I’ve been noticing how many of the stories floating around right now come with a hidden instruction.

Not just “here’s what happened,” but “here’s who you’re allowed to hate,” or “here’s the person you’re supposed to laugh at,” or “here’s the group you can blame so you don’t have to feel how unstable everything has gotten.”

Sometimes the harms are real and the frustration is real, but the narration gets tuned toward one outcome: certainty that makes you harder.

It’s tempting. If I can snap the world into a simple picture, I get a clean role inside it and the comfort of belonging.

But I don’t think that’s what’s actually going on underneath the talking points.

What I keep hearing—under the politics, under the culture war stuff—is a steady hum of fear and fatigue. People feel squeezed. They don’t trust institutions, or each other, or their own ability to keep up. A lot of us are carrying some version of: what if the future is smaller than the life I thought I was building?

When that question is in the air, narratives become tools. They give you a handle. They let you trade a complicated, unfixable feeling for a story with a target.

That’s why the bad-faith stuff works so well. It doesn’t just lie. It offers a counterfeit kind of care. It says: don’t sit with uncertainty; don’t grieve; don’t admit you’re scared; don’t look at the ways your own side might be contributing. Just clamp down on a story that feels strong.

And then it trains you in contempt.

Contempt is efficient. It makes other people look like props.

I’ve been thinking about this at work. When you build software for healthcare, you’re surrounded by words that sound neutral and responsible: “risk,” “efficiency,” “utilization.” Those words aren’t wrong, but they can become a story, too—one that teaches you to see humans as throughput.

Every time a workflow gets framed as “user error,” there’s a fork in the road. Either the user is careless and the system is fine, or someone is trying to do something important under pressure and the tool made it harder than it needed to be.

When I choose the second story, I get more precise. I ask better questions. I stay oriented toward the person on the other side of the screen.

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

Not the posture of “everyone is good” (they aren’t), or “everything is complicated” (sometimes it isn’t). More like: don’t let the story make you sloppy about people. Don’t let it turn whole groups into a single bad character. Don’t let it convince you that humiliation is the same thing as accountability.

One small thing I’ve been trying lately is to pay attention to the moment I feel recruited.

The moment a post or a headline gives me that quick internal click—oh, I know exactly what this is—and with it, the little rush of righteousness.

When I notice that, I try to slow down and ask: what is this story offering me right now?

Is it offering clarity, or is it offering permission to stop caring? Is it helping me see something true, or is it teaching me to enjoy someone else being reduced? Is it pointing at a real problem, or is it just giving my nervous system a place to dump its fear?

Sometimes the answer is still: yes, this is wrong, and it matters.

But the difference is the next step—whether I respond from steadiness or from heat, and whether I keep a person human in my mind even when I’m naming harm.

I don’t have a big solution for where the world seems to be going. Mostly I’m just trying to stay in relationship with reality: the people in my life, the work in front of me, the quiet decisions that shape what kind of person I become.

If the loud narratives right now keep trying to make us harder, I’m interested in the opposite move—staying clear without getting cruel.

Anyway. That’s what I’m holding today: a suspicion that beneath a lot of the noise, people are trying to ask for safety and dignity, and we keep answering with stories that make it harder for anyone to actually find either.