How do you cope with the state of the world today?
Everything just seems so out of control. The US seems to be tearing itself apart. The world is on fire. We seem to be going backwards when it comes to freedom and human rights. We’ve turned our backs on each other. How do you cope with all this without just giving up?
Meditation (as in, observing your thoughts without judgement, allowing them space, cultivating awareness and compassion). You don’t have to sit and focus on a candle or image or get the right breathing techniques or follow any kind of religion. Pema Chodron’s books are a very accessible and easy to read, and you don’t need to be a Buddhist to follow her work.
Look for spiritual sustenance in nature and in compassionate people. I find a lot of reassuring and helpful approaches in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s works, particularly his understanding that cultivating awareness and honest, open observation will increase compassion in yourself and will spread compassion in the world. (It’s more nuanced than that, but that’s an element of his observations). People with something genuinely helpful to say are not selling you anything - neither an idea or a product.
The news is there to sell things - ideas and products. Most news sources are selling a political and/or religious idea and bias as well as literally advertising products. News media is a business, making money from advertising. They don’t make money from selling ideas that life can be satisfying or enjoyable without buying stuff or doing things that make politicians and religious leaders more rich or powerful. Always read the news with a critical eye and look at what isn’t being focused on, not what is. Search for interesting personal stories, not headlines to get a slightly better perspective on the world.
There was a study done a few years ago that found that 60% of social media accounts were fake. That number is probably higher now, and there is more AI, too. The news and media and even federated systems are all manipulated in various ways. Huge congregations of right wing end-times Christians work like bot farms to spread fear and misinformation across all platforms: their goal is to speed up destruction because they believe in an afterlife that is only possible if the unbelievers are destroyed. They spread so much fear around feminism, LGBTQ+ issues, trans debates, flat earth nonsense, climate change denial, pro and anti vaccine arguments, etc. They just use whatever works to stir people up; they will take either side of an argument. The Taliban and Al-Queada worked in the same way, to similar ends. Israel and Russia and China all use these manipulation tactics too, to slightly different ends. The UK and Europe have other methods and goals (destroy threats to capitalism and neo colonialism, be seen as good guys). There are bot farms, hackers and paid accounts for every type of greedy power addict. But they all want destruction of perceived rivals, and they want one group of people to be afraid of another. It’s all lies and manipulation - some of it works, in a way, but a lot of it doesn’t. The fact they are all using these tactics show how desperate and afraid they are. We need to remember just how manipulated news stories and media are, and how the governments and organisations of the world are all trying to fool each other’s populations. Before the internet, you only saw your own country’s propaganda - now you see it all, and the system is falling apart in front of our eyes.
The news is not the sum total of things that are happening; it’s what is making someone more money or more power. The news doesn’t report all the people who had a pleasant day, or did a little bit better than yesterday - but how can it? Remember that for every horror story in the news, a thousand times more people were doing OK or better.
Do something that brings you actual joy every day. If you are honest with yourself, you find that actual joy is always the simple things - a favourite food, bouncing a ball, sitting under a tree, reading a good story, caring for a pet, holding hands quietly with a loved one, watching the clouds, riding a bike in nature, making music and art, reading a comic… Whatever small joys you can find, do them every day if you can, even if you’re living in a war zone. The small joys are reality, and sometimes you’ll experience big joys, although you don’t need them so often. News and depressive thoughts are not reality, only skewed and biased ways of looking at parts of reality. Moments of small joy are often all of reality that really matters.
Meditation (in whatever form works for you) can help you to experience the sensation that you are not your thoughts. “You” are something that exists with or without thoughts. It is not enough to consider this idea, it is something you need to actually experience, as often as possible. By extension, the world is not the collective thoughts and opinions of people: there is a reality of existence beyond all the nonsense we project on top of it.
Look for humour and go back to things that help you remember that there is always a lot to laugh about in world. Try to avoid cruel, mocking humour and yet be open to finding life-affirming humour even amongst the worst tragedies.
Cultivate compassion for yourself and the world around you. Ultimately aim to do everything out of compassion - not obsession or selfishness, fear or greed. If you need to be alone, be compassionate for yourself and others that need to be alone; if you need to be with other people, be compassionate for them. Don’t look for things in return: it is not a transaction. Compassionate action will not only bring you joy and peace, they will spread it. Practice compassion for everything - plants, animals, yourself, and other people. True compassion is not draining or tiring; it is a letting go of things like prejudice and judgement. It is not easy to do, it is something to work at.
Have positive, achievable goals and work on them whenever you can. You will get setbacks; it’s OK. Life shouldn’t be lived on a flat surface, there should ups and downs. It’s a journey, and a true journey should be interesting, across a changing landscape. When you have downs, recognise that there will necessarily be an up before long. The same us true for people around you, and the world.
Work on things you can change for the better, don’t focus on what you can’t. But actually work on the things you can change. It doesn’t matter how small they are; in many ways, the universe is not interested in big or small; and small things can make big changes anyway, like atoms or bacteria or blood cells (which can all do equally good or bad things, from our human perspective).
