I took a walk in the woods yesterday in the cool of the evening. “That’s good!” No, that’s bad—I found a big hole and fell into it. “That’s bad.” No, that’s good; inside the hole was a big strongbox. “That’s good.” No, that’s bad—when I lifted it out, I dropped it on my foot. “That’s bad.” No, that’s good—the box broke open and it was filled with some of that lost Cherokee gold the old‑timers talk about. “Well, that’s really good.” No, that’s really bad—every relative I have is calling me now to “see how I’m doing.” “That is bad.” You’re darn right that’s bad.
The thing about that old routine is that it’s funny only because the friend reacts to each twist as if it’s the whole story. Every new detail sends him swinging from good to bad to good again, never pausing long enough to wonder how the tale might unfold if he just let it breathe. And the more I watch the way we respond to world events these days, the more I think we’ve all become that equivocal friend—jerked around by every headline, every alert, every “breaking” development, as if history happens in single beats instead of long, complicated arcs.
And that’s not the worst of it. In the age of information, we often dig ourselves into opposing camps based on how we interpret that information, and every few years the occupants of Camp Good and Camp Bad trade places without ever noticing the double standard. One group sees a policy as reckless; the other sees it as necessary. And then the opposite. The facts don’t change—only the jerseys do.
Social and political unrest churn in a self‑reinforcing loop fed by the information peddled by media sources. That information is shaped by agendas beyond simply reporting the facts. Most people sense that, and trust in media accuracy is near historic lows—unless the reporting happens to flatter our own bias. Our ability to find a needle of truth in a haystack of noise is hampered not only by our cognitive blind spots, but by the way we perceive time itself.
Our ability to navigate the course of human events rests largely on our perception of the event horizon. A historical worldview — one that sees how events play out over years instead of minutes — gives pause to knee‑jerk reactions. People who know history are more apt to have a “let’s wait and see” attitude. Unfortunately, in the age of instant gratification, the event horizon rarely extends beyond arm’s length. Many media consumers have the attention span of a dog obsessed with a cat until he sees a squirrel.
A person with that longer view has a built‑in buffer against panic. They’ve seen enough cycles—economic, political, military, cultural—to know that events rarely mean what they seem to mean in the moment. Consequences unfold in layers. Today’s crisis is often tomorrow’s footnote. And the loudest voices are almost never the most accurate. That kind of mind doesn’t jump at every headline or confuse motion with meaning.
But the modern attention economy is built to do the opposite. It compresses time into a series of disconnected jolts—each one presented as urgent, existential, and definitive. It’s the “squirrel!” phenomenon, except now the squirrels are algorithmically selected, emotionally optimized, and delivered at a pace no human nervous system evolved to handle. And as the years go by, more and more of our leadership seems to be drawn from that pool of squirrel‑chasing dogs. When the public’s time horizon shrinks, leadership drawn from that public shrinks with it. You end up with decision‑makers who react instead of reason, who chase instead of plan, who govern like the friend in the comedy routine—always responding to the last thing said, never seeing the next thing coming.
Maybe that’s why the old “that’s good / no, that’s bad” routine still lands. It reminds us that judgment in real time is a fool’s errand. What looks disastrous today may turn out to be a turning point tomorrow, and what seems like a triumph can carry the seeds of its own undoing. History has always moved in long arcs, not breaking‑news intervals. If we could stretch our sense of time even a little—beyond the next headline, the next outrage, the next squirrel—we might rediscover the steadiness our moment is missing. And we might finally stop mistaking the middle of the story for the end.
Outside The Box 