Hey Communicators—Keep Your Problems to Yourself

Maybe you’ve seen this poem by Donna Ashworth, which has gone viral during the pandemic:

You’re not imagining it, nobody seems to want to talk right now.

Messages are brief and replies late.

Talk of catch ups on zoom are perpetually put on hold.

Group chats are no longer pinging all night long.

It’s not you.

It’s everyone.

We are spent.

We have nothing left to say.

We are tired of saying ‘I miss you’ and ‘I cant wait for this to end’.

So we mostly say nothing, put our heads down and get through each day.

You’re not imagining it.

This is a state of being like no other we have ever known because we are all going through it together but so very far apart.

Hang in there my friend.

When the mood strikes, send out all those messages and don’t feel you have to apologise for being quiet.

This is hard.

No one is judging.

*       *       *

I don’t know about you, but that poem rings true for me. 

The pandemic drones drearily on, day after day, week after week, month after month. Some days it’s hard to get up the motivation to do much of anything at all. 

All too true, you say. But what does that mean for communicators, and especially for those involved in communicating about hard issues like international relief and development or justice issues? 

At a time when everyone is stressed, the people you are trying to reach aren’t terribly interested in having you add to their problems. They have enough problems of their own, already. 

That truth was brought home to me recently in an interview with communications researcher and campaign adviser Anat Shenker-Osorio in Slate magazine.

In the article, titled The Theory That Explains How Senate Republicans Justify Acquitting Trump, Shenker-Osorio was asked what advice he would give progressives who are having such a hard time trying to get Americans to pay attention to the importance of the impeachment decision.

Or, as the interviewer Dahlia Lithwick put it, why are progressives “generally suck-ish” at things like this?

“If you look at progressive messaging, one hallmark of it across issues is that we like to begin with some permutation of, ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you,’” said Shenker-Osorio.

Shockingly, he said, people already have “99 problems and they don’t want ours. They’re generally not shopping for new things to worry about. They have plenty on their plates, especially right now.” 

That idea stopped me in my tracks. 

Intuitively, I know it to be true. Especially now, during the pandemic, when many are just barely getting by. I know I don’t need more problems, more bad news, more information about things going wrong.

So why would I think the people I am trying to communicate with need more problems, too? 

What I want are solutions. I want some good news. Tell me something that’s going right for a change. Something that makes me feel a bit better about this sorry old world. 

Don’t add to my list of problems, in other words. I've got enough already, thank-you very much.

For communicators—especially those involved in hard issues international relief and development or justice, climate change, natural disasters and the environment—this is a challenge.

We know only too well about all the things going wrong in the world. How can we communicate about those things without making people turn the page or leave the page?

People are looking for hope. For themselves and for others. Fortunately, we are also in the hope business, not just the problem business.

Maybe now is the time to focus on hope, even just little bits of it. Especially now when, as the poem says, we all are spent, just putting our heads down to get through each day.

Donna Ashworth’s poem, Ladies, Pass It On, is from her book To The Women: Words To Live By. Photo by Getty Images via the BBC.