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copperbadge:
thisnewdevilry replied to your link “The Great Mortality”
… your selling pitch alone has guaranteed my anxiety level will remain at 12 for the rest of the day. How do you not dissolve into a panicked puddle of despair? Desperate and inquiring minds need to know.
Exposure, probably. I have to read a lot of news in my job. :D
Part of it is that I have spent my entire life narrowly dodging disaster. Was I in San Francisco when the 89 quake hit? No, I was across the bay. Was I in Boston when the entire eastern seaboard had a calamitous power outage in 2002? I sure was, but Boston was the only city with power, because it was the only region on its own grid. That kind of near-miss has dogged my whole life, so I can either conclude that I live a charmed life or that I won’t see the one that gets me.
Also, whenever I get nervous about something like that, nervous about some impending doom or nearby disaster, I do as much research as possible. For someone who is deeply afraid of flying, the statistics on aircraft crashes won’t help, but for someone who is just anxious about it, knowing how very few people die in airplanes helps. Back in the early 2000s there was a scare about a very specific kind of avian flu, and I was like, well, I get sick a lot, I’ll research the symptoms. But I couldn’t find them anywhere. Want to know why? The avian flu they were reporting on was theoretical. It didn’t exist. It was a thought experiment by an epidemiologist. Who was in a position to know what might happen, but had merely suggested it as a possible occurrence. But people were flipping their shit about it and buying all kinds of crazy supposed remedies.
Which leads me into the other thing I do when I’m nervous about something: I ask myself if there’s anything I can do about it or if there’s any way I can prepare to survive it without impacting my quality of life. Almost always, the answer to both of those questions is no. Nothing I can personally do will impact the likelihood of this happening or not happening, and very little will help me survive it if it does, so there’s no point in worrying. I’ll do my activism because collective action may help, but if the only thing I can do to survive the impending apocalypse is stockpiling canned goods, pass.
None of this will help if you have an anxiety disorder, of course. But if you’re just an anxious person who feels fucked up about the state of the world, it may help to calm you. If you can’t do anything, why worry? Make art, do your activism, and probably you won’t see the one that gets you. (Welcome to 1918.)
(Your picture was not posted)
copperbadge:
thisnewdevilry replied to your link “The Great Mortality”
… your selling pitch alone has guaranteed my anxiety level will remain at 12 for the rest of the day. How do you not dissolve into a panicked puddle of despair? Desperate and inquiring minds need to know.
Exposure, probably. I have to read a lot of news in my job. :D
Part of it is that I have spent my entire life narrowly dodging disaster. Was I in San Francisco when the 89 quake hit? No, I was across the bay. Was I in Boston when the entire eastern seaboard had a calamitous power outage in 2002? I sure was, but Boston was the only city with power, because it was the only region on its own grid. That kind of near-miss has dogged my whole life, so I can either conclude that I live a charmed life or that I won’t see the one that gets me.
Also, whenever I get nervous about something like that, nervous about some impending doom or nearby disaster, I do as much research as possible. For someone who is deeply afraid of flying, the statistics on aircraft crashes won’t help, but for someone who is just anxious about it, knowing how very few people die in airplanes helps. Back in the early 2000s there was a scare about a very specific kind of avian flu, and I was like, well, I get sick a lot, I’ll research the symptoms. But I couldn’t find them anywhere. Want to know why? The avian flu they were reporting on was theoretical. It didn’t exist. It was a thought experiment by an epidemiologist. Who was in a position to know what might happen, but had merely suggested it as a possible occurrence. But people were flipping their shit about it and buying all kinds of crazy supposed remedies.
Which leads me into the other thing I do when I’m nervous about something: I ask myself if there’s anything I can do about it or if there’s any way I can prepare to survive it without impacting my quality of life. Almost always, the answer to both of those questions is no. Nothing I can personally do will impact the likelihood of this happening or not happening, and very little will help me survive it if it does, so there’s no point in worrying. I’ll do my activism because collective action may help, but if the only thing I can do to survive the impending apocalypse is stockpiling canned goods, pass.
None of this will help if you have an anxiety disorder, of course. But if you’re just an anxious person who feels fucked up about the state of the world, it may help to calm you. If you can’t do anything, why worry? Make art, do your activism, and probably you won’t see the one that gets you. (Welcome to 1918.)
(Your picture was not posted)
