The future perfect
We are living in an epidemic of loneliness that everyone from the former surgeon general to the Pope is talking about. At the same time, only 14% of Americans report that the news is useful to their daily lives. The first fact indicates a lack of supply for a growing demand for connection. The second indicates diminishing demand for an existing supply of information. I believe they are related.
The conventional beats of journalism may meet people’s informational needs but leave untouched something deeper: their existential ones.
Humans are searching for something. The fact that the wellness, mental health, and spirituality sectors are billion dollar industries indicates this.
The psychology of the news
If the news were a person, what would its personality be? Is it empathetic? Antagonistic? Neutral? I used AI to aggregate and categorize what a major news organization I trust places on its website on any given day.
Here’s the breakdown:
| Category | Share of Content |
|---|---|
| Breaking/Hard News/Conflict | 65% |
| Politics and Government | 15% |
| Business and Economy | 5% |
| Technology and Science | 5% |
| Environment | 4% |
| Human Interest | 4% |
| Health | 2% |
| Culture | 1% |
The news is a vibe.
It’s stressing people out. Why does that matter beyond the fact that many people are avoiding the news? Stress reactions can lead to the production of cortisol. Cortisol decreases a person’s ability to think, act, and connect. It can decrease agency and trust. What if what we manufacture is structurally designed to decrease our trust in each other and the world we live in?
In the entertainment sector there are genres — a person might choose to watch Succession or Ted Lasso with very different effects. Is journalism, for the most part, offering only one register?
An experiment
It doesn’t have to be this way. I vibe coded the news to aggregate around principles from philosophy, psychology, and a manifesto by Rob Brezny. This is an alternative taxonomy that organizes reporting around concepts related to human experience — to understand, to feel, to act. Subcategories include things we do in daily life: laugh, cry, lie awake.
A simplified version of this practice would be to make a food pyramid for news output deliberately designed to better reach the full range of human experience.
The point is not to ignore bad news or replace it with good news but to include the range– the full feelings wheel: our joy, grief, our need for connection, our agency, our desire to understand.
Ultimately the point is not just to move stuff around but to change what we make. The essayist Elissa Gabbert writes that an essay is a realm. It’s a place — an architecture. The media is also a realm. But by design or default?
Innovation
Nearly every major business sector maintains a dedicated investment in its own future. Companies dedicate a percentage of resources to research and development because they understand that failure to innovate is its own form of collapse.
The news industry, in large part, does not operate this way. When I speak with colleagues, they often tell me they do not have time to think. This is understandable. The demands are acute. It is hard to innovate while responding to crises. Yet without dedicated space for innovation, the industry responds to the same crises with the same tools. This is exactly the moment when thinking differently is most necessary. It’s a strategic investment.
Motivation
I keep the front page of the New York Times from May 24, 2020 with me because it motivates my work. You might remember it. It’s covered with the names of those lost to COVID when the death toll neared 100,000. It reads, “an incalculable loss.”
This may make my mindset a period piece. We are no longer inside the pandemic. But I feel its psychic weight. We never had a one million person funeral. When we emerged from isolation, we never had a three-month dance party. Instead patterns that began in a terrifying crisis accrued and changed us over time.
In a recent article Derek Thompson shared that happiness never rebounded after 2020, “After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And its hardly bounced back at all.” This is not surprising given the current circumstances. But I wonder what we can do about it.
A fellowship is an opporuntity to have protected time to think. During my time as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I have been working on three projects:
- Strategies for the field.
- A new approach to content (aka The Existential Beat).
- A live performance series inspired by The Decameron.
The Future Perfect is a grammatical tense that describes what will have been — a future that looks back on itself with clarity. At a moment of profound change, we have a choice: do things the same way, or create ways to meet the moment? What will we wish we had built? What will we wish we had tried?
I want to look back and say we tried something different. Not just because the market demands it, or because audiences deserve it, but because the stories we tell shape the world people wake up into every day.
The media I am interested making reaches the full range of human experience. One that helps people feel less alone, recover a sense of agency, and reconnect with each other and the world.
As I end this essay I’m going to try to flood the zone with something closer to oxytocin or tryptophan. These are some bright lights I researched during my fellowship:
Joy is a form of therapy, believing is a beat, sometimes a museum is a dance floor, and art is a prescription for loneliness. People are throwing living funerals. Gossip is a tool. A climate campaign can emulate the feeling of sitting in the sun. A poet can write an advertising campaign “please go away”.
People are figuring out how to live in the face of the unexpected. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. Here’s the story of a straight man who delivered thirty eulogies to gay men at the height of the AIDS crisis. Here’s the story of a clown who’s trying to solve people’s problems one absurd performance at a time. Here’s the story of strangers encountering the impossble choice of what to do when your embryos are mistakenly swapped during IVF. Media is being generated with love as it’s orienting principle. A producer in Vermont will make you fall in love with her neighbors.
The future perfect I see is working together to build this kind of realm.
