As luck would have it, I came across two different series of blog posts involving, well, dealing with the way stuff happens in the world.
The first source is a series sent to me by my friend ADD. “If you have any interest at all in where our civilization is going and how we got to this perilous moment, please take a look at Professor Sid Smith’s new series How To Enjoy The End of the World. You’ll find far more reasons to have hope and even know how you want to proceed than you might think; the title is NOT meant to be funny or ironic.
“He’s absolutely serious about making the most out of living in a time of the collapse, starting with understanding why it’s happening.” If you watch none of the other videos, check out the prologue “Why You Shouldn’t Let Collapse Get You Down.”
Greens
The other was two videos in the Vlogbrothers series. Hank Green asked Are You Stuck in The Sad Gap? In his piece, Hank notes all the myriad topics he’s concerned about at about 2:25, and the list he says is incomplete.
Hank writes in the notes: “I… think that there are some people who think that The Sad Gap is the honorable, correct place to be. As if you are a bad person if you get out of the place where you only feel hopelessness and outrage. I am, frankly, OVER THAT. I think it’s making things much worse. And I never thought it was the right thing to do and the moment I realized that other people did, I got very worried.”
His brother John Green replied in How Do You Cross the Sad Gap? In four minutes, he notes how impossible it is to fix EVERYTHING, even if you wanted to. He notes what worked for him. Now, he’s focused on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, where he, with tons of help, has actually turned the tide in that narrow, specific area.
I get it
I see the despair out there, everywhere. “OMG, OMG, what can little old ME do about Ukraine and gun violence and racism and environmental catastrophe” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? The fretting, I posit, is totally human and understandable, and not terribly helpful. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t happen to me from time to time.
Maybe you and like-minded people can do… something about one of the things you are most passionate about. Or at least recontextualize it. But trying to fret over each perceived crisis until we move on to the next one is not particularly productive.
