What We as Individuals Can Do About Polarization
- Apr 17
- 5 min read
If you've been feeling a low-grade existential dread about the state of the world lately, same. The news is a lot. Social media is a lot. And somehow, all of that "out there" chaos has a way of showing up at the dinner table, in the group chat, and occasionally in the middle of a staff meeting when someone says something and suddenly the air goes weird.
Polarization isn't just a political problem anymore. It's a personal one. And most of us are feeling it.
The Gloria Gaynor Strategy
When faced with systems that feel this broken — Congress, cable news, the social media algorithm that seems specifically designed to make everyone angrier — our instinct is totally understandable: survive. We channel our inner Gloria Gaynor. We will survive. We go for long runs. We take up quilting. We do a digital detox. We create little pockets of peace and try to ride it out until things get better.
And honestly? Those things aren't bad. Rest and recovery matter but we can’t stop the conversation at self care.
You have more power than to just survive the chaos.
All of us do. And we don't have to sit around waiting for the Federal government, or the algorithms, or the 24-hour news cycle to fix itself before we do anything.
So what can we do?
Start by getting honest about your own biases.
This one isn't fun, but it's foundational. We all have blind spots — ways we see the world that feel like objective truth but are shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, the media we consume, and the people we spend time with.
Getting honest about those biases looks like noticing when your reaction to something is less about the facts and more about who said it. It looks like catching yourself assuming the worst about someone's motives before they've finished their sentence. It's recognizing that the news sources you trust and the ones you distrust probably both have something to do with what you were raised to believe. It's sitting with the uncomfortable question: what if I'm only getting part of the picture?
None of that requires beating yourself up. It just requires a willingness to think critically about your own perspective before you go defending it.
Then, try on another point of view — really.
Not in a "I'll steelman your argument so I can dismantle it more effectively" way. In a genuine way. Try to brainstorm the best version of someone else's argument. What values are underneath it? What are they trying to protect?
Try not to imagine what you would do in their situation. Instead, think about what emotions they might be feeling — and when you've felt something similar. Fear. Uncertainty. Like things that used to make sense don't anymore. Most of us have been there. That's the door.
Have a risky conversation with someone who votes, believes, lives, or loves differently than you do.
Okay yes, we fangirl on risky conversations more than your aunt does on Timothée Chalamet. We know. But we're not just being self-serving here — the statistics are genuinely on our side.
A meta-analysis of 515 studies from the University of Washington found that in 94% of the studies, having a conversation with someone from a different walk of life reduced prejudice.
It might not be pleasant to think of ourselves as having prejudice but, if you watch five minutes of a news source you tend to avoid, you know that prejudice is alive and well. It’s easier to think it’s just “them” with the prejudice issues but, do we really accept the notion that prejudice only lives on one side of the political spectrum?
One real conversation with a real person across some kind of divide does more than a thousand hot takes ever will.
The catch: none of this is one-and-done.
This is where a lot of well-intentioned efforts fall apart. We do a bias quiz, feel briefly humbled, and consider ourselves evolved. We have one good conversation with someone we disagree with, pat ourselves on the back, and go back to our usual bubble.
The problem is that our usual bubble is really good at its job. It's designed to feed our confirmation bias and reinforces what we already think. It surrounds us with people who nod along, content that shows us our existing worldview, and a steady stream of soundbites that the other side just doesn't get it. And over time — pretty quickly, even — whatever opened up in us during that one good conversation starts to close back up. We don't even notice it happening.
This is the reason workplace bias training gets such a bad rap. Companies do a single session and consider the problem handled. But it doesn't work that way — any more than going to the gym once gets you in shape, or seeing a therapist one time resolves everything you've been carrying for decades. The bubble is always pulling. This work has to be consistent to push back against it. It's not a destination. It's more like a practice.
What happens when we do this — consistently and intentionally?
We don't just become better versions of ourselves (though that happens too). We start to resist the us vs. them trap. We get to be like Dorothy stepping out of black-and-white Kansas into the technicolor of Oz — except in this version, we're realizing the world was always more complex and more colorful than the two-sided story we've been handed.
A 2018 Hidden Tribes study identifies 67% of Americans as part of the "Exhausted Majority" — Americans who don’t identify with the two dominant political extremes where all the noise lives.
The "us vs. them" story is, at its core, just that: a story. A narrative. One that doesn't reflect the reality of who most people are or what most people want.
When we do this work regularly, we stop cooperating with the parts of the system that are broken. We can't overhaul those systems overnight. But we don't have to keep feeding them either. We can keep the Gloria Gaynor “I will survive” strategy for those difficult moments but we don’t have to make it our life anthem.
We can do more than just survive the chaos.
You don't have to do it alone.
We know this is hard. The conversations that matter most are often the ones that feel the riskiest. The discomfort is real. The stakes feel high.
That's exactly why School for Risky Conversations exists — to give you a place to practice, to build these skills alongside other people who are trying to do the same thing, and to make the work a little less daunting and a little more doable.
Better conversations are possible. We're here to help you have them.
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