.

Facebook says the average user has about 130 “friends.” But once you add in friends of friends, strangers in public comment threads, the constant churn of content, Twitter mobs, Instagram followers, group chats, and random high school acquaintances from 1997… that number explodes. Most people I looked up had 300, 500, sometimes 5,000 “friends.” That’s thousands of signals and inputs flooding your brain daily—each one a story, a crisis, an opinion, a plea for attention, a moral emergency.

We’re oversaturated. And it’s fucking with us.

Thirty years ago, if something tragic happened a thousand miles away, you might hear about it days later—if at all. Now, you see it instantly, with video. Then commentary. Then more videos. Then debate. Then rage. Then more rage. Every post is a tragedy. Every tragedy is a debate. Every debate is a fight.

And you’re carrying it all around in your pocket.

To be clear, I am certainly no Ted Kaczynski, nor am I some type of modern-day Luddite. I’m not out there mailing suspicious packages or smashing laptops with a hammer in the woods. In fact, I love technology. And social media, when used responsibly, is a powerful tool. But it’s still a tool. And we’ve been using it like it’s an IV drip—mainlining global despair without pause or filter.

When I logged into Facebook this past week, it felt like the world was collapsing. But when I walked outside the next morning? The sky was still there. There was no gunfire. No explosions. No roving gangs. Just birds. Sunshine. Neighbors walking their dogs. The world, at least where I was standing, was still functioning.

That doesn’t mean everything is fine everywhere. I’ve been to Iraq. I’ve been to Chicago. I know danger exists. I know some people live with it every day. I feel for them. But drowning yourself in constant global suffering isn’t going to fix their lives. It will, however, wreck yours.

At the top of this piece, I suggested you log off and go outside. I didn’t mean forever. I’m not saying you should become a hermit. I’m just saying—try it for a while. A week. A month. Take inventory of how you feel after the initial withdrawal symptoms subside.

What happened in Dallas was horrifying. Orlando, same. And all the other stories we’ve absorbed this year. Senseless violence should always be condemned. And we should keep fighting for justice and equality. But maybe we can also stop and remember: these events, awful as they are, come from a very small number of people. On a population level, they are outliers—not the rule.

You’ll never escape the bad news entirely. Even unplugged, it’ll find its way to you. But it helps to step back. Zoom out. Breathe. Look for the helpers, as Mister Rogers used to say. Better yet—be one.

And here’s a piece of breaking news that won’t make the front page: Today, over 325 million Americans didn’t shoot, stab, rape, or blow anyone up. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before.

Good job, everyone. Keep it up.

Author: Nick Allison is just a banged-up Army Infantry vet of the War in Iraq. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife, their children and two big, dumb, ugly mongrel dogs. Don’t take anything he says too seriously… he’s just trying to figure out this ride we call existence like everyone else. Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in third-person because it probably makes him feel more important.

“But it grieves my heart, love, to see you tryin’ to be a part of a world that just don’t exist. It’s all just a dream, babe, a vacuum, a scheme, babe. That sucks you into feelin’ like this.”

– Bob Dylan 

 “If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.” 

– Joe Rogan