How can you navigate the fear, anger and uncertainty of this political moment?
Eleanor says: A long and well-known tradition of philosophical thinking about emotions and politics; Aristotle In Henry David Thoreau And until Amia Srinivasan and My Sha CherryI ask this exact question. Anger and fear are truly brave. When we know that they are perfectly rational, how are we intended to ensure that we are completely flattened and not depleted by these feelings?
I never knew the answer. I don't know how to convey the difference between comfort and comfort as a balm as anesthesia.
When I was kind I had to move away from floods of tears, hiccups, memory days at school that were unable to handle the number of deaths during wartime. I'm fine as a child – death is scary. But you also see something like that in adulthood – “I turn off the TV and I can't stand it.” I'm worried there might be something like self-satisfaction about this.
But I also know that very well that an orange “bearing witness” with no clock treatment can torch your mental health and drain your ability to help. It can make you nihilistic, suspicious, pessimistic, and you have no help to such a person.
The problem is risking yo-yos between these two points.
I don't know exactly how to find a stable average. But maybe I can tell you what I'm trying to do.
First of all, I think it's worth distinguishing from “I feel good and feel better, so I want to manage my feelings.”
Political moments are not ultimately a collection of emotions. The most pressing question we face together is not how we manage how we feel. It is the means of end. The question is how to manage our emotions so that we can manifest the way we think we should, For others, for the world we want. The reason it appears is not to make you feel better. It may make you feel sick. The more you get to know each day the various forms of motionless forces, the greater the personal risks of exposure, the worse you feel. But if we're not doing things now, we're stuck in bouncing between “overwhelming” and “sand heads.”
I think it's worth investing in hopes. Hope is compatible with a rather harsh view of how things actually look. You can think of things as going very badly, and although they will probably continue to go badly, there is still a fire of hope.
Finally, I think it's worth trying to learn from many smart and sensitive people who have overcome the darkness. The Internet and social media are not usually good places for deep insights, but there is no shortage of books to replace them. You can pay time and attention. It can be argued that involvement in despair-inducing material gives insight in return, not just bad emotions and fast content.
The key is that you don't necessarily feel better, but feel like you can make it appear at the most important moments.
