This morning I noticed how quickly I can start reading the world like a referee.

I open a headline and my brain wants to sort it instantly: who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s lying, who deserves to be mocked. It feels like clarity, but most of the time it’s just a little hit of certainty — a shortcut around the harder work of understanding.

A lot of what’s “going on in the world” right now isn’t just events. It’s narration. Everything arrives with a ready-made storyline attached: heroes and villains, winners and losers, the sensible people and the idiots. The pace is part of it. If you keep moving fast, you never have to sit with the parts that don’t fit.

What I keep trying to get underneath is: what are these narratives doing for us?

Sometimes they’re an honest attempt to name harm. Sometimes they’re people trying to make meaning inside a life that feels more expensive, more precarious, and more lonely than we want to admit. And sometimes they’re just product — outrage packaged up and shipped to your nervous system because it keeps you engaged.

When I listen for what’s underneath the talking points, I keep hearing the same human needs:

People want safety. They want dignity. They want to feel like their work matters. They want the rules to make sense again. They want a future that doesn’t feel like it’s narrowing.

If you don’t feel those things, a story that offers certainty can feel like oxygen. Even if it’s brittle. Even if it asks you to flatten other people into caricatures. Even if it turns every disagreement into a contest where someone has to lose face.

That’s where bad-faith negativity gets its leverage. It offers a counterfeit comfort: you don’t have to be curious, you don’t have to admit fear, you don’t have to hold complexity. Just pick a target and tighten your grip.

The cost is that it trains us in contempt. It teaches us to confuse hardness with honesty.

I think about this a lot building software in healthcare, because systems are really good at teaching you what to see — and what to stop seeing.

A ticket comes in: “User can’t complete the workflow.” The quick narrative is that the user is careless and the system is fine. The more accurate story is usually messier: the workflow was designed away from the floor, the language is unclear, the “edge case” is someone’s real life, and the user is a nurse near the end of a shift trying to do the right thing quickly.

When I remember that, I don’t get softer about the work. I get more precise. The goal stops being “prove we’re right” and starts being “make it easier for a human being to do a good thing.”

I wish we had more of that precision in public life.

Not the precision of trivia or gotchas — the precision of asking: what problem is this person trying to solve? What are they protecting? What would it cost me to assume they’re a person, not a symbol?

One practice I’m trying (imperfectly) is to notice when a story makes me feel instantly righteous. Not just angry — righteous. The feeling that I’m on the correct side of a simplified frame.

When that happens, I try to pause and ask: what is this story doing to my empathy?

Is it asking me to enjoy someone else’s humiliation? Is it asking me to treat a whole group as a single bad character? Is it asking me to stop listening and start scoring?

Sometimes the honest answer is, “I don’t know enough yet.” Sometimes it’s, “That’s real, and also there’s more going on.” Sometimes it’s that the anger is pointing at something true — and the narrative is still leaving out the people it would be inconvenient to remember.

I’m not trying to float above it all. I don’t want to become passive or numb. I just don’t want my attention shaped by stories that require me to get meaner in order to make sense of what’s happening.

What helps me, on days like this, is trading a fast sentence for a slower one. Trading “of course those people are like that” for “what are they afraid of?” Trading “they’re evil” for “where did this break?” Trading “I’m sure” for “I might be missing something.”

Not because that makes me better than anyone. Because it keeps me oriented toward reality.

And reality, as far as I can tell, is still made of people.