Giving Fix the News the last word

December 30, 2025

When something goes wrong in space, the public watches the visual feed: explosions, debris, visceral evidence of danger. Mission control watches everything else: oxygen levels, trajectory drift, the systems that determine whether the crisis is survivable. This year felt like being stuck in that room. On the screen, disaster: 56 conflicts raged, the most since the Second World War. Gaza remained a graveyard, satellite imagery showed blood in the rivers of Sudan, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine approached its fourth anniversary.

According to Reuters four in ten people now avoid the news, and after a year like this, who can blame them? What made 2025 exceptional wasn’t any individual atrocity but their sheer velocity, the sense that they arrived bullet-like, leaving no room to recover. Wildfires in Los Angeles, Zelensky’s humiliation in the White House, a Swiss village buried by mud and ice, antisemitic terror attacks in Manchester and Sydney. Countries slashed aid and stockpiled missiles. The rich got tax breaks and stock market highs, everyone else got expensive groceries and crippling mortgages.

Beneath this ran a deeper anxiety: that digital technology has done permanent damage, replacing our shared stories with fragments of conspiracy and grievance. Oxford’s word of the year in 2024 was “brain rot.” This year, it was “rage bait.” And while we all scrolled, the coral reefs kept bleaching. Glaciers lost ice at record rates. Bulldozers kept flattening forests. Ships kept bottom-trawling. In Texas, the Guadalupe River rose overnight and drowned children in their beds. The planet remained on track for temperatures that will reshape continents, yet the political will to change course, incredibly, went backward.

I watched it all, spending hundreds of hours mainlining all the corruption and cruelty until the scale stopped registering. I can’t remember ever feeling more angry. But each week, I also monitored the consoles at the back of the room: WHO technical reports, Spanish-language newspapers, Chinese state media, energy analysts on LinkedIn, a website devoted to a guru of transcendental meditation that publishes good news because, it claims, the media is a mirror of collective consciousness.

We published 38 editions of our newsletter this year, featuring 1,932 stories from 170 countries, and what we found was that while the headlines kept insisting on collapse, the data – child mortality rates, vaccination coverage, emissions intensity, deforestation curves – kept showing stubborn progress. While everyone was staring in horror at the flames outside the capsule, we were looking at telemetry that said there was more than enough oxygen to make it home.

This gap, between the world as it is and how we’re told to see it, comes down to a choice about what we do with our attention. Mission control doesn’t ignore danger. It’s acknowledged, monitored, taken seriously. But knowing which emergencies require immediate action means you need to watch all the instruments, not just the alarms. That’s the difference between panic and an effective response.

Look, I don’t want to sound like some bloodless bureaucrat here. You can’t fact-check people out of a feeling. For hundreds of millions, the world feels like a terrible place right now. If you’re a democracy activist languishing in a Hong Kong jail or a single mother in New Jersey struggling to pay the rent or a cobalt miner risking your life in the DRC, no amount of statistics or lines going up on a graph is going to matter.

What I do think is that the collapse merchants have gotten carried away. There’s an entire genre out there now about living in the worst timeline, about how fascism is inevitable and the kids are doomed. Almost all of it is created by people cosplaying the apocalypse from positions of extraordinary comfort. They’re being lazy. It’s easier to predict the end of the world than to wrestle with the truth, which is that some things are scary, some things are going great, and most of it is just really complicated. [emphasis Dana’s]

But nuance doesn’t sell. Pessimism does. It sounds smarter, more sophisticated, proof that you’re a clear-eyed realist. Plus, doom is dramatically satisfying in ways that incremental progress never can be. You get to use words like atrocity, crippling and conspiracy. You get to be the prophet who saw it coming, brave enough to tell hard truths while collecting your advance and planning your next speaking tour. —Angus Hervey

Why I subscribe to Fix the News. When you get tired of doomscrolling, you should, too.