Care: to deploy or protect

“There is no precedent for what it means to live with this level of grief. I don't think I can say that enough. I don't think I can grasp it enough for myself… I don't think human beings were meant to live with this much suffering, grief, or loss. And it's very hard. And there's no way to do it right, or correctly, or perfectly.”

This quote is taken from a 1991 sermon delivered by Jim Mitulski, a pastor at a San Francisco church serving the gay and queer community. The congregation had been living with or dying from AIDS for years by the time he shared this reflection from the pulpit.

It does feel as if there is no precedent for acute and overwhelming pain and grief. Were it true that this kind of suffering was so exceedingly rare? But generations, communities, and even individual families know better.

Media brings grief impossibly close that we might not otherwise even know about. We can't know how unnatural it is to witness so much grief from afar. Governments can unleash grief at scale, and the Trump Administration seems determined to do so. Iran is only the latest instance. What do we do in the face of so much suffering? How much do we let ourselves care? And what do we do?

Most of us play two roles in an information ecosystem: producers and consumers. A central question of my work now is how we can navigate both of these roles better. We can produce information more likely to be useful. And we can take in information that is less likely to be destructive and that we are more likely to do something with. The question is how.

Mitulski urged his congregation to accompany each other in their grief and to express the anger, frustration, or exhaustion they were feeling. He encouraged his church to work toward clarity about the things they could not change, like death, and the things they could change, “so that we can rise to fight this one more time, until it's over."

I would encourage you to listen to his sermon and to the podcast in which it's included as an episode, When We All Get to Heaven. It is the history of the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco and how this particular community navigated the AIDS crisis. It is a choice to turn toward something difficult. But it is presented with such care that it is impossible not to learn, reflect, laugh, and be inspired by this history.

What can we do with our feelings?

How do we not get overwhelmed by what is happening in the world? Even if we can navigate these emotions, why are we doing it? What exactly do we hope to achieve by taking in information about things happening around us and more distantly? It's not enough for news producers to seek only to “inform.” The same is true for us, as news consumers. It is unsatisfying at best and indulgent at worst to be “informed,” without any other objective.

I had a few failed experiments trying to figure out how individual values might align with news and information consumption in a way that wouldn't cause filter bubbles or polarization. But we are led by habits and needs as much as values, so a more workable framework might be to articulate what we want to use news and information for in our lives and try to stick to that. This would be a kind of mirror image of the essential functions of news framework, but for us to use as consumers.

I think this framework should be practical as much as it is aspirational, like eating healthy. The hope is that this rubric could be used to build information consumption habits that would keep us mostly healthy and happy.

Here is where I could use more input, so please let me know what you're thinking. We are at the brainstorming stage here. Then we can choose the functions we want to put more research and work into.

The long list of functions—the things we might want to be able to use information for—I've come up with thus far are:

• meeting individual needs
• entertainment
• education
• self-actualization
• responding to others needs
• resistance
• creating connection
• navigating systems
• personal efficacy
• sense-making

What else do you use information for that you would want to keep closer track of? I'd appreciate you letting me know.

Thank you

For dealing with recent changes to the newsletter. If you missed last week's issue because it landed in your spam, you can catch up here. If you'd like to talk to somebody you know about these ideas, go ahead and forward this to them.

Until next week, take care of yourself.

Know somebody else who needs respite from the attention economy or the doomscroll? Recommend they subscribe. Ideas on how to find, share, and understand the information we need to stay engaged without being overwhelmed. Dispatches about once a week, because that's plenty.