The World is Shifting... Don’t Lose Your Footing
The ground is shifting beneath everyone's feet, journalists, teachers, engineers, anyone whose profession is being reshaped by forces beyond our control. What keeps me grounded?
The handle of the silver cooking pot jutted out of the bathroom sink. That’s what triggered my flashback to fourth grade, back to years as a homeless child that I’d long forgotten. The pan. My mind suddenly zoomed out and I could see her, really see her, living in this Red Roof Inn.
I stepped back mentally, taking in the room. Plastic storage bins stacked to higher than my waist. Medication bottles colonizing every horizontal surface. A laundry basket wedged between hanging coats near the sink, clean clothes draped across the comforters in careful piles. She couldn’t have a storage unit, I thought to myself. Everything appeared to be here.
The pot helped my mind start to see through the pieces of her life. Her plug-in stove top hidden between boxes and medication containers on the counter, the white air fryer not too far away from it. Her kitchen. Where she made dinner for her son.
And then I heard the mouse. Maybe two. Unwelcome residents. Or perhaps we were the unwelcome ones—they seemed even more entrenched in the place than she was. They would certainly remain when she left. She jumped every time she heard them, and her jumps made my heart palpitate too. I could see her jumping while she tried to cook.
Neither Here Nor There
For six months, I’ve been oscillating. Re-anchoring myself in journalism like this, in motel rooms, food lines, and more. Bearing witness. Then there’s social media, trying to stretch myself into uncharted territory on online. Building a “personal brand” while producing the work that reminds people why they need news in the first place. Craving the freedom and security that comes with a following, while feeling disgusted by what we’ve all sacrificed to the attention economy. It’s a lot of back-and-forth of the mind.
I imagine people in almost every industry are dealing with some form of this. Finding ourselves in this new economy. What keeps me grounded is the work itself. And lately, watching the cautionary tales unfold.
Olivia Nuzzi—the journalist who became the story, allegedly involved with a presidential candidate she was covering (maybe two). In some perverse way, she’s winning. Attention, after all, is currency now. But she’s also a warning about what happens when you lose your footing in a shifting industry.
The question isn’t whether the ground is moving. It is. The question is what you root yourself with while it does.
Resisting the Algorithm
Earlier this year, I wrote about my TikTok experiment. I was deeply uncomfortable with the platform, but the data didn’t care about my comfort. One in five people now use it as a primary news source, a number that keeps rising. Facebook and Instagram claim even more news consumers. With AI killing website traffic, social media is the medium of the hour for publishers.
I started at zero in July. I’m approaching 10,000 followers now, outpacing my peers in national national and reaching audiences who’ve never heard of WAMU or NPR.
But I’m far from finding my footing. I constantly wade too deep into one style, one mode, and have to pull myself back because I could feel my ‘footing getting unsteady,’ forgetting what I was doing this all for as I obsessed over the algorithms.
For me, the most powerful recalibration is returning to places like the room in the Red Roof Inn. Rooms with pots in bathroom sinks and mice in the walls. They remind me why I gave news a shot in the first place, so that people like her—people who remind me of my own family at a particular point in history—could understand what was happening in the systems that governed their lives. Could hold the powerful accountable.
Who Signed Us Up For This?
And for me to reach that goal,...sometimes that means standing in the Red Roof Inn. Sometimes it means standing in rooms where people’s titles don’t fit on business cards. Sometimes it means being on TikTok. Sometimes it means doing what you have to do to build a following, to keep your job, to survive.
We’re living through an era of economic evolution that demands constant rebalancing. The ground is shifting beneath all our feet—journalists, teachers, doctors, technicians, politicians, anyone whose profession is being reshaped by technology, attention, and economics beyond our control. It’s like we are all suddenly part of something we didn’t want to sign up for.
Just don’t lose your footing. Know what you’re rooted to. Find the pot in the sink and use it as a moment to recalibrate and anchor yourself.
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