I remember when my phone buzzed with a breaking news alert about a local flood warning. Everyone in my office panicked, but I just checked the radar, saw it was minor, and went back to work. That’s not a brain designed for bad news—that’s a brain that filters it. Look, Kepha makes a decent point that negativity grabs our attention. But evolution gave us that bias for survival, not for doomscrolling. Our brains are actually brilliant at adapting to threats, then moving on once they’re handled. The issue isn’t our hardware—it’s how we’re using it. Constant headlines trick us into thinking everything’s an emergency, but that’s a misuse, not a design flaw. We’re built to handle bad news in doses. We just need to stop feeding ourselves a firehose of it.

Okay, so I’m at the grocery store and see a headline about bird flu. I shrug, grab some chicken, and move on. That's not a brain overwhelmed by bad news—that’s a brain putting it in perspective. Kepha, I get that negativity bias is real. It kept our ancestors alive. But here’s the thing: that same bias lets us hear a scary statistic, assess the actual risk, and go back to buying eggs. The problem isn’t our brain’s design; it’s the algorithm shoving 50 of those headlines at us an hour. Evolution didn’t prepare us for that, sure. But it did give us the ability to filter, prioritize, and move on. We just have to use that filter more.