I Know This One

It's a simple enough headline, "It was a wild week for stocks. Should you worry? Here are 4 things to keep in mind."

It contains a simple enough question: "Should you worry?"

And it has a simple enough answer: "No."

Because I keep coming back to things that irritate me on Nobody In Particular, I'm going to make a point that I've made before: "Does it spark anxiety?" is not a good judge of a headline. "Is there anything you need to do?" is a much more useful question, because the answer is, more or less by definition, able to be acted upon. Sitting and fretting is always less useful than identifying what needs to be done, and doing it to the best extent possible.

What I think that headlines like NPR's tend to tap into is the sense that there is nothing to be done, because the forces at work are simply too large, and too impersonal, to be impacted by individual action. But if it would be helpful to reduce one's exposure to stocks, or to put more money into savings, those are actions that can have measurable effects; and they don't require anxiety to implement.

Worry headlines are, I think, a slice of the phenomenon of news consumption as a hobby. Something that people do as a diversion, or to understand themselves as more informed about the world, but that doesn't require any other time or effort. And I understand why, in matters of finance, NPR avoids giving definitive advice. And I doubt that the headline writers at NPR actually see themselves as contributing to their audience's sense of anxiety. (In fact, they'd likely tell me that their audience doesn't need them in order to feel anxious.) But there's wisdom in the saying that no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood. Still, if enough of them held off, there might not be a flood to feel responsible for.