With several months to go before my ‘terminal date’, on 30 October, I have commenced the judicial version of Swedish death cleaning (döstädning). Last Sunday, in my intentional, proactive process of decluttering and organising, I opened a tiny file marked ‘My Appeals’.
Now, what you need to know is that I had made a rule for myself not to read news reviews and appeals of my judgements — just the headnotes. Not because I didn’t care, but because I cared entirely too much. An appeal upheld would make me prideful; a bad one would make me despair. No good was to be had either way.
And so here were the appeal decisions and clippings I’ve kept in a little folder since I was appointed to Fiji in 2003. I clicked. And then I scrolled.
Most of the reviews were complimentary and, in most judgements, I was upheld. Did I read those? Um, no. I scrolled right past them until I found the ones where the journo was critical, or the Appeal Court was completely correct in overturning my stuff-up — and I read every single one.
Why do we do this? Why does a single negative comment outweigh a hundred affirmations? Social psychologists have a name for it: the negativity bias.
Our brains are wired to keep us alive, not happy. When something feels threatening (physically or socially), we get a rush of cortisol and adrenaline. This was useful when we needed to remember where the sabre-toothed tigers were. It was also useful when our belonging to the group was at risk. Humans cannot survive alone.
But now, bless our hearts, we get the same neurochemical dump from blogs and streaming news services as we used to get from woolly mammoths — complicated these days by the tiresome task of discerning what might or might not be true.
Same hardware. Completely unregulated software.
For some reason, our brains just don’t have the same urgency around compliments and thank-you notes and the good in people. While pleasant things involve some oxytocin and serotonin, the long-term impact is not the same.
As so many of us are taking social media apps off our phones, and realising that consuming “news” all day — and by news I mean media accounts of the very worst things people are doing to each other every minute of the day across the globe — is not, in fact, good for our spirits or mental health, the question becomes: to what do we give our attention?
We find ourselves in a time in which it is increasingly difficult to see the good in people and, for reasons of still having Ice Age brains, we are more easily impacted by the negative than the positive — even if the latter far outnumbers the former. We are exposed to content that rewards the loud, the divisive and the alarming (even when those things may distort reality), and we live in an economy in which our attention is our currency. The powerful control that currency, as they always have, but choose to hide that behind the law and its rules — or abandon any rules-based order in favour of exercising raw power over the weak and powerless.
Perhaps this is the question for this new year of 2026: to what and to whom shall we give our attention? Can I suggest: people.
Bless our little Palaeolithic hearts, people are all we’ve got. We need each other now more than ever. We need unity more than ever. We need our humanity more than ever. And when we pay attention to people, we see the good in them.
And sometimes — astonishingly — people are heroic and tender and hilarious. We do unbelievably kind things for one another. I wish I knew the actual ratio of good to bad we put into the world — not what it feels like, but what it is — because I suspect the good still outnumbers the bad.
Put down the device. Abandon ‘twit-face’. Go pay attention to people.