Alt text: Screenshot from YouTube that says the following:
I am 57. Not only does it feel like “something wicked this way comes” but there is also this feeling that the whole world is holding it’s breath. Almost as though we are all waiting for some catalyst or sign or event that puts an end to this feeling of being put on hold. This vague, unexplained unease we feel. Something terrible lurking just out of our field of vision but we all feel it closing in. I cannot count the number of people who have told me they wish that whatever is going to happen would just get on with it. That this waiting for the thing in the darkness is unbearable.
Jokes on them. That’s anxiety and the “just wish this would happen so we can get over it” is the start of a long depression about how nothing changes and nothing we do actually matters.
That’s a bit melodramatic but we are facing problems on a rather unprecedented scale.
The connectedness of the world and the fragility of profit maximising economies means that local crises are global and there isn’t much slack to absorb shocks. We’re seeing that now with how badly we’ve dealt with a pandemic (not even a particularly bad one by historical standards) which is an expected event you must plan for. We’re seeing it as we get squeezed by rising insurance premiums as disasters become more likely and so on.
Maybe the Teflon in our teeth wont matter too much, maybe we will somehow address climate change without displacing hundreds of millions of people and the expected refugee crisis, maybe we’ll handle the resurgent fascism in western democracies but that doesn’t change that the system we’re in is fragile and people are stretched to their limits.
That lurking feeling is actually just indigestion from your unceasing diet of pessimistic online dialogue and media. Go outside, enjoy the air and the wind, look someone in the eyes. It’ll clear things right up.
Yep, nothing is wrong, absolutely nothing to be fucking terrified about in the future! It’s all in your head, just touch some grass and you’ll stop worrying about trump winning or the environment getting irreparably fucked (:
Avoiding pessimistic content does not mean embracing ignorance. The key is to understand what is within your capacity to change and to try and let go of worrying about everything else. It’s about understanding that marinating in a sea of doomscrolling is really bad for you: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/what-is-doomscrolling-and-why-is-it-bad-for-us/143139/
And that bad news is also literally addictive and it is important to break that habit: https://www.fastcompany.com/90269566/how-to-stop-your-brains-addiction-to-bad-news
