The other day, I was thinking about a feeling I had on January 19, 2019. It’s not common for me to have the experience of being part of a powerful collective. (As an autistic person, I’m more often relegated to the periphery.) It was the day Dear Husband and I participated in the mother of all Women’s Marches.
At the time, Trump had been president the first time around for two years, and everybody was sick with the stress and anxiety of it all. Women in particular had plenty to protest about. (Little did we know that his first time around would be a walk in the park compared to the chaotic evil he’s visiting upon us this time. But I digress.)
The thing is, after you’ve been fed a steady diet of bird sh*t and cadavers for two long years, you become overwhelmed*, and you start to lose your appetite for life. That’s understandable. I’d even suggest that it would be a little odd if you didn’t. That was my mindset on the days leading up to the march.
But on that day, I was surrounded by hundreds of people who wanted the same things I did. I felt like I was part of a hive mind. For once, I didn’t feel like I was standing alone in the face of impossible odds. On that day I felt bigger than my usual self. As a part of this collective, I was a force to be reckoned with. I had hope for the first time in two years, and it felt good.
America has always prized individualism, and in certain ways I like that. As an autistic person, “a village” would be a bit hard to take every day of my life. I’d be miserable. I don’t cope well with that much social stimulation. Even during my wonderful year studying abroad in Mexico, I would often chafe at the constant expectation of togetherness, along with the total disregard for personal space. Multi-generational living would drive me absolutely insane.
For the most part, I actually prefer to feel tiny in the face of the universe. When I look up at the vastness of the night sky, it makes me realize that my problems are not that big in the overall scheme of things. I take a lot of comfort from that.
But I’m beginning to think that we’ve taken this individualism too far. When public health becomes politicized and people refuse to wear masks even though it would save the lives of others, that’s unacceptable. When people vote for someone who has been known to incite violence and put others’ lives at risk, that’s morally repugnant. This has got to stop.
What people seem to overlook is that with individualism comes isolation. And then you throw in computers, which allow us to survive without ever leaving the house, and the situation becomes even more extreme. People used to laugh at the idea that no one walks in Los Angeles. Well, when’s the last time you’ve seen kids on bicycles anywhere? They used to be everywhere. Our neighborhoods are becoming human wastelands before our eyes.
When you become that isolated, but have internet access and are therefore hit with the world’s problems (which, of course are much bigger than your own), and the stream of bad news is relentless, your first, and most logical instinct is to give up, get fetal, pull the sheets over your head, and do nothing. Because it’s all too much. There’s nothing you can do.
It’s hopeless. Global warming. War. Fascism spreading across the globe like a slimy orange comb-over. Poverty. Human rights violations. What can one person do to change any of that? Not a damned thing. So, honestly, what’s the point? Gloom, despair, and agony on me, as the song says.
If you feel that way, you come by it honestly, and you’re definitely not alone. It’s almost like we are all being pushed toward this attitude, like cows in a cattle chute, bound for our destruction. But we aren’t cows, and there are other routes to take.
This time around, when Trump got elected, I couldn’t take it, and I stopped watching the news entirely. My god, the pushback was enormous. People were really disappointed when I refused to take part in their 24-hour anxiety-fest. Readers of this blog felt betrayed that I wasn’t providing my usual percentage of political rants, as if I have influence on anyone at all. It made me realize why so few of us prioritize self-care. It’s just not socially acceptable.
At some point during all this drama, Dear Husband suggested that I listen to an episode of the podcast of Hidden Brain that is entitled, “Wellness 2.0: When It’s All Too Much” and I’m glad he did. It really gave me some much-needed perspective. Selfishly, it also validated the fact that I hadn’t done anything wrong by stepping back. (So there.) You might want to listen it, too, or read the transcript that you can also find at that link, for your own sanity and rejuvenation, so you can live to fight another day.
To sum it up, the podcast discusses why we get burned out and how we can regain a sense of purpose. The host, Shankar Vednantam, interviews Sarah Jaquette Ray, who studies the ways we respond to huge overwhelming problems and the ways we can get better at solving them. She was seeing students plunging into severe depression, becoming apathetic, and even depriving themselves to an alarming degree due to guilt about the environment.
Sometimes people resort to self-harm. Some feel so guilty that they commit themselves so thoroughly to a cause that if they allow themselves to rest or enjoy themselves in any way, it feels like a betrayal. That is the perfect recipe for burning yourself out.
Others become so overwhelmed in the face of a problem and the sheer futility of attempting to solve it themselves that they decide that there’s no point in doing anything at all. That’s how they cope with the overwhelm. They are the ones who seem so selfish and indifferent to those of us who care. They aren’t, really. They’re just trying to mentally survive it all. Still, their inaction is not helpful. But how to get them to act?
