Being a news junkie, it was a hard decision a few weeks ago to limit my access to the news. I felt that I should know what was going on in the world, but it was making me too depressed. Layoffs, economic crisis, budget talks breakdown, etc, etc.

The next day, I mentioned this to an Indian man I met through Couchsurfing who has been traveling the world for 15 months. He’d recently been in Africa and I asked him if seeing the poverty in Rwanda, Uganda and near the Congo saddened him.

“No, Susanna. Actually, it makes me feel happy and uplifted. People there might be very poor, but they are happy and optimistic and it gives me hope,” he answered.

In Africa, he found people to be happier than in the wealthy US.

I’d heard this before from people who had been to poor areas in sub-Saharan Africa and it made me think about the way our news programs are geared to make us constantly be in fear. I doubt that anyone here in the US will be dying of hunger anytime soon. We really have it quite good here despite our bad economy. Perhaps it’s just time for people here to realize that we’ve been living on credit for too long and need to downscale our lives to realistic levels. Maybe then people will learn to appreciate some of the smaller joys of life.