November thoughts

11/19/24

I believed that I could put aside my anxious spiraling, catastrophizing thoughts into a box. I mostly succeeded in doing so. I quit social media a week before the election. It's now been about 3.5 weeks without Facebook. I eliminated my Twitter account. I've eliminated NY Times (about a month ago). I don't read the news. I actively try to avoid it.

I've embraced the new life that has come into Bsky (blue sky), but it's with some trepidation. If people post about politics, either via worry about the incoming president's staff picks or worrying about potential laws and actions, I can't help thinking about it throughout the day. It's certainly not as paralyzing as my dread in October was, but it's creeping in that direction.

I find that I'm still left with these strong feelings about politics. I get angry at the idea of completely unprofessional people being in charge of things. I get angry at how much I fear I will have to fight to prove my value, or to prove that my values are worth preserving. I worry I might have to spend years of my time in the future fighting a system that will eventually collapse anyways, all while my gentle, curious mind is snuffed out by all the chaos and noise. Will I grow to believe that research is futile? Is there no place for introverts in the future of America?

All these things have been on my mind of late. They're theoretical scenarios, I know, so nothing is real yet. But believing in what is happening, I find that I am forced to make some very negative conclusions about Americans - ones that I don't feel that I made in the past. This is what concerns me.

I used to feel that people were simply ill-informed about a lot of issues. That probably has always been true, but I find myself believing that people don't care about what is true nowadays. That's more concerning. And where my brain goes with this is to believe that others don't care about knowledge, just power. If knowledge has no access to power, then in a selfish world, it never makes sense to pursue it. You're left concluding that knowledgeable people are expendable. I'm also left concluding that most people believe I don't matter.

I feel like I used to believe that, fundamentally, people should care for each other. Show someone examples of how others struggle or talk to people about your life and they will empathize. It's human nature. Yet, we're given a political landscape where people have excuses to reject most other people. There are excuses to dislike immigrants. There are excuses to dislike Latinos and Black people. There are excuses to dislike LGBTQ folks. Accept all of them and you're left with people who have drunk the kool-aid of structural prejudice and dog-whistle politics. And it's not that I didn't believe that prejudiced people existed before, it's that I believed that they would want to change. If I now believe people don't want to change or learn about others, then I have trouble believing in their fundamental goodness. 

Taken to its conclusion, if no one wants to change their views about the world or others, then they learn nothing from me. After all, it makes no sense to engage with people who have no interest in learning from others. Dark thoughts, surely.

So, without social media, as I'm not anxiously spiraling worrying about the future, my brain has still made what seems to me to be very logical conclusions about the nature of people. I suppose that the scientist in me wants proof that most people are still fundamentally good, while the child in me wants to believe that I don't live in a country as hateful as I fear it is.