A Day in the Life

Quite by chance I heard the old Beatles song this morning, and I do remember how "cool" (had the word been invented?) and world-weary we felt listening to it. This would have been at the height of the "flower power" period, a time when the young could effortlessly taunt their elders simply by wearing their hair long and/or their skirts short!

I was never totally convinced by the pose of despair at the ways of the world adopted by so many young people at the time, not because many of them were not sincere, but because such despair as they felt was more than offset by the natural ebullience of youth. I doubt if our feelings of angst lasted more than the length of a song.
Things are a bit different when you get to my age. You wake up every morning to a steady drip drip drip of truly catastrophic news and it becomes more and more difficult to adopt the essential schizophrenia or multi-tasking mode that enables younger people to go about their daily activities despite what they have just heard/seen/read. I wonder if print, TV and radio journalists have any idea of the long-term effect of this avalanche (yes, the drip has become an avalanche!) of disasters on sensitive souls such as myself?
What can be done about it? I suppose it would be too much to ask for better news?