Why You Need to Grieve WAY More | The Black Sheep LIVE

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Technology has freed us from many painful things, but it has also divorced us from many meaningful things, like collective grieving. Social media and the 24/7 news cycle give us front row seats to every tragedy now, but we have no grieving process for secondhand sadness. While our experience of bad news about disasters, war, violence, and tragedies isn't direct, the normal response is still fear, anger, sadness, and grief.

For most of human history, people had rituals around these hardships that offered a cathartic way to make sense of the suffering and move on. The opposite is true on social media. Whereas people normally feel more connected to those they're experiencing a tragedy with, when we experience that tragedy via social media, we become more disconnected from each other, as debating and blaming take hold every time.

What happens to a person that witnesses a tragedy secondhand and feels the appropriate shock, anger, and sadness, but has no cathartic outlet?

What happens to a culture when its people experience painful events from a distance—seeing videos of mass destruction and suffering, reading firsthand accounts of loss—but turns to social media commentary to grieve?

How should we as individuals deal with the regular stream of tragic news today, so we neither numb ourselves to human suffering nor devolve into resentment and anxiety over today's omnipresent tragedies?

Join me in this livestream to do what is so rarely done today: talk about the issue beneath the issue. As Los Angeles joins Asheville in the long, painful process of rebuilding after a historic loss, finding ways to constructively contend with the tragedies that are inevitable in life isn't just good for us, but for the suffering people around that could use support instead of yet another destructive force.