Particularly - America.
I personally have found that, I live in the past to cope. Nostalgia is my drug. It sometimes doesn’t help because all it does is that it makes me yearn and beg for things to be back to where things were. Because it warps my mind into opening time capsules whenever I watch an old show or listen to an episode of some niche radio show that long stopped producing new material.
However, it helps because, it at least reminds me that there are some things that I can revisit. If I couldn’t revisit anything, play the games I played, read the books I read, watched the movies/shows I used to, then I’d be up shit’s creek because I’d have to face the fucked up things people consider what are the ‘best that’s offered’.
One thing I’ve been doing is doing random online classes instead of doom scrolling. There’s a ton of free ones that you can do at your own pace and spend an hour or two each day learning new stuff. Just generally being more mindful and curating my media inputs and replacing algorithmic rage inducement with better stuff. Here’s a few examples, but there’s tons all over the web:
Organize in your community. Doing something/anything will help alleviate the anxiety and stress you are feeling.
Avoid news. Turn off internet. Literally, stop looking for like two weeks. The difference is palatable. I’ve used this technique a handful of times over the years.
The old “ignorance is bliss” strategy. Tried and true.
Look on the bright side, when’s the last time you ever heard of the word famine?
That’s a valid and useful thought.
Poorly, to be perfectly honest.
Stoicism.
It does not make sense to worry about things outside my ability to change. Humanity has survived significantly worse. All I can do is prepare, run, lift weights, and whatever else can be useful.
I don’t.
I think most people yearn for the past, and always have. People who grew up in communist East Germany (the country) even long for the glory days of the German “Democratic” Republic too. The term Ostalgia (East-algia) was coined for that. I think everyone long for a past that never truly existed and was only rose-colored by the innocence of childhood and early youth. Fewer people die in violent conflicts each year (at least up until the invasion of Ukraine), childhood deaths decline, yet the world seems extremely violent and polarized. I think the world was always violent and polarized, but we didn’t have social media and the internet to broadcast and amplify the violence and our differences.
I recently started learning to play guitar and am addicted to it. Really keeps you in the moment and makes your forget the current state of the world while playing, at least for a bit.
Spread awareness about it and change my actions to mitigate the impact of it if I am able to do so. For example by protesting or boycotting.
Only reading about things and taking no action tends to pile up the emotions.
I also live in the past probably to an unhealthy level. I have a pretty massive data hoard of old 90’s/early 2000’s everything, tv shows, movies, old commercials, radio songs, magazines, and a huge collection of old games. I collect as many pictures as I can find of old things I remember, old home videos from the time period of people just like walking around in malls and stores that no longer exist, etc. I draw on that past period of happiness, because I haven’t felt genuinely happy in over 10 years at this point.
I try to fully immerse myself I guess as a form of dissociation/escapism. When I’m dragged back to reality or unable to preoccupy myself my mind goes to dark places. I cope with weed and alcohol. I take naps when I can when my mind is breaking. Sometimes it builds up till I have psychotic breaks, or self harm. I guess that’s an ‘outlet’ but it’s really not good. Therapy can help sometimes, but only insofar as helping me to cope with the outside world, but there’s only so much that can be helped there when the problem is external and almost entirely unavoidable. There’s only so much I can tell myself “this is fine” while the house is burning around me.
I’m a wreck. I do not cope well.
I weigh the pros and cons of committing suicide every single day.
When I was a teenager I was way into eastern spirituality and meditation, taoism. People think meditating is having no thoughts. The thoughts are still there. They speed through your mind like cars on a train. Meditation is letting each individual car pass you buy. You let the cars blur by, not trying to focus on the individual cars. It’s a blur, and you eventually see them as a train going by not the singular box cars.
I bring this up because during some of the darker days in my life, I let time pass by me in such a way. Each day fading into the next, slipping through my fingers as though it were sand. It helped me not focus on the train car I was currently in. Carrying on autopilot. Like fast forwarding on that Click movie.
Sorry this was so long winded. I just have shared your feelings for a long time throughout my life, and this stuff helped me through what I felt trapped in earlier on life. Addicted to spooky drugs. Homeless. No jobs. Felt like I was at the bottom on the ocean there was so much pressure. I hope you find your way through these feelings. Not tryjng to tell you how to feel or what to do. I definitely understand how you feel. Some one else cant make you feel better.
Better circumstances would be a huge help i know that. I made it to the next day bitter and jaded and pissed. I wish life could be easy, and giving up is easy. I can’t tell you for sure things will get better, but time will carry us forward. If you can’t find something in the now, live for the maybe.
Peace.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. I appreciate it and your perspective. Logically I can understand and accept what you’re saying, but emotionally I’m not so lucky.
I’ve struggled with my mental health for most of my life anyway, but I lost my wife, 2 cats, FIL and everything I owned in a house fire that I, for whatever reason, walked away from last April. I’ve spent the last year trying to understand it, and the conclusion I’ve come to is death. No matter the highs or the lows, the recognition of the present or the expectation of better days, death seems to hold the most weight. I’m tired, you know? Not like a long day tired, but like my soul, if it exists, is tired.
I’m in therapy and have been for years, and I know the tricks pretty well. I have a cat and a few friends that for better or for worse guilt me into staying, but they don’t know this pain thankfully. We’re all going to die one day anyway so what’s it matter if I, 1 meaningless person out of 8 billion, goes early? That’s where I weigh the pros and cons.
Don’t an hero when there’s cool games like super smash bros and mar!o party.
Who says we’re coping
Therapy, family, plotting to overturn the system in my head, imagining carrying out those plans with them going swimmingly, imagining myself as the warlord-poet of the enlightened utopic society I would erect afterwards, imagining other things.
There’s a lot of imagining.
Try and see the optimistic side of things. Like, maybe if Trump and his ilk are successful, they truly will try and make things better for the world. I know it’s a long shot, but what the fuck else can I do?