There are injustices and tragedies and traumas happening around the world; there are as many beautiful, loving kind things happening at the same time, probably more. The internet, the TV, the newspapers, magazines, books and media are just very small windows for an infinitely large world. We often think we’re seeing everything, but we are seeing very little. Our only reality is when we are not looking at life through these small windows - but we spend so much time looking through them that we forget reality. Do things that take you back to reality. If that reality is painful, approach it with compassion and it will gradually get less painful.
Work in reducing suffering in all forms for yourself and everything around you. Don’t contribute to suffering and don’t dwell on guilt and fear. Acknowledge those experiences, but let them pass. Don’t push bad things away, but don’t give them energy - just observe them, and return to things that create joy and peace, no matter how small. You don’t have to fix things or cure things that are bad, just work on making them a little bit better.
Remember that a lot of bad news is only a matter of perspective. So much of what we hear about - wars, corruption, illness, oppression, greed - are clear signs that the perpetrators of those things are desperate. Desperate people feel as though they are losing; they are doing everything they can to hold on to power, and they are lashing out. But they are losing the fight (most of which is with themselves or each other). Yes, we are the victims of their lashing out, but their viciousness and fear-mongering is because they are losing. They are losing because they have lost compassion and kindness and love. If we don’t cultivate those things, we will join them in desperation and fear; if we do continue to cultivate those things, they can never defeat us, because we are not even trying to win or to fight. We are surviving and growing and living. They can hurt us, but they can’t defeat us, and when they hurt us, they hurt themselves. But when we try to hurt them, we hurt ourselves, too. We end the fight by inviting them (the desperate, the rich, the powerful) to join us in compassion and kindness, by turning away from suffering and from causing suffering. There is no action too small to help make the world a better place.
To be clear I hate religion but wisdom is where you find it.
The world Sidrattha (the Buddha) lived in is more horrible than anyone alive can imagine, except maybe North Koreans. In a culture where you were legally allowed to beat an untouchable they let their shadow pass on you, in a culture where the penalty for a slave caught praying was to have their tongue ripped out. In this world he taught a message of the inherit goodness and inner strength of humanity. His last spoken words were to remind people that no one needed him and they should work on themselves with diligence.
Now if he could see our potential in that hellscape I think we can manage to see it. And no I don’t think you or anyone else should become a Buddhist.
For me, personally: Shit’s always been out of control, and even though it may seem like human rights are going backwards, we’re better off now than we’ve ever been. Interacting with my own kids and the college students I work with gives me a lot of hope. We really just need the boomers to stop getting nostalgic for the “good old days” when you were allowed to bully anyone who was different from you.
The kids are progress. Support them! Let them turn the world into what they what it to be, and not what we think they need.
I got Sync for Lemmy because Sync for reddit used to be great and I refuse to create a reddit account. I’m mostly here for porn.
If you’re not here for porn, you probably haven’t come to terms with how inconsequential you are. Once you come to that realization you start doing doing things for yourself and things get better.
You are nearly powerless as an individual yes, but you still have some influence on the world around you. Using it alone at your own whims maybe you can affect the people closest to you and make their lives better but as a collective you can expand that sphere of influence to a vast extent, even globally.
Western society is designed to isolate you, it’s a sprawling expanse of concrete with no where for you to go that doesn’t cost money. We primarily live in single family homes and that is often legally required due to our districting. we wake up, we go to work surrounded by people we often don’t actually connect with because deep down we still know they are our competition, maybe we go out and spend time with what friends we might have retained this far if it’s a weekend and we aren’t too exhausted, maybe we stay inside and busy ourselves with some hobby or mindlessly consume some media, then we do it again. Over and over and over and over.
How are you meant to organize if you barely even know anyone outside a small friend group? If you don’t have a car? If you’re exhausted from rediculous work hours and broke from shitty pay? You certainly won’t organize if you’re pumped full of the most dopamine rich meaningless slop corporate can come up with. Not if there is no sense of community where you live because existing outside cost money and everyone is so far away you don’t even know who your neighbors are.
But you do it anyway. Because the struggle is not meaningless, because you wouldn’t want them to look the other way when you’re left to rot, because you want change.
It’s normal to feel overwhelmed by the horrors of the world when you have no one to lean on and you don’t have any idea of how you might help. You are meant to feel that way because the more powerless you feel the easier you are to exploit
I just accept that life is absurd. Once you accept that morality, your own desires, logic, all of them are like waves through time, coming and going, changing form, never staying still…you recognize how ridiculous it is to desperately cling to any semblence of a ground beneath you. Just let yourself fall into the unknown, and at least the insignificance of your own struggle against the tides of change is acknowledged.
Or you can, y’know, just scream, cry, and rage about it. I think of emotions like a buffet. You gotta try them all at least once, and often in a wide variety of combinations. But hey, you do you.
Try to limit how much news/social media I consume, especially the really dark stuff. Then I spend a lot of time finding good things that I love watching (cute animals, reno videos ect). It’s a lot of self-preservation because a ton of news is super depressing and rage inducing, keeping a balance between not being totally ignorant but not wanting to ruin my mental health is key
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