How The Happy Broadcast avoids toxic positivity
“There is a sneakiness to bad news that goes back to our survival instinct.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
For when you’re done pretending to be a little frog on a lily pad. —Kate
Early in the pandemic, locked inside my Bushwick apartment, I decided to use Instagram Stories to post one piece of good Covid-related news every day. In March 2020, “good” was relative. But what started with “rate of hospitalizations slowing” and “China pledging humanitarian assistance” eventually became promising research on treatments, updates from vaccine trials, and finally, a year later, my selfie with a band-aid on my shoulder after getting vaccinated in the Javits Center.
Sitting here, I can click through the “good news” highlight on my profile and see a vastly different picture of 2020 than I would anywhere else—a year when, every day, people helped each other in various small ways until we dug our way out of the worst.
If I didn’t find that one piece of good news every day in the first year of the pandemic, I’m not sure I would have made it out of bed on a regular basis. The onslaught of bad news then—and now—is too much for me without a filter.
My problem is less with the news itself than how the internet forces us to receive it. I’ve written before about how social media exacerbates bad-news narratives, and Charlie Warzel recently wrote about how that contributes to feelings of stuck-ness. But we can do more than keep in mind that the internet is presenting a skewed reality—we can counteract it.
“I was diagnosed with Aspergers when I was a kid,” Mauro Gatti, illustrator and creator of The Happy Broadcast, tells me over the phone. “My whole life, I had to fight with social anxiety—but when I moved [to the U.S.], I was bombarded by the news, by these terrible headlines. And so that spiked my social anxiety because I was like, ‘Oh my God. I don't want to leave the house.’”
Gatti created The Happy Broadcast in 2018 to present the world with good, productive, legitimate news on a regular basis. As in, not human interest fluff, but actual solutions to the bad news that’s been plaguing us.
“There were plenty of Instagram profiles with these amazing videos of people and animals [that were] very positive. But it was almost like a quick shot of dopamine, not something that was lasting, because the problems that were giving me anxiety were structural problems of our society and the world,” Gatti says. “It was politics, it was the environment, it was climate change, it was animal rights. I couldn't find the good news that I wanted, so I was like, let me see if I can find it.”
The Happy Broadcast now lives on Instagram, TikTok, and an app. Other than the work that students at an engineering school in Africa do for the app, content for The Happiness Broadcast is done totally pro-bono, Gatti says. He does the illustrations on the side from his job as a creative director at Meta, and hasn’t missed a week since the project first launched.
In this interview for paid subscribers, Gatti and I talk about non-toxic positivity, how mainstream media is capitalizing on our animal instincts, and why good news never feels as important as the bad.