There Is No Shame in Disenchantment

Lately, I’ve noticed a change in how people talk about the news. Not anger. Not outrage. Something quieter. A sentence that trails off rather than lands. I don’t read the news anymore. At least, not like I used to. Sometimes it’s said with a shrug. Sometimes with guilt. Often with relief.

Words: Penny Fourie

I recognise the impulse, even though disengagement is not an option for me.I don’t encounter South Africa’s failu es through headlines alone. My work takes me into audit reports that don’t reconcile, forensic investigations that circle the same conclusions without consequence, leaked documents that arrive cautiously, and whistleblower accounts weighted with fear and calculation.

I spend days verifying claims, cross-checking figures, confirming timelines, and working out what can be proven rather than what merely feels true.

I unravel these stories for a living. Still, there are days when the accumulation feels heavy. Not because the work doesn’t matter, but because so much of it lands without effect.

That is the quiet context in which we are approaching another election cycle.

The system feels broken. That much seems settled. What is no longer settled is whether staying engaged still matters.

Switching off can feel like relief. Muting the noise. Stepping out of the churn. Protecting your mental space from a steady diet of failure and delay. I understand the appeal. But disengagement carries a cost, even when it feels rational.

As a journalist, I sit uncomfortably with that question.I still believe in exposing failure. I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t. But I’ve learned that exposure on its own doesn’t carry the weight it once did. When nothing follows, when no one is held to account, revelation begins to feel circular. Over time, the work has shifted for me. It is less about naming what has gone wrong and more about understanding how decisions are made, where power actually sits, and where it has, on occasion, been forced to bend. Against that backdrop, I’ve been paying close attention to how political movements elsewhere are trying to reach audiences who have already tuned out.

Recently, the UK Green Party released a campaign video that deliberately breaks with conventional political messaging. It isn’t polished. It isn’t dense with policy. It is raw, emotionally direct, and unembarrassed about its anger. The tone assumes scepticism. It assumes exhaustion. It speaks to people who feel spoken over, managed, or ignored by institutions that no longer seem responsive.

What struck me was not the ideology itself, but the strategy. The video does not assume an attentive audience. It does not presume trust. It starts from the premise that large parts of the electorate are no longer listening by default. Engagement, it suggests, has to be earned.

South Africa is not the UK. Our political terrain is more fragmented, more unequal, more burdened by history. Imported rhetoric rarely lands cleanly here. But the underlying insight travels. People are not disengaging because they are ignorant. They are disengaging because they feel trapped inside systems that absorb pressure without reforming.

This is what I think of as the doom loop. Failure is exposed. Outrage follows. Nothing happens. Attention wanes. The next failure lands in a quieter room, perhaps as a headline scrolled past on a phone at the end of a long day.Over time, the loop becomes self-reinforcing. Journalism documents decline. Audiences disengage. Institutions face less pressure. The space for accountability shrinks further.

Breaking that loop doesn’t mean pretending things are better than they are. It requires something more difficult. Showing how consequence can still follow visibility. This is also what many people who avoid reading the news are still quietly looking for. Not cheerfulness. Not spin. But evidence that change is possible. Clear explanations of how it happens. Proof that effort connects, however imperfectly, to outcome.

Optimism, in this sense, is not denial. It is earned through evidence.

One of the clearest examples of this comes from outside politics altogether.

In the Brazilian Amazon, one of the most significant factors in reducing deforestation during parts of the past two decades was not a sweeping new law or a single campaign. It was the widespread availability of satellite data. Once deforestation could be seen in near real time, ignorance was no longer plausible. The facts were visible, public, and verifiable. The technology itself wasn’t the solution. It just made it harder to look away. That transparency altered incentives. It enabled enforcement where political will existed and created pressure where it did not. By grounding debate in observable fact, it narrowed the space for denial.

The lesson extends beyond forests.

Many systems do not fail because of a lack of passion or intelligence. They fail because of fatigue, fragmentation, and eroded trust. Addressing those problems requires more than better messaging. It requires designing work and telling stories in ways that allow people to stay engaged without burning out, to learn from failure without shame, and to see how their efforts connect to outcomes that matter.

For journalism, that has meant discipline.

Not every story is for everyone. Not every investigation needs to chase maximum reach. A more honest starting point is clarity about where consequence is possible. Whether that lies with a regulator who can act, a court that can compel compliance, a parliamentary committee that can summon officials, a municipal council facing public scrutiny, or voters deciding whether participation still feels worth it. Different audiences require different forms of evidence and different kinds of narrative.

Relevance matters more than virality. This is where disengagement begins to carry political weight. As public systems weaken, those with resources start to find ways around them. They buy reliability where the state no longer provides it. Gated living, private security, backup power, water that runs, roads that are maintained. It is not indifference so much as an attempt to make daily life manageable. Those without those options remain exposed.

The public sphere narrows, but power does not. It becomes less visible, less contested, and harder to reach. I don’t think the answer is constant outrage. I also don’t think the answer is withdrawal. I am less certain about what comes next, except that it has to sit somewhere between the two. Something that allows people to stay engaged without being consumed by it.

We are not uninformed. We are exhausted.

And until institutions, political movements, and journalism itself reckon honestly with that exhaustion, the question will remain unresolved at the centre of our public life. Does staying engaged still matter?

I don’t pretend this resolves the tension I’ve been describing. It doesn’t. But it does reflect where I am right now: unwilling to retreat completely, and equally unwilling to pretend that exhaustion isn’t real.