Something’s going on with Americans.
We are talking to each other less, but we’re seemingly more engaged in politics than ever before. More than one in 10 Americans don’t know any of their neighbors. We may be living in a “friendship recession” as 12% of adults report having no close friends and the number boasting 10 or more has tanked since 1990. Instead of engaging with others, we are checking our phones an average of once every five minutes.
Online, we’re seeing political posts everywhere from X to Instagram. But even back in 2020, two-thirds of Americans were already complaining they felt worn out by the news.
This presents an opportunity for conservatives, one we have often not taken.
Unless we’re complaining about Bad Bunny or celebrating Sydney Sweeney, conservatives have largely ceded the cultural conversation to the Left. General coverage of lifestyle, pop culture, and human interest content has become the purview of the liberals at magazines and websites that would prefer for each heartwarming story about a successful GoFundMe campaign for a cancer patient to end in a call for universal healthcare.
In recent years, we’ve seen a shift among conservatives toward more lifestyle content, with the rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Almost overnight, conservatives began talking about protein-maxxing and incorporating beef tallow into your beauty routine. But we are often not engaging with the broader culture unless there’s an easy Right vs. Left angle.
That’s a problem. A problem we want to solve here.
At Upstream, we don’t want to focus on stories because there is an immediate partisan takeaway. We want to engage with topics in hopes of reaching a better understanding of our fellow Americans and, ultimately, how to live our own lives well.
Conservatives and traditionally minded people seem to be swimming upstream when it comes to the rest of American society. It may be more difficult, but we wouldn’t sacrifice our values for a life of ease. Plus, if politics is downstream from culture, we should be paying more attention to what’s upstream.
The purpose of this section is to be conversational, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be controversial. The questions about how to live a good life have divided humans for thousands of years. Socrates wasn’t killed for nothing.
We want to engage in considered and thoughtful arguments about everything from what to buy at the grocery store and how to engage with that Oscar-nominated film everyone is talking about, to when to get your kid her first cellphone and where to find products from brands whose values you support. Here we ask the big and small questions, and we champion individual agency.
“Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being,” Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.”
When Americans are feeling alienated from each other and are turning for solace to political outrage or AI companionship, exploring how to live the good life is an imperative. Here, you will find real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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