Bad News
“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.” - Douglas Adams
Douglas, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Bad news, like gossip, spreads like wildfire. It’s amazing how the more you try to stop it, the more ears it reaches. In school, you can ace three tests and fail one. When you come home, your parents are only going to lecture you about the bad score, they aren’t going to waste time praising you about how well you did on the other three. Or if your a pitcher, people are going to remember when you walked the batters. They are going to remember the ones you struck out, but people always remember when you screw up.
[youtube]UFMoJXnzUKY[/youtube]
Most of the time, you can look back at your screwups and make a funny of it. They provide fun times for the future. “Remember that time when you tripped in the mud?” I look back at those times and laugh about it now but at the time, it was humiliating. And it seemed like everyone knew about it the next day. Why does bad news travel so fast? I think it has to do with natural selection. When you find out a fault about someone, it makes you seem better. So, humans are programmed to look for bad news or qualities. It draws attention because people always look for faults.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
That’s an interesting theory that you have about evolution being the cause of peoples’ interest in bad news or goof-ups. I was wondering if those are two different things–bad news sometimes makes us sad; the goofs like the ones in the video are very funny.