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’.
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.