December 2, 2025

You are a sophisticated person if you think things are bad.

“We get accustomed to something improving, and we stop recognizing that actually matters. I think as well, there’s an element where for audience, it feels weirdly not smart to consume this kind of coverage. Like, you are a sophisticated person if you think things are bad.

Because you’re smart enough to see it, which actually is not hard to see. I think with solutions there’s no one to blame, which I think is a big part of news coverage and news consumption. Especially, again, in a more social media era, like we’re usually trying to identify very quickly what went wrong.

And in some ways, that’s a great step forward. Like, we’ve experienced these terrible floods in West Texas. The worst and the deadliest floods we’ve had in decades in the US.

And these things used to happen more often. And I believe when they did, the reaction was less, well, what went wrong? Because we didn’t presuppose we had the power to control things like that.

Now, almost instantly you’re going to who failed, right? Like, this shouldn’t happen, who failed? And that is true to a certain extent.

Like, things like that, incident in particular, shouldn’t have happened to this degree. But what that means is that there’s a constant feeling that there’s failure everywhere. Government’s failing, or people are failing, or businesses or institutions definitely are failing.

And I think trying to consume solutions, journalism, means you have to go back against that to a certain extent. If your attitude is that things are wrong, this is challenging that. There might be a bit of a cognitive disconnect, I think, that sort of pushes people away.”

Bryan Walsh – “Solving the Narrative Deficit” on the Hope is a Verb podcast