I have that problem too. What I do to cope is concentrate on the stuff I love. I love live music — I’ve gone to 37 concerts this year. I love travel — I’ve taken four major international trips this year, plus several smaller excursions.
SDMB Dopers -please advise how do you retain your basic empathy and humanity in these troubled days?
I don’t disagree with that (or anything else you wrote), and it is specifically for that reason I choose not to participate in any mass social media platforms, or and try to not get pulled into any doomscrolling. However, I spent the last couple of weeks before going on vacation watching the COP28 presentations, and even though I skipped as much of the farcical “Summit Proceedings” and just stuck to the technical presentations (mostly the Cryosphere Pavilion because everything else was basically “Same news as before, only worse,” whereas ice sheet and associated marine activity has had a lot of new advances) it was still hard to come away from that with anything but a sense of foreboding ruin. Of course, there is nothing I or anyone else who isn’t running a major oil company can do about that, but tuning out completely doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, either.
I do think the attitude that today is “just like all the other times, no worse than before,” is a distinctly head-burying move in the face of multiple crises that are quickly rising to the literally existential level (and not in the “this will be a problem five generations down the road, let them figure it out” way), so even if you think that politics are purely transient and inconsequential changes regardless if an inept fascist fronting for a radical fundamentalist religion which seeks to make over your country in its own Gilead-esque way, there are still a lot of things that bear attention just to know how to expect the direction that the winds will blow. But I don’t have any particular answers or solutions.
Stranger
Generally, I agree with the gist of your post. But I do want to point out one thing that certainly might happen that would affect me significantly: If the Republicans take full control they might repeal Obamacare. That would have a devastating effect on my finances.
I’m sure other people have their own specific issues of great concern.
Oh, certainly some people are very much affected by an election. But most people looking to improve their lives would be much better off focusing on their local situation and improving their personal lives than handwringing constantly about federal politics.
Again, the GOP candidate-presumptive damaged foreign relations with formerly allied nations; undermined the economy in substantial ways that affected farmers and small businesses; attempted to fundamentally undermine the electoral process in multiple ways including inciting an insurrection; and has pledged to make himself a dictator “for just one day” (as if any autocrat has ever limited himself to gorging on power once it is on the buffet). With normal parties and politics I’d tend to agree that it makes relatively little difference because despite the rhetoric there is often very little daylight in operational policy between two major parties; with the GOP and Trump there have been and continue to be very real impacts right down to the personal level. This is, again, not a “both sides do it” issue, or that it really doesn’t matter who’s in charge because the ship is always self-righting, and in general around the world there are many elections in 2024 that will have manifest impacts on many individuals regardless of how much you think that they “would be better off focusing on their local situation and improving their personal lives.”
Stranger
I’d say, first, consider all in all whether things are objectively any worse now than they were 5, 10, 50 or 100 years ago? There have always been doom and gloom headlines.
On the other hand, it does seem that a lot of stuff is, slowly on average, getting somewhat better?
Human rights, scientific progress etc. Yes, slowly on the human rights front…
Terry Pratchett had a quote something like: most people, if you treat them respectfully and pleasantly, are inclined to be harmless and even helpful. And I would say that I usually find that to be true.
If you see someone having a problem with something you know about, isn’t your immediate impulse to help, especially if it only costs you a bit of time and attention?
There is hope for humanity. Or so I hope.
I understand your point, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with educating yourself about an issue, however bleak (I’ve been trying to educate myself about Israel/Palestine which isn’t exactly an uplifting topic.) And I don’t blame you for coming away from those climate change presentations with a sense of doom. I have tried my best not to engage with distressing thoughts, but I feel strongly that emotions are a different matter, and while they are often driven by thoughts, they are usually some kind of physiological reaction that needs to be processed at some point, whether through weeping, or exercise, or something else. I don’t want to give the impression I’m against people being informed, or that I advocate a lifestyle of burying one’s head in the sand. I think there is a way to acknowledge and address hard realities without undue suffering, and it’s that sweet spot I’m aiming to hit.
Moving to a different point, I have an easier life than most, and I try to stay grateful for that, and I am a firm believer in self-care, which gets a lot of roll-eyes because I think people think it means buying fancy bath salts or something (and it can.) But for me it’s been about building a consistent morning routine that incorporates things I value, spending time exercising outdoors, writing fiction, reaching out to loved ones, starting my work on time, creating rituals around my work (I’m into tea and candles right now) and practicing gratitude on a daily basis. I use an Android App called “Three Good Things” which encourages me to reflect on the day’s positive events. I understand we’re in White Woman’s Instagram territory here, but that’s what works for me!
