50 Wholesome Memes That Remind Us The World Isn’t All Bad

We managed to get in touch with the creator of the group, Pritam Singh Rathore, and he was happy to tell us more about it.

"I started it because I want to spread positivity all around," Pritam explained to Bored Panada, adding that he has been working with social media in one way or another since around 2012, and this experience helps him run the project.

"The members are amazing, and they share awesome content, but the biggest topics, in my opinion, are animals and relationships," Pritam said, admitting that he also has other niche communities.

Pritam also told us something very similar to what we've heard from the creator of 'Humans Of Marketplace' which is that Facebook itself makes it incredibly hard for the community to properly function.

"Managing the group, you and your admin/mod team have to be active all the time," he said. "A group on Facebook is totally different from a page because people might have malicious intent and litter the comments with abuse. That means people who are in charge of it have to spot and delete such comments before someone else does and reports it directly to Facebook or else the violation will be recorded."

The same applies to posts. As you can imagine, when there are more than half a million members, the amount of content they want to share with each other is huge, but just a few slip-ups and the group is done.

"If you have approved a post and it then got removed by Facebook, your group might be at risk. 2 or 3 such violations will get it banned," Pritam said. Thus, at least one moderator must be online at any given time and make sure that everything is going according to policy.

But groups like this are needed as mainstream media isn't always working in the best interest of its viewers. "Unfortunately, a lot of the news we consume today isn’t so much reporting as it is a way of keeping people addicted to the news cycle," said licensed psychologist Logan Jones, PsyD.

Since sensational headlines get more attention, Jones says media outlets often end up focusing on disaster reporting—and rarely any positive news.

"Consuming too much of this kind of news, whether actively or passively, can be very toxic, and what you hear has an impact on your mood."

Annie Miller, MSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, explained the process like this: when we experience a threat, our brain activates the fight or flight response, and the systems in our body react accordingly.

Consuming the news can activate the sympathetic nervous system, which causes our body to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Then, when a crisis is happening, and we are experiencing this stress response more frequently, physical symptoms may arise.

This emotional toll and negative effect on the psyche was demonstrated in a study that found people who watched negative material, as compared to those who watched positive or neutral material, showed an increase in both anxious and sad moods after just 14 minutes of viewing television news bulletins and programs.

In addition to an increase in anxious and sad moods, the researchers also found the results to be consistent with the theories of worry that implicate a negative mood as a causal factor in facilitating worrisome thoughts.

So, thank you 'Wholesome Memes' for balancing out people's social media feed.