Designing A More Prospective News Relationship

Nov 14

If you’re like me, the first thing you do most mornings is negotiate with the news.

Not the capital-N News as an institution, but the smaller, more insidious version which lives inside my phone. The one which waits for me between sleep and coffee, offering up overnight disasters, bad-faith hot takes, and algorithmic outrage as a kind of psychic breakfast buffet.

Most days, I lose the negotiation. Thumb to screen. Swipe. Scroll. Dread. Duty. Dopamine.

But lately, I’ve been trying to treat this differently. Not as a character flaw in my own willpower. Not as a referendum on journalism. But as a life design problem. A product problem. The tools which have helped me most are optimism and something positive psychology calls prospection.

Prospection is the very human ability to mentally represent and evaluate possible futures. Planning, predicting, daydreaming, rehearsing what might happen next. In many ways it’s the positive flip side of anxiety. Positive psychology has been quietly reframing a big part of the field around this idea. We’re not just pushed around by our past, we’re pulled forward by our imagined futures.

It’s a helpful lens for reframing our relationship with the news, because so many modern news environments are engineered to do the opposite. They collapse everything into an anxious perpetual present. Live feeds, live blogs, live fact-checks. Push alerts which treat every incremental development as equally urgent. Social feeds remixing truth, opinion, and AI-generated nonsense into a single undifferentiated scroll.

It’s no wonder news fatigue has become a clinical phrase. Psychologists now document increased stress, anxiety, sleep problems, and a sense of helplessness closely tied to media saturation. Global surveys show a sharp rise in people who actively avoid the news altogether. Up from 29% in 2017 to around 40% today, with even higher rates especially in the US and UK.

When it all feels too much, tuning out is rational self-defense. But total avoidance comes at a cost. Civic disengagement, lost situational awareness, and a creeping guilt that you’re not paying attention while important things are happening in the world. More JOMO (the joy of missing out) than FOMO I suppose.

Prospection, and its key tactic of optimism offers a more viable and healthier third path between doomscrolling and disappearing. In both product work and positive psychology, optimism isn’t about pretending everything is fine. It’s the default working assumption that better is possible if we’re willing to do the work, learn in public, and iterate. It’s stubbornness on behalf of the future.

When you combine that with prospection, you get a very practical question. Given the future I want to help build, what is a sane, sustainable way to be informed today?

That’s a very different question than the one our phones usually ask us, which is closer to What will keep you here for the next 47 minutes?

Optimistic prospection doesn’t deny that AI misinformation is rampant, that social platforms have shredded context and credibility, or that news is increasingly weaponized against journalists and audiences alike. It simply refuses to let those facts be the only ones in the room.

Instead, it asks, Which futures am I orienting toward? What information helps me move even slightly toward them? How can I protect my attention and nervous system while I do that?

The moment you ask those questions, you stop being a passive recipient of the news and start being its product manager. So how might we design a more prospective relationship with the news?

Think of your relationship with the news as a product you own. The KPI is not the quantitative minutes spent or articles read. It’s the qualitative Do I feel both informed and humane? Am I better able to act in an informed way in line with my values?

Here’s some ideas for how prospection and optimism might help you redesign that product.

Prospection, but also anxiety, are about time. You’re constantly rehearsing tomorrow, next week, next year. So give your future self a gift and contain the present. Pick 2–3 intentional windows a day for news (for example: 10 minutes mid-morning, 10 minutes early evening). Outside those windows, turn off non-critical news notifications. Take a lesson from Mel Robbins and let the world be slightly delayed.

Research on news fatigue suggests that guardrails like this can prevent I check constantly from sliding into I avoid completely, which is where both mental health and civic engagement really suffer. You’re not ignoring the world. You’re refusing to let the worst version of the feed own your health’s daily rhythm.

Also think about how to anchor yourself to futures, not just headlines. Before you open your news app of choice, ask a prospective question. What future am I checking on?

That might be the future of your local community. The future of democracy. The future of climate resilience. The future of a specific group you care about.

Then choose sources and stories which actually map to those futures. Deep explainers, local reporting, solutions-oriented journalism. Rather than whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you angry and engaged.

Studies on such selective engagement suggest deliberately choosing formats and topics you can act upon (rather than just react to) is a healthier, more sustainable coping strategy than the brute force of blanket avoidance.

Instead of a chaotic infinity scroll, curate a tiny stack which serves your prospective self. One or two explainer newsletters which summarise complex stories with context. One local outlet that keeps you tethered to where you actually live. One long-form source (podcast, magazine, or show) which helps you think in months and years, not hours.

Many newsrooms are experimenting with precisely this mix. Concise explainers, curated newsletters, and transparent how we reported this boxes, to meet audiences where they are and rebuild trust in an era where weaponized and politicized fake news runs rampant.

Our job is to subscribe intentionally, then ruthlessly unsubscribe when something consistently leaves us more panicked than prepared. Similarly, in a world where any headline, video, or image might be synthetic, prospection means building important verification habits into your news product.

If a story spikes your heart rate, pause and cross-check with at least one high-trust outlet or, when possible, an original document (court filing, scientific paper, government report). Be suspicious of perfectly on-brand outrage which flatters your existing beliefs. That’s a pattern AI-assisted misinformation is designed to exploit. When using AI tools such as ChatGPT for news-adjacent questions, treat the output as a thinking partner, not a source of record. You’re still the editor of what you consume.

Optimism here is not AI will fix this. It’s humans can learn new verification muscles quickly, and tools can support them if we’re intentional.

Conversely, pure good-news fluff won’t fix a broken information ecosystem either of course, but solution-focused stories can recalibrate your sense of what’s possible.

Research on media overload shows that what wears us down isn’t just the volume of bad news. It’s the sense of helplessness which comes with it. Stories about concrete progress, policy wins, community responses, scientific breakthroughs all restore a basic ingredient of hope. People like me can still do things that matter.

So make this a design constraint. For every 30 minutes of heavy, threat-focused news in a week, I’ll also seek out at least one story about people fixing something. Not as a dopamine palate cleanser, but as an input into my prospective map of what the future could look like if we simply keep trying.

Prospection is at its best when it doesn’t stop at imagination. It moves into pathways and agency. When a story really gets under your skin, instead of spiraling in the feed, ask What is one small thing I can do in the next 48 hours that is even loosely connected to this?

That might be donating to a trusted organization, or calling a representative. Having a difficult but necessary conversation with someone in your life. Attending a local meeting. Learning more from a long-form book instead of the tenth online hot take.

Our action doesn’t have to fix the problem. It just has to move us from spectator to participant. That shift is the heart of optimistic prospection.

We live inside an information system which profits from our own lack of personal regulation. That’s not a conspiracy, it’s an incentive structure. Left to its own devices, it will happily trade our long-term mental health for one more executive time spent chart going up and to the right. Prospection gives you a way to quietly opt-out of that default without opting-out of the world.

Instead of asking What happened now? you start asking which futures do I care about? Which information really helps me navigate toward them? How do I steward my attention so I can stay in this for the long haul?

Optimism, in this frame, isn’t about believing the world’s news will suddenly get nicer, social platforms will see the light and find their integrity, or AI will magically self-regulate. They won’t. It’s about believing we still have agency in how we see, sort, and respond to the world.

That our relationship with the news can be redesigned. That our nervous system is worth protecting. That even on the worst days, there is a version of you, a few years from now, who is still informed, still engaged, and still capable of hope. Not because the feed got kinder, but because you did.