When was the last time you opened a news app and felt genuine excitement instead of dread? When did you last read a headline that made you think “wow, what a time to be alive” rather than “maybe it’s time to delete social media and move to a cabin in the woods”?
I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly when the news cycle shifted from occasionally uplifting to relentlessly exhausting, and I’m coming up empty. Somewhere along the way, we traded wonder for worry, and “fun-interesting” became an extinct species in our media ecosystem.
The Endless Spiral of Bad News
Pick any day of the week and scan the headlines. Climate disasters, political dysfunction, economic uncertainty, social unrest, international conflicts, public health crises. It’s an unending cascade of reasons to feel like we’re collectively circling the drain into some dystopian future that feels less like science fiction and more like tomorrow’s reality.
The news has always carried its share of tragedy and conflict—that’s nothing new. But there’s something different about our current moment. Every story seems to carry the weight of civilizational decline. Every crisis feels existential. Every problem appears unsolvable. The news doesn’t just inform us anymore; it actively depletes us.
This constant barrage creates a peculiar kind of mental exhaustion. It’s not just sadness or anger—it’s the specific fatigue that comes from having your sense of wonder systematically crushed by an endless feed of humanity’s failures and the planet’s deteriorating condition.
The Longing for Cosmic Perspective
What I wouldn’t give for some genuinely exciting news. Not the manufactured excitement of breaking news alerts about the latest political scandal or celebrity drama. I’m talking about the kind of news that expands your sense of what’s possible, that reminds you the universe is vast and full of mysteries yet to be solved.
Imagine waking up to headlines about the James Webb Space Telescope detecting clear evidence of an advanced civilization on a distant exoplanet. Not little green men landing on the White House lawn—that would probably just trigger another round of political chaos and conspiracy theories. But something subtler, more profound: the unmistakable signatures of technology, of intelligence, of life that has achieved something remarkable somewhere out there in the cosmos.
This would be both existentially significant and delightfully “fun-interesting.” It would reframe every petty human conflict in the context of a universe teeming with possibility. It would give us something to marvel at instead of despair over.
The Science of Wonder vs. Doom
There’s actual psychology behind why positive, wonder-inducing news feels so rare and precious. Our brains are wired to pay attention to threats—it kept our ancestors alive. Media companies know this, so they optimize for engagement by feeding us a steady diet of outrage, fear, and crisis. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re happy; it cares if you’re clicking.
But wonder serves a different psychological function. It expands our sense of what’s possible, connects us to something larger than our immediate concerns, and actually makes us more creative, more generous, more hopeful. When we encounter something truly awe-inspiring—whether it’s a scientific breakthrough, an act of extraordinary human kindness, or evidence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe—our problems don’t disappear, but they do get put in perspective.
What Would Fun-Interesting Look Like?
Real fun-interesting news wouldn’t just distract us from our problems—it would give us new ways of thinking about them. Consider what soft first contact would actually mean:
We’d suddenly have proof that intelligence can survive and thrive long enough to become detectable across interstellar distances. That would suggest civilization isn’t inevitably self-destructive. We’d know that whatever challenges we face—climate change, resource depletion, social coordination—are solvable problems, because someone, somewhere, has already solved them.
We’d have new questions to ask, new technologies to imagine, new possibilities to explore. The discovery wouldn’t solve our immediate problems, but it would transform our relationship to them. Instead of feeling like we’re managing decline, we’d know we’re part of an ongoing story of intelligence and exploration.
Beyond Space: Other Sources of Wonder
Of course, first contact isn’t the only kind of news that could restore our sense of wonder. Breakthrough medical discoveries that genuinely improve human life. Technological innovations that solve real problems without creating new ones. Environmental success stories that prove we can reverse damage we’ve done. Art, music, literature, or scientific insights that expand what we thought was possible.
The common thread isn’t the specific content—it’s the feeling these discoveries would provoke. That sense of “what a time to be alive” instead of “how did we get here?” That feeling of possibility opening up rather than closing down.
The Media Diet We Deserve
Maybe the problem isn’t just that fun-interesting things aren’t happening—maybe it’s that our information systems aren’t designed to highlight them when they do occur. A breakthrough in fusion energy gets buried beneath political scandals. Archaeological discoveries that rewrite human history get overshadowed by celebrity gossip. Scientific achievements that took decades to accomplish get a day of coverage before disappearing into the noise.
We’ve created a media environment that amplifies despair and minimizes wonder, that treats cynicism as sophistication and hope as naivety. No wonder so many of us want to lie in bed and twiddle our thumbs in despair.
Reclaiming Wonder
Perhaps the most radical act in our current moment is to actively seek out sources of genuine wonder. To follow space missions and scientific discoveries with the same attention we give to political drama. To celebrate human achievement alongside our criticism of human failure. To remember that the same species capable of such spectacular dysfunction is also capable of launching telescopes that can peer billions of years into the past.
We deserve news that occasionally makes us feel lucky to be alive during such an extraordinary time in cosmic history. We deserve to feel wonder alongside our worry, hope alongside our fear.
And who knows? Maybe somewhere out there, an alien civilization is using their version of the James Webb telescope to study our little blue planet, marveling at the strange and wonderful species that managed to build such incredible instruments while simultaneously posting angry comments about it online.
Now that would be both existential and fun-interesting.
