For the last couple of weeks, I have struggled to write, in large part because the tone of so many stories shared over the internet has been dire. Our human grief and empathy are saturated with stories of genocide, murder, extreme weather events, and the rising cost of living, and so on. It makes writing about beauty feel tone-deaf.

And yet, I have made a promise to myself—not to live in the tumult of global suffering. I allow myself to visit it, to remain informed, to grieve the avoidable loss of young life across the globe—but I do not live there.

This year has been about focusing on the incredible innovation of our time—from the cost of solar dropping 70% over the last decade, to advancements in geothermal, agrovoltaics, and wind power illustrating a future that is 100% renewable. To the building of biodiversity highways across American farmland, and the giant uptick we have seen in policy engagement and community organizing.

To the movement of collective mothering, and witnessing my own community come together in astonishing ways—re-weaving community ritual and advocating for local ecological resilience—has been deeply inspiring. My dear friends, now in their tenth year of running Drylands Agroecology Research, a non-profit focused on building food forests to retain more water in the arid desert, held their annual fundraiser—and that night we raised over $200k to combat the devastating loss they faced in the wake of federal funding cuts.

I’ve been focused on how to think about systems-level solutions and what local contributions to those changes can look like. This has included a personal pledge to read a handful of books from both the liberal and conservative traditions about our future economics and to attempt to answer the question for myself: what are the largest hurdles to having a more effective government?

Unfortunately, news articles are geared toward the salacious—trying to get us to react—because that reaction equals engagement, equals clicks, equals advertising dollars. So instead, I have turned to long-form articles and books written by renowned economists and great thinkers of our time, on both sides of the aisle, to develop my thinking and ability to problem-solve at a systems level. I’ll be sharing more about what this has brought to my life. I’ve started with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance and will be moving on to The Conservative Futurist by James Pethokoukis next—partly because being drawn into the explosive space of political commentary on the internet right now is only distracting us from our collective focus on how to problem-solve.

Part of the immense challenge of our time is the disconnect between the beauty we find in our personal lives and the abhorrent state of the world as portrayed online. How could I bask in a beautiful moment in my life when I feel the negative articles and aggressive reels stacking up on my device? Collectively, I believe it’s distracting and paralyzing us from being solutionists.

So if you would like to join me in maintaining vigilance around a solutionist mindset and collective problem-solving, I am thinking about starting an online forum that would be part book club, part meaning-making discourse—to help us all solution and invent our way to a more beautiful world.

With love,
Paige Faye