Lost your mojo?

Here's who took it and how you can get it back.

Feeling increasingly anxious and exhausted?

You’re not alone. A May 2024 poll conducted by the American Psychological Association says adults in America are increasingly anxious, and More in Common’s 2018 research on America’s hidden tribes uncovered so much exhaustion that they used the term Exhausted Majority to refer to the 87% of us stuck between the 13% on the extreme ideological wings.

Shortly after launching Remaking the Space Between Us in April, I led a dialogue on its findings with 25 of my neighbors. To kick it off, I asked folks to share one word that best captured how they felt about the state of our nation. Their responses?

I then asked them to rank on a scale of 0 to 5 how much hope they had for the future of the country, and how much control they felt over shaping that future. The scores on both were uniformly low, mostly ones and twos with only a couple of threes and fours.

Finally, I asked them to rank on the same 0 to 5 scale how much news they consumed every day. Turns out, the more news they consumed, the less hope and control they felt.

These unsurprising but dismal results not only reflect the state of our nation but the skewed “if it bleeds, it leads” filter through which mainstream media curates the news.

Consider More in Common’s research on the state of polarization in our nation. In one study called The Perception Gap, they found that people who regularly read the news are almost three times more distorted in their perceptions of their political opponents than those who said they read the news only now and then. This is in part due to a significant perception gap between what Republicans and Democrats think members of the other party believe and what they actually believe, with both parties overestimating the percentage of people in the other party who hold what they consider extreme views—by twice as much.

“We can’t prove that one causes the other,” say the researchers, “but these results suggest that rather than making Americans better informed, media coverage is now feeding our misperceptions.”

And those misperceptions, in turn, are feeding exhaustion and anxiety.

Similar results come from experiments conducted by Stanford researchers Larry Diamond and James Fishkin. On three occasions between 2019 and 2023, they brought together the most statistically diverse groups in American history to deliberate on a range of contentious issues from immigration to climate change to voting. They wanted to see what would happen when citizens engaged directly with one another in evidence-based small group discussions. “When Americans take the time to talk to each other in a civil, evidence-based way,” Fishkin and Diamond report, “they learn to listen to each other and often change their views dramatically, depolarizing across partisan divides.”

More in Common’s and Stanford’s research together suggest that when we interact directly with one another, unfiltered by the news, we see better, we feel better, and we do better.

Wonder where your mojo’s gone? It’s getting chewed up by a skewed news filter you don’t even see.

From Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

How dominant news outlets are stealing our mojo

The vast majority of us get our news from a small number of dominant news outlets—papers like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times as well as 24/7 news stations like FOX, MSNBC, and CNN.

While the political leanings of these outlets vary, they all share the same news filter. This filter focuses mostly on what’s wrong and who’s to blame, often speaks in a reactive, alarming tone, and reports the attributions, accusations, and counter accusations people make as much as, if not more than, what people did to warrant the attributions and accusations.

To keep us coming back for more, this filter targets our most reactive selves. Those reactive selves, in turn, feed the distortion, polarization, and fragmentation the news then reports back to us, creating a vicious cycle riveted on how our nation is falling apart and who is to blame.

That cycle is sucking up our mojo on a daily basis.

It’s time to change our news filter

In 2020, as I watched a perfect storm of a pandemic, a racial reckoning, and a divisive presidency tear at the social and political fabric of our nation, I was curious if anyone was working to knit it back together.

Turns out, a lot of “anyones” are. While doing research for Remaking the Space Between Us, I uncovered hundreds of thousands of citizens working together across the country in locally rooted, nationally connected groups to heal historic divides while solving common problems. Yet when I asked folks at that first dialogue if they had heard of any of these groups, not one hand went up.

That’s about to change. How fast depends on us.

On March 27, 2024, America at a Crossroads on PBS aired a story on the deadliest school shooting in Tennessee history. It took place at the Covenant School in Nashville in 2023 when three nine-year-old children and three adults were gunned down. Unlike most news accounts focusing on the carnage and the polarized gun debate that followed, America at the Crossroads host Judy Woodruff chose to take a different filter to the events of that day. She decided to focus on how 11 people on opposite sides of the gun debate were so disturbed by what happened that they came together a year later to listen to one another’s experience and perspectives and create proposals together for reducing gun violence. It’s an amazing episode. I hope you watch it.

Woodruff is far from alone. For the past 20 or so years, alternative news outlets on Substack, YouTube, and other websites have been disrupting the dominant news filter. Though very different from one another, they all bring a broader news filter to events and problems. They investigate the hidden causes behind events like the one in Nashville and report on the solutions people are building together to address them. The stories themselves are told in a more reflective tone that engages our prefrontal cortex rather than our amygdala, making us think rather than merely react. They speak to our better selves, evoking understanding rather than fear, empathy rather than outrage, and a desire to help rather than fight or flee (see the table below on Changing Our News Filter).

At the vanguard of this movement is the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). The folks at SJN have already trained tens of thousands of journalists working in and outside of major news outlets. These journalists are all disrupting the dominant filter by telling us about the many people and organizations out there in the world who are solving, not just causing, the problems that worry us.

If you check out any of the many stories on SJN’s Solutions Story Tracker, you’ll see that they energize rather than enervate, not because they cover up problems, but because they show us what we can do to solve them. And if decades of systems change work has taught me anything, it is this:

When dangling from a rock face, it doesn’t help to constantly look down
at how far you might fall, at how likely it is you will, or at who is to blame if you do. You’re much better off looking for toeholds and reaching out to people
already working together to reach the top.

That’s why I wrote Remaking the Space Between Us and why I support organizations like SJN. If these stories don’t help get your mojo back, I’ll refund your free subscription!

To paraphrase James Baldwin, changing the world doesn’t take numbers; it takes passion. We need to sustain our mojo to get through this election cycle and make something good out of whatever is on the other side.

Hang onto your mojo. Nurture it. And don’t ever let anyone, especially a skewed news filter, steal it.