The other day, I was doing an interview for one of the kabillion case studies I signed up for this year* and the person I was interviewing, who struck me as a lovely, thoughtful person, used a term called “reflective capacity.” She did not explicitly define the term for me, but I understood it to mean: the capacity we as human beings have to reflect and make sense of complicated, often heartbreaking events and happenings in our lives.
This term, reflective capacity, hit in all sorts of different ways. Here are some of the things I thought about after hearing that term:
The things that drain my own reflective capacity: Around the time when the iPhone was still in its third or fourth iteration, when the onslaught of digital content and commentary was really ramping up, I gulped down any and all content that was now available to me online, oblivious to the possible consequence of ill side-effects. I read all the mommy-blogs; researched obscure British food items that had always puzzled me in the children’s literature I read; searched out very old, out-of-print books that I had first acquired through the Scholastic book clubs that had somehow gone missing from my collection.
I do remember wondering, during this period, whether the deluge of online content had its dark side; I also remember inventing a term to describe how I was starting to feel, which was “content-fried.” Like being burned out at work, but on too much content.
The Trump presidency is when all of this content consumption started to make me feel really, really bad. It goes without saying, for at least half of the people living in this country, that he and his fellow MAGA Republicans are corrupt, terrible people, completely useless in all government and leadership things, without any sense of decency or justice. One thing they are particularly good at, though, is creating lots and lots of chaos. They did, and continue to do, so many bad things, they are flooding our content channels with shit. We are choking on their shit.
And then: there’s the media arms race, which is all about who can put out the most content and commentary on a particular current event. It’s gone so far beyond straightforwardly reporting what actually happened; it is now about reporting what happened minute-by-minute, in excruciating detail, and then hiring a metric ton of people – some qualified, some not – to opine on what happened. The recent week of news about the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli citizens, and the Israeli government’s retaliation against Gaza residents, is a very clear example of how much we are being tested, in terms of our sanity. There just aren’t that many people who are well-versed in the history of Israel and the Middle East. And even those of us who possess some knowledge of the history and of current geopolitical dynamics shaping the region: well, I did not find my tiny bit of knowledge to be all that helpful in processing the horrifying deaths of babies and teenagers and other civilians.
In other words, the horror and complexity of the news, and the ways in which our online channels of discourse turn the news into vast echo chambers in which the horrors and atrocities begin playing on a loop in my head, are without question diminishing my own reflective capacity. While there is some part of me that feels obligated and sometimes compelled to stay informed of the latest developments, there is another part of me that keeps on reaching out for the “off” switch. Because I can feel myself losing the capacity to reflect and make sense of what’s happening; then I can’t figure out how to feel about it; then I end up feeling all of the things; then I get paralyzed about what to say and how to act.
Reflective capacity and how it relates to my work: For those of us who are in the business of communicating for causes sorely deserving of more action, investment, and support, it is a tough business these days. It is tough to put out content about wonderful organizations doing wonderful things when you know that everyone’s swimming in rivers of horrible, horrible news, especially news about bad people doing bad things. When I write a piece for dissemination, I sometimes get asked to also help with the dissemination—to write promotional email copy, for example, or write the copy for a landing page on a website. And when I write this copy, I do so with the core belief that what’s to be shared has value—value to certain audiences, value about what was learned and what impact might result. At the same time, I can’t write the copy without thinking about it entering the vortex of terrible, terrible news we’re in.
I will share something that gives me hope, however. Often, the case studies and pieces I write are about people coming together to learn and do something meaningful, as a collective, as a community—whether it’s progress on education, affordable housing, racial justice, the work that good people are doing has value in and of itself. But I think that getting audiences to read these pieces doesn’t have to happen immediately. I think that the pieces can be read right away by those who have the capacity to do so, and that for others who are struggling right now to process and absorb events in their lives and in the world, they can either put the piece away for later or stumble across it, years later. In other words, the types of things I write are helpful for the long-term reflective capacity we all need to look back and remember the way things were, so we can strengthen our sense of direction about where we need to go. It doesn’t need to impinge on people’s reflective capacity right now.
Things that restore my reflective capacity: I remember the early days when people were very worried about the self-censorship that people were exercising online—that they were choosing only to see what they wanted to see, which was then contributing to the increased polarization and fragmentation of our public discourse. And then people started to worry about the Tech Overlords controlling our filter bubbles—that we were only seeing what the algorithm allowed us to see, based on what sponsored content we clicked on or didn’t, based on who was paying to get the greatest visibility online.
These issues—I’ve oversimplified greatly—represent very real concerns for how informed we are, and how we behave online, as a result. I want to make an argument, however, that it is possible to choose filters through which we can understand what’s happening in the world around us without damaging our reflective capacity. In other words, the choice is not binary: it’s not, consume the firehose of content and commentary that’s coming at us from multiple platforms and channels versus shut things off completely and go back into our hidey-holes. There are other ways.
Two filtering mechanisms that have come to matter to me, greatly: first, there is Heather Cox Richardson, the political science professor and scholar who has achieved fame through her Substack daily letter, in which she talks about current events and then finds parallels to similar developments or events from history (there are also a few instances in which she has been unable to find parallels). She writes about unbelievable, hard-to-process events in the cleanest, most elegantly understated prose imaginable–—even when she is stating her own disbelief about current events happening, like the extraordinary shitshow of a leadership struggle that is taking place in the U.S. House of Representatives, she does so in measured, thoughtful language. Because she is so non-histrionic, so well-informed, so balanced, her words feel like a balm to my soul. They help remind me that I, too, can make sense of the world–I just need a little bit of help when my reflective capacity is low.
Two: This may come out of left field, I know, but I have really come to love the podcast from Busy Phillips and her former co-producing partner for her talk show, Caissie St.Onge. Busy Phillips is an actor who achieved early fame through shows like Freaks and Geeks and Dawson’s Creek, and later in life, she became an author and a staunch activist, especially for reproductive rights. Caissie is a television writer and producer and I cannot tell you how much I love her calm, wise, sweet voice. Both have the immense talent of being able to look at a very complicated set of issues from many different angles, without sounding wishy-washy or both-sidesy about it. Last week’s episode opened with a discussion of the Israel/Hamas conflict and I felt so comforted, just listening to them. I felt like they were exactly like me: two reasonably well-informed women, not subject-matter experts by any means, just women who work hard to stay present and maintain a compassionate frame of mind, while still showing some healthy righteous anger every once in a while, too.
And three: last but not least, I really do draw strength and inspiration from talking with my family. I don’t know what combination of luck, genes, and parenting style resulted in my husband and I producing such thoughtful, lovely, well-informed kids, but I am grateful that I CAN talk to them about what’s happening in the world and walk away feeling better as a result.
That’s it. That’s all I got, at the moment, as I fight to keep my head above water and not give in to the darkness or the despair of processing today’s news. I hope you, too, can find the things that restore your reflective capacity, so you can continue to do good things for yourself and for others.
*Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but it’s certainly been a lot!
Minna Jung Consulting 