I feel like we’re living in a Billy Joel - We Didn’t Start the Fire song 2.0 (Fall Out Boy did a 2.0 version of the song where they used more recent events.) 3.0 and the events in the song are happening at 1.25 times the speed of the original.
No.
The world is run by capitalism, and you have to remember that unhappy, anxious people spend more, while dead people don’t spend anything.
Turn off the news. Turn off the social media. Go for a walk. It’s nice outside. None of this shit has manifested there.
Well, unless you’re in America and you look vaguely foreign. Maybe don’t go for a walk in that case.
I don’t know if just choosing to ignore this all is the correct response. I mean, it’s not overencumbering, but it feels like it also is a way for capital to reign free.
Maybe I’m just reading badly into it.
The correct way to fight against capitalism is to get together with your neighbours and start building communities that aren’t reliant on the Big Market.
We essentially have an oligarchy, or at least a growing list of authoritarian leaders. Kings in many ways except by name. Kings have been perfectly willing to destroy countries in furtherance of their egos, profits or other. Wellbeing of their citizens be damned.
Honestly? I think if you had access to social media for any time in the last 100 years you would feel overwhelmed. The nature of the beast is there is ALWAYS something happening. There’s ALWAYS something to be angry about.
I feel overwhelmed by how the world apparently went today
Someone … or a new artist should just release a new version of the song with new lyrics every year
But to your question … I’m Indigenous Canadian, so from the day I was born, I’ve always been overwhelmed by the world because most of it, especially living in northern Ontario was a government that either actively or passively just wanted us to either disappear, assimilate, go away or just die.
I’ve always seen the world as falling apart. I remind my friends when we debate this stuff that the human species has been around for about two million years, a species that looks like us was around about 100,000 years ago and the most modern ancestor that could think, act and be like us is about 50,000 years ago. We’ve only just started our technological evolution about 200 years ago. So when you think about it, we are more designed as prehistoric cavemen and cavewomen who are easily scared of shadows in the dark or what happens after we die. We have only just taken our first step out of the cave we all used to inhabit. It’s going to take us a few more thousand years to get to the point where our brains can process and live with the modern world we created … that is if we last that long. In the meantime, we’ll just fumble along trying to become temporary Masters of the Universe on our tiny speck of floating dust in the galaxy.
To put things into perspective … listen to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Or watch the cartoonist Steve Cutts A Brief Disagreement
The thing that is pissing me off these days is not so much that the world is falling apart … it always has been for me … its that we are accelerating the amount of danger we are putting all of humanity … and for what? a little bit of profit and for a small group of people to say they can rule the world?
An evil person will burn down the kingdom to rule over the ashes.
Without selective pressure our brains won’t change, and definitely not on the timescale of thousands of years.
Bruh selective pressure to mate has these young men going full fascist mode
We have selective pressure. It just selects psychopaths.
So survival of the fittest, become one or find something more useful to become.
Nope.
There’s nothing I can do to change it apart from trying to do good in my own little neighborhood, so that’s what I do.
Yes, so I am overwhelming myself with good stuff so I don’t have as much time to let that stuff bother me.
I joined an animal rescue that I work at every Sunday and busy my butt there. I also started participating in community events with other people through my music teacher, so I’ve always got new songs to work on. These national protests also have a more uplifting vibe than I’d expected, so I’d like to participate in more of those too.
So I’m feeling better about my own actions, developing more skills, helping my environment, giving entertainment back to my community, and seeing hundreds of other people that also want this place to be a bit better.
Sure the news is still a total buzzkill, but I can only dwell on it so long. I put off doing these things for so long saying I didn’t have time or energy, but now they are wonderful healthy distractions, and even if we do pull out of this tailspin, I’d love to keep doing all these things anyway.
Don’t let jerks keep you down. We can’t stop all of it, but we can all find some way to be useful and successful, and other people seeing you carry on will keep them motivated too!
I’m just doing my small part by raising kids who will act like adults when they grow up
All i know is i didn’t start this fire
Hoping to get into numismatics professionally. That or teaching. My SO is a teacher and there’s a shortage hereabouts, has been for years.
Of course. It’s not the path you want to take. But I’m old enough to remember similar times and the future isn’t written yet.
You have many parallel selves that didn’t make it. Wonder how many more selves you have left
If you really believe in Everett’s many worlds, infinity.
Listen here you lemniscate, I don’t want any more analemma’s out of you!
It’s not about how we feel but what we do about it
anyone that’s paying attention is likely in the same place you are
I mean as a Canadian, I knew that was coming since early last year if Trump would win. I couldn’t know where we would land on the spectrum between nothing changed and Armageddon. What I did know was that, without fail, I would hear what stupid thing Trump did just about every day in the news, and it would be overwhelmingly exhausting.
I have three pieces of advice. First, connect with the people around you offline, reinforce your ground truth. Second is keep your eyes on the ball of what you want to be better in the world so that you can keep going after it. Lastly, don’t let right or left wing online propaganda, or the despair from crises the US, Israel, Russia, China or North Korea stir up paralyze you from taking action on those two things.
Honestly: no.
There are only so many things I can focus on at once and I’m quite good at not letting the others affect me.
Work, kids and friends take most of my time. My «crisis» of choice to stay updated on is Ukraine. Everything else I read on now and then, when I feel like it.
I quite enjoy just touching grass and being in the moment instead of stressing about things I have no control over.
