Manufacturing hope
I recently read the best thing I've come across in a while, Amy Newell's latest installment of Woe. She's been very open about her struggles with her own mind, and much of it resonates deeply.
Something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years is the increasingly terrible hellscape we've manufactured for ourselves to live in. It feels like things are only ever getting worse and, reinforced by a self-selected assortment of doomsday thought pieces, like our chance to fix it has passed and we're all pretty much fucked.
Amy's apocalyptic death spiral is very familiar to me. I easily get caught up in the bad stuff, overwhelmed by the sheer seriousness of it all, and paralyzed by headline after headline about the end of democracy, impending nuclear war, billionaire techno-utopian schemes to track and control our every move, etc. etc. The dystopian world inside my head starts to feel real, and it's only downhill from there.
The problem is, I have real things in the actual real world that I want to do and spend time on, which I can't when my brain is permanently preoccupied and fixated on how the world as we know it is imploding around us. How can I possibly care about shaving some seconds off this query whilst Ukrainian software engineers are sleeping in mud-floored bunkers just trying to stay alive. What do you mean am I done that thing? Don't you know it's the apocalypse?!
But this is a trap. It's been hard to accept that I can't always trust my own mind. I had to learn the hard way that it can sometimes work against me. Sometimes, it's worth using every ounce of willpower and energy I have to bump my brain out of a rut, like these times when it gets stuck. Sometimes the world I really feel is real, isn't. Or at least isn't the whole picture.
This is what made Amy's tips for getting unstuck so valuable. My main takeaway is this:
The way out of an apocalyptic death spiral is through disconfirming evidence, through acts of protest or imaginative building of something new and different, and through solidarity.
When I'm spiraling, I need to remind myself that there are many true facts in the world, and many of them run counter my sense of imminent societal collapse. There are actions I can actively take to combat the things I hate about the world, and there are beautiful people in the world who I can do them with.
I've spent the last couple years re-orienting everything about my life in this general direction. I thought I knew what would make me happy, and like so many people who get to where they always thought they wanted to be, I was wrong.
Now the priority in my life is relationship and community building. I found some people, and I found a place I actually feel excited to call home for the first time. I need to remind myself daily that there are good things happening in the world, that I am participating in them, and that I get to do it all with people I love.