I’m just a normal civvie software engineer, but this is actually a thought process that I have struggled with mightily, and continue to do so: as a conscientious human who has a strong interest in history, is it reasonable and ethical for me to medicate myself into quiescence, when my anxiety and distress is directly caused by the fact that I care about the world and happen to know a good deal about current events?
Or, if you’re more neurotypical / are better at compartmentalization: is it ethically ok to just straight up ignore all the systematic, horrifyingly bad shit going on in the world?
Yeah.
I struggled with panic attacks in the military and during an aid mission we brought a bunch of medical staff from other countries with us.
So I talked with a German psychiatrist.
His advice was basically:
Which helped a lot more than it sounds like would have.
He didn’t try to pill me up or anything or say it was my fault for how I’m handling it.
Just very simple matter of fact told me my response was 100% rational.
What the fuck does the average American have to be happy about right now? Millennials being unhappy is because life sucks for lots of us.
If you are curious, that is part of logotherapy, which was started by a German.
“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” ― Victor Frankl, Man’s Search For Ultimate Meaning
I’m just a normal civvie software engineer, but this is actually a thought process that I have struggled with mightily, and continue to do so: as a conscientious human who has a strong interest in history, is it reasonable and ethical for me to medicate myself into quiescence, when my anxiety and distress is directly caused by the fact that I care about the world and happen to know a good deal about current events?
Or, if you’re more neurotypical / are better at compartmentalization: is it ethically ok to just straight up ignore all the systematic, horrifyingly bad shit going on in the world?
We’re all stuck here right now, and no individual can really change anything that matters on their own.
But if everyone does a little and helps each other out, all of us added together can make ridiculous amounts of change with very little effort.
Like that whole “think globally, act locally” thing that I only remember from that Pauly Shore movie Biodome.
These aren’t impossible problems to fix, we just need to get enough people to acknowledge we need to fix shit. Once we do that, the rest is easy.
So it feels like impossible tasks, but easier than it looks