On July 16, 2026, Murmuration brought together leaders, organizers, creators, and journalists at The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice for America 251 & Beyond, a forward-looking conversation about the kind of America we want to build over the next 250 years. Across seven lightning talks exploring belonging, community, joy, identity, agency, nation, and hope, speakers Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer Sarah Stamper, Alex Johnston, Amanda Litman, Cord Jefferson, Astead Herndon, Daria Dawson, Murad Awawdeh, and Jason Green offered distinct perspectives on the people, relationships, and communities that shape American civic life. Together, their reflections challenged us to look beyond the current moment and imagine what becomes possible when we invest in the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
About Cord Jefferson
Cord Jefferson is an Oscar-winning writer and director, known for his sharp, socially conscious storytelling. He's written for acclaimed series like Watchmen, The Good Place, Master of None and Succession. His directorial debut, American Fiction, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, alongside nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Score.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2005, at the age of 82, Kurt Vonnegut gave an interview in which he described the conversation he had with his wife on the occasion of telling her that he was going out to buy a single envelope at the post office. "Well, you're not a poor man," he quoted his wife Jill as saying, "Why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?" [Vonnegut said,] “So I pretend not to hear and go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people and see some great-looking babes, and a fire engine goes by, and I give them the thumbs up, and I ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And I don't know. The moral of the story is we're here on earth to fart around. And of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is that we are dancing animals.”
This is where I would like to begin my discussion on how to recapture joy and life, a mission that I believe begins with the destruction of the internet as we have come to know it.
If we look at the simple act of going to buy an envelope as perhaps the most basic way to foster community and thereby find meaning and joy in life, we have to consider how many of us have willingly deprived ourselves of moments of joy in favor of convenience.
For instance, how many of us have willingly opted to have everything we purchase shipped to our front door instead of going out into the world and engaging with human beings to buy it? How many of us have started opting to see new movies on big flat screens in our living rooms instead of venturing to a movie theater to have a communal experience? Even more recently, how many of us have started taking Waymos instead of Ubers, allowing us to eliminate even yet another human being from our normal courses of life?
Post-COVID, Americans say they're willing to take salary cuts of four to 10 percent if it means they're allowed to work from home. Only speaking to their colleagues via Zoom or email, or preferably not at all.
And yet recent studies have shown that people working from home repeatedly report feeling more isolated, more lonely, and more anxious than the people who go into the office. I am old enough to remember when the Internet was sold to us as a revolutionary tool that would bring us closer together as human beings, allowing us to interact in real time with all different kinds of people from around the world. Instead, the algorithms have intentionally shrunken our perspectives, turning our social media feeds into echo chambers where all of our beliefs are perpetually parroted back to us from people we already know and agree with.
This, of course, leads to dangerous, dangerous digital hovels, the kinds where angry, lonely young men start to augment one another's embitterment.
And we have all seen too many times the peroxisms of violence these kinds of communities can foment.
The good news is that the Murmuration survey of Americans on joy found that most Americans report being happy. And the things that make us happier are still relatively straightforward: spending time with family and friends, engaging in personal interests, creativity, and helping others. All of these activities are still available to us. They're just being obscured by the technology we have allowed to infect every facet of modern life.
The good news is that Gen Z is getting back into the world in a very real way.
The Zoomers are the demographic most likely to attend live music events, and the generation most likely to want to see movies and theaters. Meanwhile, people aged 55 to 64 are increasingly the group most likely to sign up for social media accounts. In my opinion, this exodus by young people from social media is one of the reasons the tech oligarchs have pivoted to trying to make AI ubiquitous.
They are afraid that they are afraid that they're losing the stranglehold on our attention, and they cannot let that happen. America's strength from the very beginning has been its diversity.
But that diversity has also been what confounds us the most.
Our pluralism means that we have never been able to recognize an American based on sight alone.
And the more we intentionally atomize our communities, confining ourselves to our homes, our algorithms and our self-driving taxis, the more we lose touch with our fellow Americans.
Our search for meaning is not a journey we can embark on alone. In order to find it, we need to find our way back to each other first. What this requires of us is a willingness to increase the friction in our lives. Going to a grocery store where I live in L.A. means fighting traffic and circling the lot for parking. It means getting turned around in the supermarket and not knowing on what aisle they keep the peanut butter.
But it can also mean bumping into a colleague I haven't seen in a while and having him invite me to come see a cut of his new movie or chatting with a local advocate working to add homelessness in our neighborhood or meeting a teenage softball player selling candy to fund her trip to a tournament in Texas. All of which has happened to me at my neighborhood Whole Foods in the past few months. Sure, ordering all my groceries on Instacart or Amazon would make my life easier.
But would it make my life better? More joyful, more meaningful? Franz Kafka teaches us that free will is scary. If God is dead and we have killed him as he postulated, then that means each one of us has a duty to decide what it is that makes our lives worth living.
And that's a giant undertaking. It is still up to us individually to find some meaning in our lives, whether that's one's work, family and friends, art, or a higher power. But all of this requires a return to us being social creatures.
My meaning in life begins and ends with human beings. And I believe we need to fight like hell to make sure that we remain connected to one another in a world increasingly designed to limit our reliance on and interactions with one another.