On Our Lives with the News
A new episode of On Being, with David Bornstein
A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead to correction. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein.
Krista spoke with David before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024.
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Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.
This conversation struck a deep chord—especially Krista’s observation that “our nervous system at a species level is dysregulated.” That line captures something I’ve been trying to map in my own work.
I recently wrote a piece called The Nervous System as a Map of This American Moment, drawing from over 25 years as a therapist, social worker, and practitioner supporting communities in crisis across the U.S. and globally. The piece explores what happens when the State’s nervous system—erratic, performative, and aggressive—floods everything beneath it, hijacking our capacity to settle, connect, and respond with care.
It asks: what if our collective dysregulation isn’t just a metaphor—but a literal map? And how might we begin to reclaim presence, co-regulation, and relational coherence as strategies for transformation?
Would love to be in conversation if it resonates. Thank you, Stephen
Here’s the piece:
https://open.substack.com/pub/yauguru/p/the-nervous-system-as-a-map-of-this?r=217mr3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I see glimmers of hope as we face this divided world. Conversations like these shows we don’t have to be bitter and stoop to 1st grade bully talk. Many thanks