Maybe you’ve caught yourself doing it. You open your phone for a quick update and suddenly find yourself adrift in a current of bad news. An outrageous comment from a celebrity or elected official. A political food fight in Washington. An infuriating headline from two time zones away. Before long, you realize what’s happening – you close the app, but instead of feeling informed or illuminated, you’re drained. You’re upset.
It’s not breaking news to acknowledge that constant exposure to negative news online is linked to higher anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and even physical stress. In one survey, nearly three out of four people who reported habitual “doomscrolling” said it damaged their mental health. The endless feed, designed to keep us clicking, leaves us stuck in a swirl of problems far beyond our control.
This kind of outrage bait used to be easier to avoid. But lately, even local news outlets are serving it up. To meet engagement goals and fill the constant demand for content, many Nebraska-based media post a steady stream of national headlines – stories with little to no connection to our communities, but guaranteed to provoke clicks, shares, and hand-to-hand combat in the comment sections. Here’s a sampling of Facebook posts from Nebraska outlets over the weekend:
›› BBC director resigns after criticism of the broadcaster’s editing of a Trump speech
›› Government shutdown forces some overseas bases to stop paying workers
›› Trump wants Commanders’ new stadium to be named after him
›› Elon Musk poised to become world’s first trillionaire
›› Man who threw sandwich at federal agent found not guilty
None of these headlines has a ton to do with Nebraska, really. But each of them quietly erodes the civic life closest to us, because the more we scroll through far-off crises, the less we tend to invest in the people and places that actually shape our daily lives. And over time, that tradeoff changes how we see one another and how we practice democracy itself.
Democracy is strongest when it’s grounded in place. In other words, self-government doesn’t begin or end in Washington. It starts wherever people choose to work side by side – to solve problems, disagree honestly, care for one another, and make decisions about the future we share.
We know that it’s hard – and getting harder – to stay locally rooted. We live in a time when every local question gets flattened into a national binary: red or blue, for or against, us or them. Debates once about potholes, parks, or school boards are now automatically filtered through the lens of our national identity crisis.
Oh, big deal, you might think. I can tell the difference between national and local news. Of course, we can. But when everything becomes nationalized in this manner, our local community becomes more abstract. We stop seeing each other as neighbors and begin seeing one another as stand-ins for everything that frustrates or frightens us about our country.
If this mindset takes hold, there’s a certain appeal to the idea of a single leader, ideology, or institution promising to cut through the mess and “restore order.” This impulse thrives in moments of chaos and disconnection, and it feeds on the belief that democracy is too slow and deliberative to handle the complexity of modern life.
But the very nature of democracy – the need to talk and compromise – is what keeps it going. And the only way to sustain that kind of democratic patience is to practice it close to home, where human connection tempers ideology, and where our mutual dependence outweighs partisan contempt.
That’s why the work must stay local. When we invest our energy in our communities, we’re protecting our shared civic life against despair. We’re also reminding ourselves that power doesn’t only flow down from the top; it also flows outward and upward.
This is not an invitation to be myopic. Obviously, local action shouldn’t be seen as a retreat from national problems. But it should be understood that focusing locally builds the capacity to face those problems together. At times like these, it’s important to remember that the most enduring progress in American life has always begun with local experiments in courage and cooperation.
Decentralizing attention and authority helps us learn to trust our neighbors again. It’s easier to make space for disagreement that isn’t destructive. It’s more likely we remember that democracy is not something that they in Washington do for us; it’s something that we do with one another.
You can be part of the local pivot. Show up in your community. Find a meeting, a neighborhood cleanup, a local theater production, a youth sporting event, or another “Robust Space” where diverse perspectives can come together. If you’re the organizing type, you can form a reading group at your library or host a dinner that brings together people who would rarely sit at the same table. Every act of connection is an act of defiance against the forces that would rather see us divided and disoriented.
The national headlines will continue to rage – we can’t stop that with a snap of our fingers. But we can keep in mind that the real story of America is still being written block by block, county by county, conversation by conversation. We can remember that the work of self-government depends on attention — not the kind that doomscrolls for the latest disaster, but the type that looks up, looks around, and asks: What can we make better, right here and right now?
That’s where our attention belongs, because that’s where hope lives. And that’s where the foundation of our shared civic life must be rebuilt.
