Managing my Political and our Collective Depression

Such a good article that captures much of what I have been feeling.

Political depression was a term I’d stumbled towards in trying to name the mixture of sorrow, distress, numbness, and nihilism that I was seeing again and again in flashes in the leftist and left-leaning people around me. It was marked by a sense of system immovability and stasis, a deeply-felt understanding that bad things were happening and would continue inexorably to happen, and most of all, a profound negative belief in one’s value and agency as a political subject.

Lack of agency is a perception, of course. We are not (yet) actively held down and prevented from taking action. But part of the game plan is to flood the zone and keep the relentless news cycle spinning over and over again so we all feel like there is little difference we can have. And it works.

The fact that a 2022 study found “85 million Americans suffer from politics-driven emotional problems, from depression to insomnia” is both mind-blowing and not surprising, with some declaring they have had suicidal thoughts due to politics. With the us vs. them rhetoric and the way it will tear relationships apart, its not surprising.

Paying attention to all the news you have no agency over is not a recipe for a healthy outlook about humanity. My own instinct is to ignore it, and for the summer, without a small commute shuttling kids to school I didn’t have much drive-time for which to consume my preferred news source, NPR. But soon, in September, I will. And I plan to listen.

The difference is how I choose to react. We all have a choice in how we react. I know I can’t let all the news get me angry. And I shouldn’t, because when it is necessary to be angry, I might have none left. When you operate at level 11 all the time, there is no where else to go. You can’t go higher than 11 (on a special made Gibson crate, anyway — Jokes for Nerds™).

The writer goes on to quote another writer with this idea:

We must understand the fatalistic submission of the population…as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. […] For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act.

What to do next is something I am still figuring out.