How to Build Hope in a Collapsing World
The Granite Goodness creator and host Andy DeMeo finds the New Hampshire doers--the builders, believers, the behind the scenes changemakers.
Globally, we’re seeing slumping economies, war zones, climate chaos, and market risk. Nationally, it’s layoffs, financial downgrade, unrest, environmental backsliding, and disease resurgence. In New Hampshire, the big picture is economic stagnation, housing unaffordability, transit deserts, and policy precariousness. The instinct here might be to dismiss good news at best as a distraction and irrelevant at the most in the face of global collapse or too quaint to matter locally.
And yet...
Andy DeMeo, a mission-first guy, less media outlet, more spiritual antidote for despair, still built Granite Goodness, the newsletter/podcast bundle that pumps out optimism across New England, curating stories of innovation, community impact, and incremental progress.
DeMeo’s full roster of interviews spans political heavyweights, civic leaders, and creative firebrand innovators. Senator Maggie Hassan; Corinne Benfield, Director of Stay Work Play NH; Laura Harper Lake and Sarah Wrightsman, founders of Creative Guts, a nonprofit and podcast celebrating New Hampshire’s artistic community; and Jenn Bakos, small-business owner and co-host of Tell Talks Northeast—just a small cast of the voices he’s spotlighted over the past year.
Additionally, DeMeo pumps out a monthly newsletter that curates real, measurable progress across the Granite State—including everything from watershed conservation to tiny home loans, trout donations, AI-driven language preservation, and veteran housing. Good News in New Hampshire is a slow-news antidote to outrage-fatigue, built for readers who still believe in shared progress, state-sized solutions, and the quiet power of people doing the work. The vibe is optimistic and practical.
“What I’m trying to do is give people more rational, passionate, belief-framed reasons to feel optimistic about the world and the state of our big problems in it,” says DeMeo. Documenting quiet victories to DeMeo’s mind is resistance. The people solving hard problems deserve to be seen. The communities making progress should be part of the record. And optimism, when earned and evidenced, is one of the most rational responses we have left.
“The world's an awful place, right?” DeMeo asks. “That’s thing number one. But, you know, the world’s better than it used to be in a lot of ways that you can measure. The proportion of children who don't make it to age five is much lower than in the year 1800, right? It was maybe one in five in the year 1800. And today, one in a hundred? So that's an example of an unambiguously good trajectory. That’s thing two. Then thing number three is that the world can be much better than it is now, right? So the world sucks—yes—but the world’s better than it used to be that you can measure. And the world can be better still. And those three things all exist at the same time. They don't contradict each other, those three statements. But I think that we get a lot of thing number one. That's where a lot of our attention and focus is on the suck. Everything sucks.”
I’m not Andy DeMeo—by no means—but I do try to be like him.
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“I’m not trying to be unbiased,” says DeMeo. “My bias is toward optimism.”
Facebook, as everyone well knows, is an attention weapon engineered to prioritize emotionally charged content because that’s what keeps you scrolling. Posts that evoke anger, fear, disgust, or righteous outrage outperform neutral or joyful posts by design. The algorithm doesn’t hate in a moral sense, but rewards engagement, and nothing engages like tribalism. A 2021 internal Facebook study showed that the platform’s engineers warned: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”1
The platform amplifies polarizing content not because Meta believes in fascism or communism or chaos, but because anger-charged posts maximize ad revenue through conflict theater.
Network news operates on a different but related economy: ratings and time constraints.
The first 20 minutes of the CBS evening news gets you violence, inflation, political circus, storms, fires, war. You get catastrophe at the top of the hour. The old “if it bleeds, it leads” logic still dominates because pain is legible, immediate, fast, cinematic. A burning house is easier to explain in 90 seconds than housing policy reform. And bad news is familiar, confirming our sense that the world is falling apart, which keeps us half-panicked, semi-glued, edge-lit and doom-tethered, thinking or believing that the world is on fire somehow prepares us. Network media keeps us in a state of suspended dread. Not activated enough to fight, and yet not calm enough to rest.
Then right before your brain clocks out for the weekend, CBS slaps on Steve Hartman, smiling earnestly in a flannel shirt, soft-focused, slow-paced, soundtracked with piano, telling you about a kid who made 900 sandwiches for unhoused veterans, or a dog who walks five miles to visit his dead owner’s grave. But this is engineered blam, emotional palliative care at the end of a weekly trauma cycle. Hartman is a simulacrum of goodness. A copy of a copy of a feeling. He performs packaged, flattened, and family-safe sincerity. He doesn’t interrogate systems. He never asks why the veteran is homeless. He doesn’t challenge the structures that create the pain; he patches over with a single good deed.
Steve Hartman is the Disneyland version of good news.
What DeMeo is doing is categorically different. Andy DeMeo is the county zoning board meeting, the recovery center, the slow drip of housing grants, and the kid not going to prison because someone built a teen center. He’s not giving you a break from real life. He’s reframing what real life actually is.
Good news doesn’t erase suffering. Good news creates space to see suffering without paralysis. DeMeo is fully aware of the structural mess: housing affordability, burnout, climate instability, systemic inequity, drug addiction, transit deserts, economic drag, and the near approaching budget shortfall, logging and paper industry collapses, aging population, mental health and crisis care. The list goes on, forming a tangled, growing, interconnected ecosystem of decline.
“Optimism is not about ignoring our problems, but about having a conviction that our problems are being worked on,” says DeMeo.
And if you zoom out, you’ll discover that just in the past decade, child marriage has been outlawed in dozens of countries.2 Extreme poverty rates have dropped.3 New Hampshire recently saw a decline in overdose deaths for the first time in years.4 All of that is real.
“Good things happen slowly,” says DeMeo. “You know, the result of people working quietly in an unsexy way for a long time.”
“What do I want people to do? Get away from the cynicism. There's a lot of brilliance, and compassion, and generosity, and innovation that's missing from that world. I’m not just vomiting good news stories of people and being sunny. It’s that human-oriented view of… are you engaging in a complex problem? Do you think we can make it better? That’s the conversation that I’ve tried to have with every person who’s come on the show.”
DeMeo offers good news as a praxis: as something you do, something you choose, even when the algorithm screams despair and the headlines bait collapse. Granite Goodness isn’t a vibe—it’s a blueprint. A call to notice, document, and support the slow, steady builders who keep showing up anyway. People like Deb Clough, Danielle Festa, Steve Papajohn. And people like Amanda Grappone, Charley Cummings, Steve Turner.
Honestly, the entire state of New Hampshire should be subscribed.
☕ Coffee With Steve is on the Road to 1,500
Current count: 638
Goal: 1,500 by Labor Day (Sept 1)
Days left: 74
Humans to go: 862
Daily pace: ~12 people
Just real people who care about housing, story, and the haunted infrastructure of small-town America.
Thanks so much for this piece Steve! Means a lot. Wonderful chatting with you.