The Jester

Let’s be honest: the world could use a good laugh. Or at least the world could use more joy. Every day, we’re surrounded by headlines and posts that remind us of tragedy, conflict, or scandal. You don’t even have to look hard—just open your favorite news app or scroll through social media, and within minutes (probably less than five), you’ll stumble across something that tanks your mood. When I tried this experiment, it took sixty seconds and only for pasts before I hit a story about a dam that was going to fail. All it took was scrolling through four posts to find a big dam problem. Yes, by the way, that joke had to be made. If you want to know when I wrote this introduction, you can search for Croton Dam in Michigan 2026. And when I tried the same scrolling experiment on different platforms, the results were pretty much the same. Sure, the algorithms may shuffle the deck so your bad news looks different than mine, but the point is clear: we’re inundated with bad news, all the time. Oscar the Grouch was right, there is something wrong with everything. Therapists and thought leaders try to discover how we should deal with this constant flood of stress and negativity. While we all have our insights and ideas, laughter is one very important indicator that we're ok. Not because laughter magically fixes the world’s problems, but because it helps us survive them.