How to Weather the Storm
Without really meaning to, this week I’ve posted a few related articles around the theme of how to survive the next four years of the new oligarchical, authoritarian regime here in the US. I thought it would be helpful to compile them into one post, with excerpts that are particularly relevant or resonant.
Mishell Baker, who is living with “deadly, incurable cancer”, urges us to think about how we spend our time and allocate our energies:
So, there are times when I need to pay attention to the cancer, like, when I have to go to doctor’s appointments, take a medication on time, or make choices regarding self-care to increase my quality of life.
But when I am not doing those things, thinking about the cancer is actively harmful.
There are moments when I feel okay, and my daughter wants to play a video game with me. Or I have the chance to see a cool movie, or the urge to write a story.
I cannot do these things if I am paralyzed with horror and dismay thinking in detail about what’s happening in my body.
Whether there is the chance for a one-day miracle if I live long enough is irrelevant. The point is: I am alive, *today*, and at some point, I will not be. So if in a given moment I can make my or someone else’s life better, that is what I should be doing, rather than obsessing over my illness.
But every minute you focus on that horror when you are *not* actively doing something to evade or improve or ameliorate the situation (receiving chemo, taking Zofran, listening to the doctor, etc.), you are WASTING WHAT’S LEFT OF YOUR WILD PRECIOUS LIFE.
The same goes for all of you. Most of you have more time than I do (and it has taken a lot of work for me not to rage at that, and to feel genuine happiness and hope for you), but none of you have forever.
You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.
Mike Monteiro wrote about how to survive being online:
The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.
But the people spreading panic to generate attention for themselves? Be they elected idiots, or oligarchs, or regular folks like me and you — block at will.
Mike and I are both on Bluesky, where there is a culture of blocking attention-seekers instead of dunking on or arguing with them, which I believe has made it a better place to spend time than other current social networks. I hope that culture endures as the site grows.
Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens is a paper published by a group of scholars in 2022:
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring — choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.
And:
In sum, digital environments present new challenges to people’s cognition and attention. People must therefore develop new mental habits, or retool those from other domains, to prevent merchants of low-quality information from hijacking their cognitive resources. One key such competence is the ability to deliberately and strategically ignore information.
Kim Kelly shared some dos and don’ts and resources related to mutual aid, which will become more important over the next few years as our government leans into working against the people it’s supposed to be serving:
To make a crucial distinction, mutual aid is not charity; there is no means testing, no judgement, no quid pro quo or paternalistic notions about “saving” people. It’s about giving what you can to someone who needs it, and knowing that, if the roles were reversed, someone else would step in to help you.
Find the people who are already doing the work, and follow their lead. A common mistake that folks make when they’re newly invested in a cause or movement is feeling as though they need to start up their own brand-new organization in order to really make an impact. Your energy is better spent identifying the people and groups who have already been doing the kind of work you’re interested in, and then finding ways to get involved. Intentionally pooling time, resources, and people-power is far more effective than spreading them thinly and hoping for the best!
Keep showing up. It’s okay if you only have so much time or energy to contribute — we’re all human, and we’ve all got our own struggles — but making a firm commitment to continue participating in a group or an action is how to build up a real, durable network. Mutual aid is not just a disaster response, it’s a way of caring for one another, building stronger communities, and preparing for whatever life may throw at us next. It’s a labor of love — and a way of life.
“Pace yourself” is something I hear all the time from activists…it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
From my post on Laozi’s Dao De Jing:
The soft and yielding overcome the strong and powerful.
And some wisdom from The Wire’s Avon Barksdale about weathering long, hard times:
This ain’t no thing, man, you know what I mean? You come in here, man, and get your mind right — get in here and you do two days: that’s the day you come in this motherfucker and the day you get out this motherfucker.
I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry on my vacation and I wish I could share a few relevant passages from it, but in keeping with the theme of the book, I left it at my hotel’s communal library for someone else to read.
I don’t know where this fits, but I found this heartening from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (more of this energy from our elected officials please):
One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.
And finally, something I ran across this morning, from Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs:
Instead I just want to encourage you to join something. Please don’t feel like it has to be a political organization, unless you absolutely love Roberts’ Rules of Order. Find a group of people doing something you like, and join them. Join a bowling league. Find a book group. Join a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, if that’s the way your heart leans. If the first thing you try doesn’t bring you joy, try something else.
It took me a lot longer than it should have but eventually I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty about not sticking with the DSA. And I realized that search and rescue isn’t frivolous, and it wouldn’t be even if it was a disc golf team, or a neighborhood dinner swap, or a knitting circle, or a biking group. This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.
See also How to Be Productive in Terrible Times.
I’ve decided that part of what I’m doing to weather the storm is to keep doing what I’m doing here on kottke.org — that is, highlighting the creativity of humanity, telling the truth about what’s going on in the world, sharing dumb stuff that makes us laugh — and continue to develop an online community built around those things via the comments and other means. It feels good and purposeful to me to do this work and to support this fledgling community — you could say that I find it engaging.
Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
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