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?
Also, keep in mind that all the negativity you see is mostly due to 24hour news cycles and other methods of getting instant updates from around the world. And misery-porn sells 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
I was listening to a podcast about the scientists responsible of monitoring potentially world threatening asteroid collisions with the earth. They are constantly reminded that the whole world could blink out of existence in an instant. But they continue their job because that’s the part they have control over. I worry of the things I can change. Wether they being small or big and wether my impact is small or big. If I have no control over, I acknowledge it and move on.
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