Naive optimism is not the answer.

The news is depressing. Really, really depressing, most of the time. It feels like every day some new tragedy has found the headlines, or maybe a prediction that tragedy is soon to strike in a new area, worse than before, or worse than imaginable.

I made the choice one year ago to start following the news more carefully. I wanted to stay informed, so I created a routine: I’d start each morning by reading the New York Times while I ate breakfast.

I underestimated how hard it would be to stick with this plan, but not because of the discipline of the routine: because of the subject matter. I began every morning by reading about some of the worst things around the world. Sure, small victories slipped through in rare feature stories, but by and large, I was beginning each morning thinking that the world was ending.

So what do you do, in a situation like mine?

I’ll tell you what you don’t do.

You don’t stick your head in the sand. You don’t choose to ignore what’s going on in the world. Why not? After all, at the end of the day, we’re all responsible for our own happiness, right? And why let the bad news weigh you down, when your own life is possibly quite good?

As a moral relativist, I can’t give a concrete answer. But I think we owe it to each other, as fellow passengers of this spaceship called Earth, to stay informed about what happens.

I think we owe each other the knowledge of the grief, suffering, and human misfortune that takes place around the world, regardless of our own lives. It’s not a novel concept: if we don’t know about it, we can’t do anything about it.

At the same time, if we know too much of the misfortune, we start to feel like we can’t do anything at all. Because the more we stay informed, the more likely we are to run into the negative imbalance that has run rampant in the news.

There’s a reason every headline seems to feel worse than the last, and it’s not because the world is continuously spiraling, at least not only that. It’s explained best by Pope Francis, in this famous quote:

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”

People literally have a stronger physiological reaction to negative information than positive information. It makes a lot of sense, then, that the news posts more negative information: that’s what gets you to react. And the more you react, the more you can’t stop reading.

Here’s an idea: keep reading the bad, but balance it out with the good. How? With Brightside, a Chrome extension that adds three real, human, positive stories to any article that you read with the click of a button. This way, you’re not sticking your head in the sand. You’re actually more informed than before, and your outlook is balanced.

In all honesty, I made this. But I didn’t make it to earn a commission, and I’m not a startup. I’m a high school programmer who wanted to cut through the noise and a little bit of good to the world.

Brightside lets you see the forest.