this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Yeah.
I struggled with panic attacks in the military and during an aid mission we brought a bunch of medical staff from other countries with us.
So I talked with a German psychiatrist.
His advice was basically:
Which helped a lot more than it sounds like would have.
He didn't try to pill me up or anything or say it was my fault for how I'm handling it.
Just very simple matter of fact told me my response was 100% rational.
What the fuck does the average American have to be happy about right now? Millennials being unhappy is because life sucks for lots of us.
If you are curious, that is part of logotherapy, which was started by a German.
“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” ― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning
I’ve been learning to employ self-compassion for these scenarios. Just pretend my life belongs to a friend who’s sharing it with me. How would I respond?
I’m so much more generous and compassionate to others, so learning to give that same compassion and dignity to myself has been healing.
This just reminded me of how great of a book that was. Time to reread it a decade after I first read it.
Amazing book. It’s a disturbing book but it’s good.
I’m just a normal civvie software engineer, but this is actually a thought process that I have struggled with mightily, and continue to do so: as a conscientious human who has a strong interest in history, is it reasonable and ethical for me to medicate myself into quiescence, when my anxiety and distress is directly caused by the fact that I care about the world and happen to know a good deal about current events?
Or, if you’re more neurotypical / are better at compartmentalization: is it ethically ok to just straight up ignore all the systematic, horrifyingly bad shit going on in the world?
We're all stuck here right now, and no individual can really change anything that matters on their own.
But if everyone does a little and helps each other out, all of us added together can make ridiculous amounts of change with very little effort.
Like that whole "think globally, act locally" thing that I only remember from that Pauly Shore movie Biodome.
These aren't impossible problems to fix, we just need to get enough people to acknowledge we need to fix shit. Once we do that, the rest is easy.
So it feels like impossible tasks, but easier than it looks
I really don't think it will be easy. We need to come up with a new economic system not based democratic control rather than exploitation and extraction/theft of surplus value at every step. Then we need to dismantle the old system and implement the new one. All three of these are horribly complicated tasks by themselves.
And they will need to be done while under legal resistance, propaganda resistance, and when push comes to shove, lethal resistance from the powers that be. The exxons and nestles and boeings of the world have done nothing to imply they would go quietly into the night. They will use their agents in government to disrupt any attempts at organized resistance
It's not ethically okay to ignore it, but you're also not morally obligated to solve it, only to do your part!
I actually don't know if compartmentalization is a neurotypicals trait. If anything, given my experience being neurodivergent (ADHD), and growing up with other neurodivergent people (brother with autism, sister with ADHD), I would believe that in fact compartmentalization is a neurodivergent trait. But I will say that in this case I'm not sure anyone who's compartmentalizing the world being on fire is normal. It takes a lot of mental fortitude or apathy to see the entire landscape ablaze and just be like "meh, I gotta go to work, I don't have time for that..".
if you feel theres something you can/should be doong about it, or at least trying.. you can do that, and then tune out in peace woth yourself.
I’m pretty privileged to be in a good spot and even I can see the writing on the wall - everyone around me is sad, overwhelmed, stressed, and angry and they can’t find anything that opens the release valve. I don’t understand how all these selfish bastards can look around and think that the US is doing great.