The podcast suggests that rather than blame the individuals for their inaction, perhaps blame the way they are getting the information that is causing the overwhelm which results in inaction. Too much 24/7 news. Too much negative news bias. Too much individualism.
We’ve been going about this all wrong. We’ve thought that if you scare people enough, they’ll finally take action. In fact, if you scare people enough, they’ll become paralyzed by their despair and do nothing.
Instead, we need to plug into a collective. If we feel like we’re working together, we feel more effective. And we also feel like we can take a break individually and the collective will pick up the slack. That’s a much healthier way to move forward.
It’s counterproductive to think that if we haven’t solved the entire problem then we have failed. It’s even worse if we believe we must solve the entire problem individually. Believing such things is why we give up hope. It’s so much better to accept that our individual impact on the problem, both positive and negative, is not that big, and that’s okay. We can do small things alone and take pride in that achievement, and we can participate in things collectively and take pride in making a difference that way as well. And by doing so, we can embrace hope and joy and ultimately have the energy to do more than we would be able to do otherwise.
We also need to stop feeling guilty about having multiple emotions at the same time. It’s okay to be horrified about pollution and still enjoy a walk in the woods. In fact, the joy you experience from the walk will likely energize you to fight for the environment much more than dwelling on the horror of the pollution will ever do.
At the end of the podcast there was an audio essay by a writer named Pico Iyer. He discussed his visits to a Benedictine retreat on the California Coast that I simply MUST track down. (Found it! It’s here, but it’s become well out of my price range, unfortunately.) But what really struck me about the essay was his description of an exchange with a friend. The friend suggested that it might be selfish to leave your loved ones behind so that you can go and restore yourself. The author responded, “Not if it’s the only way I can learn to be a little less selfish.”
He also said, “To come upon a place that exists outside the realm of constant change makes change a little bit less scary.”
All of the above is why I’m so grateful for this particular podcast. In spite of all of the push back I’ve been receiving about having stepped away from the news since the election (entirely at first, a little less so now, but I doubt I’ll ever fully immerse myself again), I am now even more convinced that I’ve done the right thing. While I’m still depressed about the state of the world, I’m not so depressed that I have been rendered inert. I’m not nearly as scared as I would have been otherwise. And stepping back like this has given me insight that those around me seem to lack.
I’m watching people actively choosing to dive headfirst into the turbulent sea of anxiety, while believing it is being forced upon them against their will. They seem to believe that they have no control over their exposure to this stress. It’s as if they have volunteered to be puppets on strings, and I’m finding it really disturbing to watch their inability to see their complicity in their own exposure to that emotional toxicity. They claim they do this to be informed, to take action, and to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe to come. That would be a most excellent plan if that was what I was actually seeing them do. But at my quiet remove, I have an entirely different perspective.
People are freaking out. They’re panicking. They’re making themselves sick. They’re becoming paranoid to an extreme. They are getting irritable and combative. If they’re not becoming inert, they’re making poor decisions. They are scaring themselves half to death. They seem to be overlooking the fact that there is no way to predict a catastrophe, what form it will take, or whether or not it will be inevitable. For the most part, other than wringing their hands and berating those who are refusing to join them in that pointless act, they are not doing anything positive at all.
None of this is serving anyone well. There are calm, rational things you can do to generally plan for emergencies. Do those. You can plan for certain contingencies based on past experiences. There are exit strategies you can formulate ahead of time so that you can act more quickly if need be. Formulate those plans.
Other than that, as all of the above explains, it’s rather futile to think you have to, or will be able to, stand up and solve this massive sh*tshow that we find ourselves in all by yourself. Thinking like that will only drain you of your life force. I refuse to play that game.
If I see something I can do, however small, I’ll do that thing. When I have the strength, I’ll gladly be part of a collective. I’ll amplify the calls for action that are rational and plausible and possible, not the ones that just add to the noise and can’t be constitutionally accomplished.
And above all else, the one thing I absolutely refuse to do is run around like a terror-stricken muppet just so you’ll feel better about doing so yourself. You do you. Let’s see who’s still functional once this insane marathon is over.
*Some might say we’re not becoming overwhelmed, but rather habituated, which is exactly how “they” want us to feel. That’s a plausible argument, too. But I still think it’s overwhelm, because I continue to feel disgust at all these things. I just can’t seem to summon the energy to do anything about them. Which also plays into “their” hands, I suppose. But I refuse to say that I’ve gotten to the point where I think this sh*t is normal. Never. Nope. No one gets to have that much power over me.
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