If You Focus on the Negative, Read This
There’s a popular children’s book called Zoom by Istvan Banyai.
No meetings required.
Finished? Let’s dive — or better — let’s zoom in.
The book opens with a close-up of a chicken. As the image pulls back, the reader discovers it isn’t a chicken at all, but a boy playing with a farm set. Zoom out again, and the farm set is part of a toy catalog. Zoom out further, and that catalog is being read by a boy on a cruise ship.
The cruise ship turns out to be part of a bus advertisement. The bus sits in a city. The city is revealed to be a scene from a movie, watched by a man on a beach. That image is actually just a stamp on a letter. Zoom out again, and a man in a plane is looking down at the island below. Eventually, Earth itself becomes a tiny speck on a vast black page.
It’s intriguing and humbling. It reminds us of the immense scale of the universe — and how small our lives are within it.
I don’t think the book is making a nihilistic claim that our lives don’t matter. I think it’s doing the opposite. It’s teaching perspective. When you zoom out far enough, the things consuming your attention lose their weight.
So I made my own version of Zoom. I call it Bad.
Here is the first page:
Well, this is a bad sign — Images by author
This looks like a bad book and a bad sign. It’s all filled with bad.
This is your mind when it’s focusing on something bad in the moment.
Let’s say you’re waiting for a parking spot in a lot and some guy pulls out and scratches your car, even though your hand was holding the horn. Suddenly your entire mind focuses on this, calling insurance, going to the auto body, taking time off from work….
Your entire focus is on this bad thing, causing stress and worry.
Now let’s zoom out a tiny bit:
A little less bad
All of a sudden our bad doesn’t look as bad does it? Yes, it’s still the focus of our attention, but we took a step back and realize that this bad isn’t really so bad.
Let’s zoom out further:
We start to see that the bad we were once focused on is actually getting pretty small.
And smaller.
And a tiny speck compared to all the Good in our lives.
Now let’s return to our car story. Imagine that moments after your car gets hit, you receive a call: you’ve won the lottery. Instantly, your mental state shifts. Your attention and energy snap to this new reality. The scratch may still be there, but compared to the bigger picture, it effectively disappears.
You don’t need to win the lottery to experience this shift.
Newspapers lead with bad news because we’re wired to notice what’s wrong. That instinct once kept us alive. But we don’t have to let it dictate how we see our lives, or allow it to fill every page.
Nothing changed except the perspective.
All it took was zooming out. Long enough to notice the good that was already there all along.
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Originally published February 5, 2026 | © Gabe Silverstein 2026
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