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The Heartwarming Trap: How Viral “Fixes” Mask Systemic Failures

Let’s Feel Good for a Moment

Attention: heartwarming story ahead – a teacher was recently awarded $1 million as “the best teacher in the world.” He earned that title by, amongst others, “teaching from a school kitchen, working with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, children with learning disabilities, and parents who lacked formal education...” (globalteacherprize.org).

What a feel-good moment! But hold up — the glow doesn’t stop there:

  • A local nonprofit raised $15,000 so one homeless man could live in a tiny house (operationchillout.org).

  • Strangers funded £3,000 to save Nelly, a Labrador puppy with a rare liver condition, through a GoFundMe campaign launched by a veterinary nurse who cared for her (BBC News).

  • A waitress who walked 14 miles daily got a free car from generous strangers (the-sun.com).

  • …I could keep listing similar stories, but you probably understand the pattern.

Wow, this is heartwarming. Good still happens in the world!

Is it?

The Pattern Beneath the Glow

The stories share a structural flaw: they obscure systemic failures by spotlighting individual rescue or promotion.
What do they actually cover up?

  • A flawed school system that cannot guarantee basic nutrition, access, or support to all children.

  • A housing system so dysfunctional that a viral campaign is a loophole to shelter. 

  • A media and public attention economy that elevates one dog’s surgery while ignoring real problems.

  • A labor and transportation system that leaves essential workers struggling daily, relying on random acts of generosity instead of fair support.

Instead of asking why the system produces such cases, we celebrate one isolated “solution.” Like Watzlawick’s key seeker who searches under the streetlight—not because he lost his key there, but because that’s where the light is—we fixate on what’s visible, not on what matters.

We’ve internalized an Instagram mentality: quick clicks, emotional payoffs, then swipe—on to the next feel-good highlight. What’s new here: we apply that reflex to real actions. We reward one case, feel better, and skip demanding structural fixes.

This goes beyond mere informational distortion—where media shows us what we want (funny pets, celebrity gossip). This is performative distortion: society behaves as if addressing a single case equals solving the problem. It’s not just looking through pink lenses—it’s acting through them: a pink action.

What’s Behind This Behaviour?

In my opinion, there are two reasons:

  • Humans have a tendency for instant gratification. Like the children in the marshmallow experiment, we prefer a patch on the knee over the effort it takes to fix the entire leg. (And no, this time it’s not our own leg; otherwise, the patch wouldn’t fool us.)

  • Humans care far less about those outside their immediate circles: be it the child who dyes the leather for our sneakers in Bangladesh, the Congolese cobalt miner powering our “clean” cars, or the delivery workers under exploitative contracts in our own cities.

Can we do something about it? Probably yes. Will it be easy? Probably not. But that’s for another post.

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