It is easy for people to get used to a worsening life situation when the changes come slowly.

Bad things are bad even if they are presented as leading to a better “new normal.”

People in free societies are not powerless to resist incremental bad changes.

People may not react strongly to bad news if it comes to them slowly and incrementally. This can result in the person essentially resetting what seems normal to them. That is like the parable about the frog in a pot of water that is slowly heated so that the frog lets itself be boiled to death.[i]

In today’s society, there seem to be many cases where people have personal connections to societal changes, such as new policies, guidelines, or actions concerning immigration, vaccines, or global affairs. Whether or not people agree with them, because of their frequency and number, some people may find themselves becoming numb to all the changes and experiencing “learned helplessness.”[ii] It is also worth noting that those changes have become so numerous and frequent that the media seems to have stopped using the word “unprecedented” to describe them.

Why Bad News Becomes a “New Normal”

People become numb to the changes when the congestion of news stories and information changes does not create cognitive dissonance, since each individual nugget of information isn’t too far off from what preceded it.

The........

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