As far as empathy, despite my cynicism, I have never been a misanthrope. I feel for people, even people who are supposedly my enemies. I am close friends with someone who has a very different perspective on life than mine, which keeps me honest, especially because me and this friend, despite massive differences in worldview, essentially have the same values. So I know it’s possible.
As a final note, I don’t think we can talk about an overall sense of doom and foreboding without talking about the devastation COVID wrought and how difficult it has made life for people who already found life difficult. A lot of people, myself included, were stripped of their coping tools, faced new economic hardship, and plunged deeper into social isolation. This makes everything so much worse. We are still recovering from that as a society. The problem is, we lost so many community spaces, I don’t know if we will ever be able to reclaim what we had. But we can either try to get back to the old way of things or find new ways to cope.
Honestly, I don’t think much about empathy or humanity anymore. I’ve kind of moved beyond that. Now I just focus cold-bloodedly on results. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but in a pragmatic, matter-of-fact way.
I know it sounds sociopathic to say it, but I’ve come to see that that attitude delivers much better results. Don’t get me wrong, I still go out of my way to help people who I care for, such as family and girlfriend, friends, etc. But my empathy tank is pretty much entirely gone for almost anyone else. I’m just emptied.
I don’t know if I can endorse that extreme, but empathy for everyone is not all it’s cracked up to be. It can lead to complete paralysis, avoidance of conflict, and the promotion of peace over justice. It’s a conflict I’ve had all my life.
(Also, I am very results-focused myself, which is why I’ve been frustrated with a lot of the methodology of some modern-day progressives. I’m extremely pragmatic, I’m interested not in what feels good, but what works.)
I agree that self-care is important because if you are just spiralling into despair you won’t have much energy to do anything useful for anyone else, and your ability to rationally assess the actual state of things will be compromise. But I think for a lot of people, the tendency is to throw up one’s hands and indulge in distractions, or just to be so wrapped up in the domestic affairs and normal challenges that they have no bandwidth to even understand the larger challenges that, as voters in a sort-of liberal democracy, they should be informed about. I have no idea where that ‘sweet spot’ between hopelessness and being so engaged on issues over which you have minimal influence is but I think most people don’t even know where to look, or just don’t have the energy to try.
COVID seems to have virtually disappeared off the news landscape even though we still have hundreds of deaths attributed to it per week (actually over a thousand per week for the last quarter) and entirely uncertain numbers of ‘long covid’ acute sequelae that is often debilitating for months or even years, and for which there is a paucity of ongoing research. Certainly the impacts upon people who have lost friends and family, the economic hardships stemming from pandemic shutdowns, and of course the rise in mental health issues, particularly for children and young adults whose social and educational development was affected, has all been marginalized in a desire to “get back to normal”, notwithstanding how much this should have been a wakeup call for the need to prepared for a far more deadly pandemic that is certainly coming (and that epidemiologists have been warning of for decades).
Instead, we are probably even worse off in terms of preparation for a new novel contagion; between the burnout and frustration of health care workers, the ardent anti-science of conspiranoiasts and anti-vaccine ‘activitists’, and the general fragmentation of global supply chains that are still functioning on an ad hoc basis with no real backup or ability to transition to local manufacture or stockpile of critical resources, I can imagine that a resurgent coronavirus with an order of magnitude increase in virulence, or any of a number of influenza A strains that may emerge with lethal pandemic potential, or even just the antimicrobial resistance catastrophe that all epidemiologists know is coming is going to be a challenge we are wholly unprepared to address. The COVID-19 pandemic was a love tap compared to what will be coming sooner rather than later, and we have learned exactly nothing from it other than to become even more scared, politically polarized, and untrusting of government (in some ways not without a measure of justification) instead of the need to devote resources to planning and preparing for the next pandemic.
This is similar to the mentality of the “Effective Altruism” crowd (I don’t mean to lump you in with that philosophy, just nothing that this is their stated approach) and while on the surface it seems to be a more rationalist way of dealing with challenges that would overwhelm your sense of individual empathy for friends and kin, it can also lead down the path of rationalizing all kinds of not-actually helpful and often self-serving behavior (see Sam Bankman-Fried as a prima facie exemplar), especially when the focus is getting results without consideration for unintended effects or consequences. On a purely personal level it probably makes a lot of sense to focus your charity on those you know and with whom you share familial or reciprocal relationship, but on a larger level it often means intentionally choosing to harm some groups in favor of ostensibly benefiting other, often without an actually objective view of the total consequences and damage. I don’t have any specific solution for this other than with any decision where you deprive or allow harm to one group to benefit another, some weighing of empathy should be part of the calculus for whether what you are doing is overall beneficial and necessary.
