Hi, Carolyn: I’m a millennial feeling overwhelmingly hopeless lately. Between the children suffering in concentration camps, impending climate disaster and a government that is utterly ineffective and controlled by a handful of people who make me feel terrorized on a daily basis, life is feeling meaningless to me.
I am afraid to have children. I am worried nothing we do matters anymore. I am upset that everyone is buried too deeply in their online worlds to tune into how urgent these problems are. I am not seeing the point in anything and to “think positive” seems impossible without going into denial and pretending things are okay when they’re not. What can I do? — Everything Is on Fire
Everything Is on Fire: What we do always matters, to us if nothing else, though interconnectedness amplifies our actions in ways that I think we fail to appreciate. Every person whose life you touch, even if you just graze it once in passing, is affected by your choices.
So instead of living in a macro place of hopelessness, please push yourself deliberately to a micro place of purpose. (“It’s a Wonderful Life” captures this, and gets quite dark before it lightens.)
Thinking this way is not denial. It’s living life on what has been the normal human scale since there were humans. “Online worlds” are so recent as to be a nanosecond’s worth of history.
And, with all due respect, I think the “online worlds” phenomenon is as guilty of bombarding you with urgent problems as it is of sheltering people from them. Your exposure to the ills you cite is disproportionately high [this was before COVID-19 — CH] relative to even a couple of decades ago when 24-hour news was in its infancy and people still had to go into the den before the TV could blast them with more information than they could usefully process.
We now have immediate and constant access to information without proportionate access — not even close — to ways to respond usefully to it.
So. First thing I suggest is unplugging. Not permanently, just until you feel less overwhelmed and anxious. Be local, be present, be productive, be generous with your time and effort toward your immediate environment. And when you resume paying attention, choose responsible sources and set limits.
With all your newly freed up time, have a nice long date with Steven Pinker at stevenpinker.com. Add data-supported optimism to your information diet. He is excellent and persuasive on the gap between what we perceive to be wrong and what actually is, and therefore the gap between what we perceive to be helpful and what actually is.
Then, if and when you’re ready, pick one or two ways you can work toward the general good that will allow you to see the impact of your efforts.
Also, I say it last but it should come first, please check in with your primary-care physician. It’s not unusual for external anxieties to be internalized into clinical ones.
Re: Millennial: Volunteer. Donate. I find unplugging and ignoring these huge issues to be part of the problem. — Be the Change!
Be the Change!: Yes, but even the most active activists need rest. Cycle out, regroup, cycle back in. (See also: my second-to-last paragraph.)
