Apologies for the Rage Explosion yesterday, that just needed to come out. So I let it. Because you know what? Sometimes it is healthy to do that. Sometimes it is good to acknowledge that Shit Going On In The World is actually bothering you, even if it's not something that is necessarily happening to you, directly.
This was the primary subject we talked about in therapy this week. I have been struggling with a general sense of fatigue and depression for a while now, and since there's not really much going "wrong" with my personal or professional lives right now, the only thing I can really attribute it to is a continual sense of being completely and utterly fed up with, as the cliché goes, "(waves arms around) ALL THIS".
It is easy to get yourself into a mindset where you start telling yourself that you should not waste time and energy worrying about things which are not directly and immediately affecting you, personally. Focus on your own general wellbeing and being a good person, the conventional wisdom goes, and you'll be happy, even if no-one else is.
Except that isn't true. No man is an island, and in this interconnected modern world, it is very fucking difficult to disconnect completely from What Is Happening In The World. Not just because we are perpetually bombarded with it thanks to a combination of traditional and social media, but because What Is Happening In The World is having a marked, measurable and demonstrable impact on the basics of human interaction: the way we are with one another, the way we treat one another and the way we talk to one another.
Part of the reason that All of This™ is so exhausting is because it often feels like there is no escape from it. These days, even small, private little communities primarily drawn together for friendship and mutual support reasons often end up devolving, at some point, into arguments about politics, AI and all the other shit. I have a few spaces online that have remained mercifully immune to that — but just as many where I simply don't want to raise my head and show my face any more, because I just cannot be arsed battling my way through all the yelling and the arguing and all the inexplicable water carrying for big corporations who very much do not have our best interests at heart.
Sociologists often suggest a lot of today's problems stem from the lack of A Third Place for most people: somewhere you can go that is not your home or your work. For many of us now, our home and are work are already the same thing, which has its own issues, of course, but with the massive decline in Third Places for people to go and do things and interact with other three-dimensional people, it's perhaps no surprise that the overall feelings of unrest that everyone is experiencing come out in the way they talk to one another online. After all, the person you're yelling at isn't "real", are they? They're just text on your screen.
Anyway, my thoughts have meandered through that somewhat, but the upshot of it all is simple. It's okay to feel run down, burnt out and fatigued by What Is Happening In The World, even if it's not something that appears to directly affect you. Because it does affect you. It affects where you feel safe, where you feel comfortable, where and how you want to express yourself. And if you find that The Way Things Just Are Now makes you feel like the number of places where you feel safe, comfortable and able to express yourself has contracted… well, you're not alone. That's very much where I am right now. And I'm not going to pretend it's otherwise.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
Discover more from I'm Not Doctor Who
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
