On news and social media sites, we’re fed a constant diet of stories about people behaving badly.

We can’t stop reading and scrolling because the headlines exploit our biological instinct to look for threats.

The more we read, the more we lose faith in one another, causing us to withdraw and isolate.

In reality, most everyone is good. Stepping back from media and into relationship lets us see this firsthand.

The other morning, I read about a pregnant pig I’ll call Sally. The New York Times column explained that Sally had been put in a pen so small she couldn’t do anything but stand and wait (no turning around, no taking a step). And now Congress was considering a new law that would not only keep this practice legal, but also override protections Massachusetts and California had put in place for pregnant pigs like Sally (Kristof, 2026). For a brief moment, it happened to me again: that sense that we as a people have lost our way.

Every day, stories like these find us. It’s a grave-faced reporter speaking in solemn tones, or a heartbreaking headline screaming across the top of the New York Times, or a Facebook post shoving catastrophe into our feed. They’re insisting: Somewhere out there (or maybe right in your own backyard), people are acting badly. And, watch out—they’re coming for you (or what you believe in)!

We’re shown a steady stream of people engaging in conflict, hate, and crime, and it fills us with fear, even rage, toward others. It erodes our trust and belief in one another… and we pull back, spending more and more of our lives alone. Today, more than one in five of us feels lonely all the time (or nearly all the time; Office of the Surgeon General, 2023).

Why are we being fed this constant diet of miserable stories about people? And once we understand why, the question that matters most is, What do we do now?

To answer Why?, we turn somewhere unexpected, to the humble potato chip. (Hint: It’s not nearly as humble as it seems.) When a company makes a potato chip, it engineers the chip itself, balancing salt and fat and crunch and a hundred other factors to make sure that, once we start,........

© Psychology Today