We're so screwed, I don't even know what to worry about first. Terrorist extremists? Yeah, they're frightening - but what about those North Korean nukes? Or global warming, come to think of it? I need a personal bloody organiser to sort it out - a gizmo that'll set me a "timetable of concern" just so I can break down my overall sense of creeping dread into manageable, bite-sized flurries of panic. Otherwise, I'm in danger of forgetting to worry about some things - like bird flu, for instance. I haven't seriously crapped myself about that since, ooh, February? Whenever it was, a top-up's long overdue.

I'm not the only one. I was reading a George Monbiot piece about climate change on the Guardian website the other day, and it painted such a bleak vision of our potential future, I swear I physically felt my will to live draining through the soles of my feet, as though it were being flushed out of me and replaced with a sort of heavy, porridge-like despair.

Below the article, in the comments section, a passer-by remarked, "I have two pieces of advice for anyone reading this: 1) Keep an overdose-sized supply of sleeping pills stashed away that is sufficient for yourself, your family and anyone else you care about. 2) When things start getting bad, use them." And this was one of the cheerier entries.

Still, the news isn't always violently upsetting. No. Sometimes the bad headlines turn out to be a false alarm - like the other day, when early reports of a second 9/11 happening RIGHT NOW turned out to be a comparatively minor accident involving a light aircraft. Can't be much fun being one of the victims, of course - for one thing, you've just been killed, and for another, your death was announced by an anchorman mopping his brow, and drowned out by a worldwide sigh of relief - but for the rest of us, it was the closest we've come to hearing good news in ages.

With this in mind, perhaps news journalists everywhere would like to make our lives a little more bearable by running several deliberately petrifying and utterly fabricated stories a week, just so the genuine terrifying stuff feels a bit less terrifying by comparison. And at the end of the week, simply reveal which stories were true, and which were fake. That way, we'll spend our last few years on Earth feeling like we've lived through a string of lucky escapes, rather than a protracted, dispiriting meltdown.

Start with the pterodactyl example. A week later, invent a health scare - some new hyper-contagious disease that makes your eyes boil and burst and run down your cheeks. The gorier the better. Then invent some bogus knuckle-whitening bullshit about a maniac on the Korean peninsula who's got hold of a nuclear bomb and ... Oh. Oh bugger.