Stranger
I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I do remind myself that none of this is new, and that the vast majority of it has always been here; it just may not have been visible to me, or I may not have perceived it in the past. And that the country’s gone through worse and come through.
It’s a sort of keeping things in perspective exercise, as a lot of us grew up in the 1970s and 80s, so we didn’t really see the problems then, and then for the most part the 90s and 2000s were very good times. Only 9/11 and the economic crises in 2008 were really negative until about 2015 or so, when it seems like the wheels came off of the GOP, and the more hateful, negative, racist, and narrow-vistaed chunk of the population came to the forefront. I have to remind myself that they were always there, just not so vocal, and not so publicly enabled. Prior to 2015, even Republican politicians would have fled the Proud Boys so fast their shoes would have caught fire. After that, well…
Otherwise, I look at the people trying to combat the recent trends, and see where I can help, and take some comfort in the fact that there are a lot of us who aren’t like that and who do care.
I can remember coming in from work and watching the national news. 30 mins. Got informed about whatever happened.
There might be follow ups the next day or two if it was a significant event.
Man, today the news beats us with a bat all day long. Then the next day and the next day. They’re relentless.
It’s a completely different world and it takes a toll on everyone’s emotions.
I curse myself often wondering why I’m unable to turn off the news. It’s mesmerizing.
Well, this is a difference between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ media, I think.
I don’t watch any streaming stuff. I decide what and when I am going to look at, and in how much detail.
Throw that TV in the dumpster. Really.
And here’s your subconscious mistake shouting out loud for us (and you) to see.
It is not a completely different world. The world i.e. humanity, is just what it’s always been: a hot mess on a large scale and meanwhile on a small scale, it’s just a lot of people loving their families and trying to get by as best they can.
It is a completely different set of commercial businesses trying to sell you stuff by telling you about a carefully selected subset of the real world. One chosen, regardless of politics, for maximum emotional impact and a decided lean towards bad news over good news. “If it bleeds it leads” is not a saying from 2022; it’s from the 1960s.
Meanwhile, what is different is there’s been a vast growth in those outlets, from a half hour of network news per night and one local newspaper, to dozens of 24/7 channels and websites all competing to shout louder at you so you’ll “pick me!, Pick Meeee!”.
Then of course we do have media with a political axe to grind. Although that too is not new. “Yellow journalism” is a term from the 1800s.
That is what’s changed. Not the world. What you learn of it from people who are not interested in your mental health one iota.
You (OP) might profit by reading this book and taking its message to heart.
Point taken.
I need to exercise more discipline. Eat breakfast and have my coffee. Then maybe 15 to 20 mins browsing the news. Afterwards, leave it alone until late evening and catch a summary of the day.
That’s enough news to stay informed and still focus on family and hobbies.
It’s helped to express some stuff here. I have a much better path forward.
There are days when something big happens that demands all day coverage. It’s pretty rare that anything new will be reported after the first hour.
I read a weekly news magazine and ignore 100% of the daily or real time stuff.
If it’s important enough to be talked about a week later, I ought to know about it. If not, not. And over half of what’s in there is still stuff that is not “news I can use”, nor is it a situation I can influence in any way. It’s just setting the atmospherics or Zeitgeist.
An hour a week of reading is plenty of news for any human who desires sanity, much less serenity.
The worst “highlights” (lowlights?) of the hijinks of 9 billion humans makes a really crappy spectator sport. You’d be mentally healthier to watch a continuous diet of cockfighting, dog fighting, and fatal car crashes. Not that that would be healthy. But it’d probably be healthier than what you’re watching now.
I remember when Trump was President news outlets were falling all over themselves to provide every outrageous detail. There was plenty to be outraged about without bringing up all his stupid petty comments that really had no bearing on anything. I checked out of Trump news shortly after he was elected, obviously I paid attention to the big stuff like January 6, but I didn’t need the play by play of his repulsive behavior.
These days when I visit a news site, I find myself all too often saying, “So what?” I mean they cover some irrelevant shit a lot of the time. But they have to fill their sites up 24/7 so it’s inevitable there would be a lot of garbage.
I still get a daily print newspaper delivered. I read it every morning so I know what’s going on, both locally and nationally. Then I try to ignore the news until the next day. There’s hardly ever a news story so important that i can’t wait 24 hours to learn it.
Honestly for me it’s pretty simple. I just don’t pay attention to any of that and don’t watch the news. I can’t do anything about any of the terrible things happening and dwelling on it leads to nothing but anger.
Like Candide, I cultivate my garden.
Also eat out with Mrs. J., survey the fauna at Kroger and rub Pluto’s belly.