If you’re like me, you look at the state of the world sometimes and despair that there’s anything good happening anywhere.  Such was my state of mind when I ran across the website Reasons To Be Cheerful a few years ago.  It is a buttress for hope against the incredibly pressing weight of bad news in the world.

Every year, they put together a big list of some of the stories they published over the course of the year.  This year’s contribution offers 177 uplifting stories of goodness, hope, and cheer amidst the world’s backdrop of chaos.  It took a while to scroll through, but it was worth it.

The website also has various sections dedicated to particular topics.  I’m partial to the one entitled We Are Not Divided, which is a “collaborative multimedia journalism project dedicated to revealing that truth by telling the stories that show our capacity, and our deep desire, to bridge our divides.”  I find myself borderline obsessed with the seeming divisions within our society, and so reading things like this is extremely helpful for me.  Sometimes what seems like division is merely an illusion or a lie.

I also subscribe to the newsletter, which drops cheerful stories into my inbox periodically.  Even if I don’t read them, seeing them there is important because it tells me that good things really are happening in the world.  That it isn’t all bad news, and it’s important to my mental and spiritual health that I know and believe that.

The last thing most of us need is another newsletter clogging up our inboxes, but this one is worth subscribing to and reading.  It’s necessary medicine, an antidote to the unrelenting flood of bad news we’re exposed to on a daily basis, much of which consists of misinformation and disinformation.  Getting a dose of wholesome truth every now and  then to combat that is important to anyone’s health.