More world-sad

There’s been a disturbing trend in my conversations of late. I’ll say something like, “Will I see you next month at the thing?” and the person will answer, “I don’t know if I’ll be around in a month.”

Or I might ask how a family is coping with the loss of a loved one and the response will be about how it’s good that Aunt Wilma didn’t live to see the state the world is in.

Generally, what used to pass for passing the time of day has turned into some real apocalyptic dreadness.

And why shouldn’t it? Elections certainly reduce many people to their meanest, truest selves. The US seems to be not-so-quietly imploding, and you know if things go south there they will take the rest of us with them.

Oh, and a manicou ran over the Cats’ Father’s head. Life, eh? At least so far the manicou appears unharmed.

The first Head Space column was about the woeful condition of the world and how I carried not just my own pain, but a sense that I was holding on to a lot of what I called “world pain,” or what the Germans call Weltschmerz.

It’s a real thing: the state of the world – however big or small you perceive it – affects you. Think of it as seasonal affective disorder, only the season is all the time, it’s not about the weather and you can see the impact it’s having on more people than you.

Other than that, it’s exactly the same. I rather hoped that when the shine came off covid we’d lose some of the anxiety and terror that stalked us when we suspected every sneeze of being our last. And not in a good way.

Instead, I feel like it opened a sort of portal of doom. I wish I felt we were misled or had become melodramatic about the slightest things, but if anything, it’s the opposite.

So I’m back to having world-sad. Only this time I have a lot more company, and I didn’t even ask for it.

As I’ve watched the party get bigger, the thing that has really stood out was not how many more terrible things everyone seemed to be talking about, but how much they were absorbing and responding. As if they were really paying attention for the first time in their lives and the result seems to be…well, we have options.

There is the running around screaming that the house is burning down. Sometimes you’re the one in the house, sometimes you’re looking on from outside. Next we have the group made up of those curling up in a ball, increasingly afraid to leave the house, drive, share their views and exist as active members of society. Far be it from me to encourage anyone to leave a perfectly good couch, but we need to talk.

People offer what they mean as useful advice, like: you should limit how much you watch or read about wars and who’s trying to take over the world.

I find this unhelpful. If I am becoming unhinged over Gaza, more often than not, the only way to feel I have some control over my reaction is to feel informed. I’m not haring off looking into dark corners of the web to find videos of dead bodies. Mainstream news is more than enough.

If you’ve had one truly traumatic event in your life, it can be hard to shake the memory of it. Think of it: just one thing (I don’t mean you need to think about a bad thing that happened to you). Just one thing and it can stay with you for a lifetime.

We are facing a barrage of terrible things happening all around us. I don’t know how to stop thinking about gangs here at home. I don’t know how not to worry about every immigrant everywhere. Or human trafficking – how do I flip a switch and forget that kidnapping and slavery are alive and well?

And again I say, I’m not the only one obsessing. And when so many are feeling as I do, that morass into which we are sinking becomes not only vile to the individual but toxic to all of us.

It may be more than world-sad now. Group-sad is something for which I was not prepared. Is it the helplessness that makes it all feel worse and more damaging?

Whatever it is for any of us, I think it’s important not to trivialise it. More of us seem to have it. We must think about the what-to-do-about-it bit.