Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash
Something has gone quietly wrong in the background of daily life. Institutions that people once leaned on, professionals they once believed, and even neighbors they once waved to have all started to feel a little less certain, a little less reliable. This isn't just a vibe. The numbers bear it out: Edelman's 2024 Trust Barometer found that fewer than half of people in most countries trust their governments, media, or major corporations to do the right thing. That's not a blip. That's a pattern.
What makes this moment unusual isn't that trust is low. Cynicism has always existed. What's different is how widespread the collapse is, cutting across institutions, borders, and generations simultaneously. When distrust becomes the default rather than the exception, it starts to reshape how societies function, how people make decisions, and what they're even willing to believe anymore.
We Were Promised Transparency and Got Overwhelmed Instead
The internet was supposed to fix the information problem. Before it, gatekeepers, whether editors, broadcasters, or publishers, controlled what reached the public. Once those gates came down, the assumption was that more access to information would naturally produce more informed citizens. That turned out to be optimistic.
What actually happened is that the collapse of gatekeeping didn't just let good information flow freely. It let everything flow freely. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report consistently finds that a growing share of people are actively avoiding news, not because they don't care, but because they feel overwhelmed, confused, and unsure what to trust. When you can't tell the difference between a credentialed expert and a confident amateur, the temptation is to distrust both.
This creates a peculiar paralysis. People don't necessarily stop consuming information; they stop believing it carries authority. The result is that trust migrates away from institutions and toward personal networks, toward whoever a person already knows and likes. That shift might feel reasonable at the individual level, but at scale it fragments shared reality in ways that make collective problem-solving genuinely harder.
Institutions Kept Failing at Exactly the Wrong Moments
The 2008 financial crisis didn't just wipe out savings. It demonstrated, very publicly, that the people running major financial systems either didn't understand what they were doing or didn't care about the consequences for ordinary people. Almost no senior executives faced criminal consequences. The institutions survived; the credibility didn't. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam had been documenting declining civic trust for years before the crisis, but events like that one accelerated the curve.
What followed in the next decade and a half was a string of visible institutional failures across sectors. Health agencies sent conflicting guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was partly an honest reflection of scientific uncertainty but was experienced by millions as evidence of incompetence or deception. Tech companies promised to protect user data and repeatedly didn't. Each incident, on its own, might have been survivable. Together, they've accumulated into something harder to shake.
The problem institutions face now is that trust, once lost, requires a sustained track record to rebuild, and sustained track records take time. Meanwhile, the incentives inside most large organizations still reward short-term outcomes and discourage the kind of public accountability that might eventually restore confidence. It's a structural trap, not just a communications failure.
Social Comparison Got Turbocharged
Humans have always measured themselves against those around them. It's a normal part of how we calibrate expectations and fairness. The trouble is that the reference group used to be local, meaning the people in your neighborhood, your profession, your town. Social media expanded that reference group to include the entire visible economy, and the visible economy, by definition, skews toward displays of success.
Research from the Pew Research Center has consistently found that higher social media use correlates with greater perceptions of inequality and lower life satisfaction among certain demographic groups. When someone is perpetually exposed to lifestyles they cannot access, the natural response is a sense of being left behind, which translates easily into resentment of whatever systems are supposed to have made things fair. Politicians, economists, and technocrats who insist the economy is performing well start to feel less like analysts and more like propagandists.
That resentment finds its way into elections, into conspiracy theories, into the kind of low-grade daily suspicion that makes civil life harder to maintain. It doesn't require bad actors to keep the cycle going. It mostly runs on its own, fueled by a media environment designed to maximize attention rather than foster understanding. Rebuilding trust at scale would require changing those incentives, and so far nobody with the power to do it has found a compelling reason to try.
