How do I navigate the fear, anger and uncertainty of this political moment?
Eleanor says: A long and distinguished tradition in philosophical thinking about emotions and politics, from Aristotle to Henry David Thoreau and through to Amia Srinivasan and Myisha Cherry, asks exactly this question. Anger and fear are really enervating. How are we meant to make sure we aren’t totally flattened and depleted by these feelings when we also know they’re totally reasonable?
I’ve never known the answer. I don’t know how to tell the difference between comfort as balm and comfort as anaesthetic.
When I was in kindy I had to be hauled away from a Remembrance Day thing at school in floods of tears, hiccuping and unable to process the number of wartime deaths. Fine as a kid – death is scary. But you see something like it in adulthood too – “turn the TV off, I can’t bear it”. I worry there’s something self-indulgent about this, as though we who aren’t suffering the things on the news should nonetheless be spared the pain of hearing about them.
But I also know, so well, that unblinking, Clockwork Orange-style “bearing witness” can torch your mental health and deplete your capacity to help. It can turn you nihilistic, suspicious, pessimistic, and you’re no help to anyone like that.
The trouble is we risk yo-yoing between these two points: either feeling so much of it is unbearable or, as self-protection, not feeling it enough.
I don’t exactly know how to find the stable mean. But maybe I can tell you what I’m trying.
First, I think it’s worth distinguishing “I want to manage my feelings so I can help and live well” and “I want to stop feeling this way because it feels bad”.
Political moments are not ultimately aggregations of feelings. The most pressing question we face together is not how to manage how we feel. That’s a means to an end. The question is how can we manage our feelings so that we can show up in the ways we think we should, for other people, for the world we want. The reason to show up is not to make you feel better. You may very well feel worse. The greater your daily acquaintance with various forms of unmoving power, the greater your personal risk by exposure, the worse you may feel. But if we’re not doing things now, we’re bound to get stuck bouncing between “overwhelmed” and “head in sand”.
I think it’s worth investing in hope. Hope is compatible with a pretty grim outlook on how things actually are. You can think things are going very badly, and even that they’ll probably keep going badly, but still have the fire of hope.
Finally, I think it’s worth trying to learn from the many clever, sensitive people who’ve lived through dark things. The internet and social media are not typically good places for deep insight, but there’s no shortage of books that can take their place. You can be selective with your time and attention: when you engage with despair-inducing material, you can insist it gives you insight in return, not just bad feelings and fast-moving content.
The point isn’t just to feel better necessarily but to feel in ways that allow us to show up in the moments that matter most.
