What's On Your TV?

This morning I had the TV on during a morning news show, which I usually do while tidying up around the house from the night before. I was only half-listening, but still I sensed the war in Israel was the subject under discussion among several talking heads. After about five minutes of the 200 still-captive hostages and the pro-Palestinian protests in major cities and the threat of Iran jumping in, I was becoming quite depressed so I switched the channel to an old rerun of Friends.

It was the one where Rachel sleeps with her ex-fiance Barry and her best friend from high school who is now engaged to him finds out about it. So she then tells Rachel that she slept with Barry when Rachel was engaged to him. They both go to his orthodontics office to confront him. 

Obviously, neither of those two situations described above involve me; not the war in Israel or the love triangle on Friends. The fact that one of them is real and the other is fiction doesn't change anything: I'm still not a player in either scenario and am powerless to change events.

The major difference is that hearing details about the war in Israel -- and the war in Ukraine and all the other wars going on right now in the world -- makes me deeply depressed and physically exhausted, spurring me to eat cookies until I'm nauseous, whereas hearing details about the sitcom lives of Rachel and Ross and the whole Friends gang makes me laugh and thus feel better about being alive.

At my age, I have to try really hard to make the most of every day. Spending my limited time weeping over dead people I never knew and centuries-old feuds I cannot impact is both pointless and painful. Why do I do it?