Have you heard the news? Did you catch that update? Seen the podcast where the guy confirmed the thing? Of course you did. We all did. I don’t even need to say what “the thing” is – you’ve already thought of at least three horrible headlines from the past fortnight. For the last decade we’ve all been battered, stamped and shat on with ever-worsening, supposedly life-altering news. We now know more about “what’s happening” than at any point in human history, and we’ve rarely been more at odds.

The ancients understood something we’ve forgotten: conflict begets conflict, and blood demands blood. In the Greek tragedy of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, no character is truly “wrong.” Clytemnestra is justified in killing Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter. Electra and Orestes are justified in avenging their father by killing their mother. Each act of revenge makes sense on its own terms – and yet the cycle never ends. Another debt to settle, another grievance to avenge. That’s why those plays still cut so deep: they show us the logic of vengeance, constant and ruinous.

Christianity was revolutionary precisely because it broke that cycle. It didn’t say, “punish the guilty until justice is restored.” It said: forgive. Forgive seventy times seven. Stop tallying debts, stop calling for blood, stop imagining history as a courtroom where you’re both prosecutor and executioner. For two millennia that idea has worked, however imperfectly, as a release valve on the human impulse to retaliate.

But look around: online, on TV, in politics, we’ve stumbled right back into Aeschylus’ world. Every tweet demands a counter-tweet. Every insult requires a dragging. The right cries about betrayal of values; the left cries about oppression. Everybody constantly arguing. And so the cycle spins, faster and faster, while actual lives, the ordinary business of friendship, family, reading, walking, get neglected.

Here’s the suggestion: just step the fuck back for a second. Log out. Close the tab that’s keeping your nervous system in constant alert. Start talking about your life, your actual life, with bills, friends, embarassing moments at the doctor’s, and the café that always gets your order wrong but remembers your name. Stop mistaking far-off wars and gossip about the royal family for your personal problems. Yes, those things matter in the abstract; no, your midnight comment thread won’t move the needle. What will? A walk. Proper reading. Films and TV now feel like an extension of the news cycle, so I’m staying away from those. Put on songs from the 1960s. Put on The Beatles. Put on Thelonious Monk. Put on something you’ve never heard before (Spotify claims to have over 100 million tracks in its catalogue, enough to keep you busy). Talk about that. Talk about what you love, not who or what you hate. You’ll notice it doesn’t wedge you from your friends.

“Well, who are you to say all this? What do you know better? What have you been doing these past few years?” Fair questions. There have been plenty of rumours: that I lost everything and had to rebuild my shattered life from scratch; that I joined a militia in some far-flung corner of the globe; that I’ve been secretly writing the great novel of this decade; that I opened a chain of cinemas; that I’ve been on a special assignment for the United Nations. Maybe some of that’s true, maybe none of it is. But here’s what I have been doing, consistently, for the last three years: thinking. Thinking about my life, about its shortness, about the kind of world I’d like to leave behind, and about what forces are tearing that potential world apart. I also turned 40 this year, and that shit changes your perspective, for sure.

Here’s another unkind truth: not everyone needs to be a political scientist, philosopher, or psychoanalyst. You don’t need to bring up Nietzsche down the pub. Nobody benefits from you creating a complete psychological profile of someone from a single Reddit comment, then spending several hours arguing with them in your head. We’ve mistaken abstraction for expertise and parroted opinions for insight, and it’s all making us go crazy. We’re living in the most prosperous and comfortable era the West has ever known – so why do so many people insist on being so fucking miserable and angry?”

I’m tempted to end with something provocative and ironic – this is the internet, after all – but here’s the unfashionable conclusion: just be ordinary. You don’t need to be a pundit on everything. Your hot take isn’t the one that will stand as the last, defining word about a happening. Log out. Take the walk. Read the book. Share the tune. Unite, not to do something radical or extreme, but simply to be with one another. The news will still be there in the morning. You, maybe not. And do you really want one of your final moments in this life  to be spent angrily replying to a complete stranger on Twitter that they’re  ‘fascist cunt’ and you hope they die?