Gen Z is no stranger to a catastrophic headline.
Inundated with negative news in what feels like a never ending cycle, the phrase “I can’t live through any more major life events” has now become an Internet trend. Our cognitive burden of today’s media feed only gets heavier when scrolling just a few seconds uncovers a contradictory post, forcing us to remember that every piece of information we read on Instagram must be fact-checked lest we become the uniformed slobs our parents fear us to be.
How are we, one of the most burnt out, most mentally unstable generations, supposed to cope with this downpour of disastrous headlines and ruinous realities?
Sometimes I feel like the emotions from “Inside Out” when they’re stuck in Riley’s brain, watching her islands disappear one by one. The America I once watched on a tiny television from my parent’s living room is crumbling before my eyes, and I feel powerless to change the headlines. Every day it seems another department disappears, a new tariff emerges or another government shutdown looms on the horizon.
Even locally, the news isn’t great. A car crash on the interstate. Your favorite restaurant shutting down. And a rising political temperature — all combining to create an overwhelming morning newsletter.
Sometimes I catch myself avoiding the current events cycle because I just don’t want to feel sad. Sometimes it’s deeper than that — I don’t want to feel hopeless. I can’t stand to feel uncomfortable when faced with others’ needs, as the very human parts of my brain constantly place me in their shoes.
Growing up, my mom always told me to look for others’ needs when I’m feeling mine the strongest. Instead of falling into the slippery pit of a pity party, she would say, can you help someone else up? Like all kids, I scoffed her advice off for many years.
To my great surprise, though, I remembered her advice when my life metaphorically fell apart sophomore year. After weeks of going to sleep hoping I wouldn’t wake up, I decided I’d finally had enough — the desperation to focus on anything other than myself intensified to the breaking point, and it forced me to look for someone worse off than me.
Ironically, that someone was my mom and my family back home.
A deep sickness for which doctors did not have answers left my family at a crossroads — my mom (the backbone of our household, the strongest woman I know and the reason I believe in feminism) couldn’t function the way she always had. So focused on myself, I’d neglected to notice my family as they struggled to adapt to life with a mom at 50%.
Even though I couldn’t see past my heartache and the pile of edits on my managing editor desk, I scraped together the time to make a freezer meal and do some quick shopping for my siblings. I didn’t know much, but I had a deep need to show them I cared.
An empty house greeted me after the two-hour drive, but I wanted to work in silence. I remember sitting at the dining room table, tears streaming down my face, as I ached for all the hurt and worry that my family had been going through. Somewhere between the note I scribbled down and the off-key tunes I banged out on my beloved piano before heading back to Knoxville, my own sadness began to trickle away.
When I got back in my car to leave, the loneliness hanging over my head like a cloud had dissipated. There would be many more nights of heartache ahead, but I had learned an important lesson – sometimes you must look beyond yourself in times of turmoil.
Sometimes that is all you can do — look for someone hurting more than you and then look for a solution.
That need to find the solution has followed me into my career as a journalist.
The devil on the journalist’s shoulder can sometimes whisper that he wants a crisis to happen or a riot to start up — just to have something big to write about. But these are real people with real feelings and real blood flowing through their veins. A true journalist cannot wish harm on others simply for his benefit.
What can a good journalist do instead? Find the light. Always find the light. Keep looking and looking for the light until they find it, and then tell others about it.
See, there’s this cool thing called solutions journalism, and it’s built on the belief that someone out there has found a solution to a problem. As a journalist, it’s my job to hunt for that solution and amplify it. And then the job of the reader begins — you choose your own adventure.
A few weeks ago, I read a post that said, “Throughout the darkest times in history, people were still falling in love and hanging out with their friends.” Normally that is the sort of cringy advice I would immediately scroll past, but it stuck with me for the sheer reason that it’s simple and true. Stop and think about it for a moment: Great love stories are written in times of peace and war alike. Friendship is not reliant on a certain federal status.
And oh how encouraging to realize that there’s probably been a darker time where people did more than survive — they thrived.
Instead of watching islands of society disappear, what if we made changes in our everyday lives? What if we rejected the idea that a story repost is the Gen Z modern equivalent of political action? What if we set off chain reactions of good deeds, good journalism and good ideas?
You can’t think about yourself when you’re thinking about other people. And you can’t focus nearly as hard on the bad news when you’re busy creating good news.
Go create some good news so we can write about it!
