How I am learning to deal with the scary headlines and keep positive in 2026

I’m 32, and 2026 has already provided more heavy news stories than many entire years have. I am hoping that, by the law of averages, the next few months will be entirely uneventful, with a faster-than-planned completion of roadworks being the stuff of front pages.

But that seems unlikely. The war in Ukraine is rumbling on, there is no peace in Gaza, and NATO is at risk of destruction. We have had the hottest year on record and are on track for environmental oblivion, yet the climate crisis barely gets a look-in these days. And if that wasn’t enough, the UK seems hellbent on creating more headaches for itself from debates about the placement of flags to discussions over what to do about problematic members of the royal family.

Blue Monday, not the New Order song but the oft-touted most depressing day of the year, is not until January 19, but it feels like we are already there. Tomorrow (January 9) is the day when most people give up on any new year’s resolutions, and can you blame anyone, given the headlines, Storm Goretti bringing minus 12C temperatures, and 16 hours of darkness per day?

Can things get worse? Yes. Should we despair? No. Here’s why.

Homo sapiens have been on Earth for around 300,000 years and for the vast, vast majority of that time, life was brutal. Almost nobody died from old age as disease, war, or change in weather would be likely to be the death of you, well before middle age. What today might be considered a minor ailment could have brought down an entire village. The average man or woman would be poor and hungry for most of their lives.

Thanks to the global rate of poverty halving since 1981, access to education being better than ever, and leaps in medical care, life expectancy has risen more in the past 60 years than it did in the previous 1,000. Considering human development, I can, however, take a nostalgic look back at the late 1990s when we more or less appeared to have the luxuries of today, but with the economy in a better place, high street shops open, and real-life friendships without the doom and false narrative of social media.

But while working in a newsroom can perhaps give me an overly negative perspective on the world, there are a lot of good things happening at any moment. In 2025 alone:

• Through efforts in England, conservationists announced that 150 species had been brought back in the wild from the brink of extinction,
• A glut of medical developments led to a new drug replacing asthma injections, AI brain scanning diagnosing strokes, and cancer survival rates doubling in the UK since 1975,
• Human rights were improved around the world, with same sex marriage legalised in several countries, and rough sleeping decriminalised in the UK,
• And efforts to de-pollute the Chicago River and the Seine in Paris led to the first swimmers being able to take a dip without fear of disease for 100 years.

We might not always be aware of what is going right.

To quote two great institutions of our time, from James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies, “There is no news like bad news,” and from Peep Show, “The news should really be a dispassionate list of the day’s events from the world ever… Except it would take forever”.

But while there will be more bad news to come, it is worth remembering that, behind the scenes, good is being done. There may even be good being done before your eyes if you look for it.

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William Mata is a writer and SEO editor for LBC

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