I’ve been thinking about the difference between what happened and the story we tell about what happened.

Most days, the story arrives first. It shows up already packaged: heroes and villains, winners and losers, the smart people and the idiots, the “real” Americans and the fake ones, the ones who deserve help and the ones who don’t. It’s tidy. It’s fast. It gives you a place to stand.

And it’s almost always missing the part where a human being is trying to keep their footing.

Today is Mother’s Day. That can be tender, complicated, bittersweet, or all three at once, depending on your life. It’s also one of those days where I notice how quickly we turn love into performance. We post the photo, we say the line, we do the gesture. Some of it is genuine. Some of it is anxious. We want to prove we belong to the category of “good people who remember.”

That’s a small version of something bigger I keep seeing everywhere: the way we reach for narratives as a substitute for being with the real thing.

When the world feels unstable, narratives offer a kind of handle. They tell you who to trust, who to fear, what you’re allowed to feel. They let you skip the hard parts: uncertainty, grief, tradeoffs, mixed motives. They let you feel righteous without having to be curious.

I don’t say that from a distance. I’m not immune. I can feel the pull in my own nervous system — the little dopamine hit of “I knew it,” the relief of being on the correct side of a simplified story. I can feel how quickly I can turn a person I’ve never met into a symbol I can dismiss.

But when I slow down, the question that keeps helping is: what are people protecting?

Not in the cynical sense of “what’s their angle?” More like: what would make this story feel necessary to them?

A lot of the loudest arguments are really about something quieter:

People want stability. They want to feel like the work they do matters. They want to believe their kids won’t have it harder than they did. They want a world where effort connects to outcomes. They want to be seen as competent and decent. They want a little dignity. They want a future that doesn’t feel like a rug that could get pulled at any time.

When those things are in question, it makes sense that people grab whatever story offers certainty and belonging. Even if the story is brittle. Even if it asks them to treat other people as disposable. Even if it turns every disagreement into a moral trial.

The part that worries me is how often the narratives being spun right now don’t just describe the world — they train us in contempt. They reward us for being hard. They frame empathy as weakness and cruelty as honesty. They make it feel normal to talk about whole groups of people as problems to be managed instead of neighbors to be understood.

I don’t have a sweeping answer to that. What I have is a small practice I’m trying to keep, especially on days when everything feels like it’s speeding up:

When a story makes me feel instantly certain, I try to ask what it’s doing to my attention. Is it pulling me away from the actual people in my life? Is it asking me to enjoy someone else’s humiliation? Is it encouraging me to trade curiosity for a punchline?

And then I try to bring the scale back down.

In my day job, building software in healthcare, scale is always the temptation. You can talk about “users” and “utilization” and “throughput” and pretend you’re dealing with abstractions. But the work gets real again the moment you picture a nurse at the end of a long shift, clicking through one more screen, trying to do the right thing for a patient while the system asks them to do it the hard way.

That’s where my own clarity tends to come from: not from winning an argument, but from remembering the person at the end of the chain.

Maybe that’s the only move available most of the time. Not to ignore what’s happening in the world, but to refuse the versions of it that require you to become less human. To notice when you’re being recruited into somebody else’s certainty. To stay soft without being naive.

If you’re feeling spun up by the day’s headlines, I get it. I am too, sometimes. But I’m trying to keep one question close: what would it look like to respond to this without hardening?

Not with performative optimism. Just with the kind of steadiness that leaves room for real people to be real people — including me.