Tag: climate psychology

Reality intruding

Now that climate disaster news has moved into the (American) mainstream media, a few caveats are in order.

First, the studies will be soft-pedaled to a degree. If you would read them, and the raw data associated with them, you would get the whole, horrible message. But newspapers and other media in the US can’t go doomer at this point. The problem, as always, is people believe there are solutions to every problem and demand them in articles about climate change. If a solution is not included, it will be dismissed by most readers.

Second, in general, people don’t want to believe they and their world are doomed. If they actually did buy off on it, wouldn’t you think many people would cash in their assets, quit their jobs, stop buying all the ridiculous shit that fuels our retail economy and essentially, check out on capitalism? Do you understand what that would do to the markets and the fortunes of those titans of industry who depend on the worker bees to produce and consume?

By the time you see total honesty about climate disaster in the media, someone you know personally is probably already starving or dead from a climate disaster. And even then, you’ll have Fox News blaming people for waiting around for a government handout rather than stalking the neighborhood for dogs and cats to shoot. After all, dem’s good eatin’ when you’re starving? Ain’t that right Kilmeade?

In any case, the fact that the major media is allowing progressively more frightful news, however its couched, into the information sphere, is and will continue contributing to more cases of ‘eco-anxiety’ (ow whatever they’re calling it this week), which is the fastest growing field of psychology.

I’ve even brought it up with my quasi-conservative (likes Trump on Facebook) psychologist myself. I don’t quite remember how we got on the subject, but I wanted to back away from it, but she wanted to know more. I really didn’t want to open her eyes (if that’s possible) since she has a nine-year-old daughter, but remembering that she is a pro-life Trump lover, I decided to let curiosity kill the cat.

I gave her two names to Google: Jem Bendell and Guy McPherson. I told her between the two of them, you’ll get a good introduction to, um, this ‘issue.’

I see her again tomorrow. I wonder how far down the rabbit hole she went?

The doomer groups on Facebook that I’m a member have been talking about this more and more: how do we continue on knowing what we know. As you can imagine, the answer is unique to every person. I’ve said that, in a large part, my own mental illness/personality disorder has provided a shield of sorts from emotional crash and burns. Basically, when you’ve had enough trauma in your life, something like the end of the world doesn’t seem so bad, especially when you’re my age. And besides, being something of a misanthrope, I’d like to like long enough to see Jeff Bezos’ drown in his limousine trying to escape a inundated Seattle.

Then I have no problem going with a smile on my face.

But it’s only when I turn to that other side of me – the sensitive nice guy who appreciates art and beauty, that my iron helmet of denial cracks. When I hear a particularly beautiful piece of music or see a painting or remember a scene from a musical it all is too much. We did create so much beauty, well, one part of our community did. And all these wonderful books, movies, plays, paintings and music will be gone, perhaps consigned to the memories of a handpicked group of survivors, ala ‘Fahrenheit 451.’

How could the same race create such beauty and be stupid and greedy enough to destroy the ecosystem that housed these works? It’s enough to cast my soul into a deep melancholy.

Shrinks will be boning up on treating a different kind of grief if they aren’t already. Grief will be the major issue of our time.

The question then becomes: how does one soak in the beauty that still exists without going to pieces? I have no answer to that. All I know is that we only have so much more time to experience the best of humankind and nature. I want to have some memories playing in my head when I go.

Like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green:

You’re the star in your very own end of times movie

  • See that guy reading the paper? That could be you!
    (from ‘Deep Impact’)

How good is your imagination?

When I was a kid, between the abuse I got from my family and the abuse I endured from the nuns at Catholic school, I developed a rich inner world.

Translation: I lived in a vivid fantasy world.

It was my number one coping mechanism. All day long I would ‘daydream’ where I was the hero of the world inside my mind. At night, the wonderful ruminations would continue until I fell asleep, perchance to dream.

What did I dream about? Mostly I’d create scenarios in which girls would like me but also that I would someday be a football hero or a super soldier in some war movie.

As I got older and my mental illnesses coalesced, I would literally tune out. I would begin to disassociate, if the situation I was in was too unbearable.

But of all the scenarios I would construct for myself, daydreams would combine with disassociation and my life would become a movie. Being the star of my own movie was the longest lasting and most popular of all my fantasies. It would get so serious that I would literally be watching my own movie through my eyes.

I would add opening credits, opening music, a soundtrack, etc.

One of my favorite movie genres is apocalyptic or disaster movies. I have watched quite a few of them. Name one and chances are I’ve seen it. My favorite movie of all time is Dr. Strangelove which mixes humor with global thermonuclear war. And copulating like rabbit in mine shafts.

I realize I’ve gone a long way in this essay to get to the point. It’s coming.

So. I always wondered how I would react (or act) in such a movie.

So now, I’ve gotten my perverse wish – I’m a player in a disaster movie; a live action dystopian cinema with a cast of millions. But the movie we’re a part of contains a script that is written solely for us.

I’m in a movie. I’m well aware of the scenario and script. I’m watching it through my own eyes. Every news report, every conversation, every movie I make, I find that I’m reacting as if this all leads to a crisis.

Well, I don’t do this every waking moment (thank goodness), but enough. Surround yourself in climate crisis news long enough and your mind will start playing tricks on you as well.

Many people are looking for coping mechanisms to handle the whole idea of rapid climate change and the end of the world as we know it. This is serious stuff. Immersing oneself in the increasingly depressing realm of climate news are now sending people to psychologists. Some people are having a hard time functioning if they think too much about it.

It’s customary to quote Shakespeare here, so I will.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

— The Bard

This, of course, it literally true. So why not go with it?

In my quest to help people with this issue, I offer this coping action. Into climate activism? You’re playing a part. Into hedonism? You’re playing a part too. You can be the classic ‘method actor.’

A funny thing happened on the way to the library! You’ll never believe it!
(from ‘The Day After Tomorrow’)

Changing your kid’s diaper? Making the bed? Yep – you’re performing ordinary actions in an increasingly disorderly world. You write the script, you play your part, you do your best with your role. Drama is the spice of human existence.

One day you’re doing your job as always and – what is that?!
From ‘Deep Impact’

Is this healthy? In the long run, probably not. But as a stopgap measure when things get too much to bear, putting yourself in a state of slightly altered reality will keep your mind occupied. It costs a whole lot less than therapy.

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the suck

As a person with mental illness, you would be correct to wonder how I respond to all the increasingly dire climate news. After all, although you wouldn’t know this, I’ve my periods of suicidal ideation.

I’ve found that I no longer have any periods of suicidal ideation.

How can that be?

To understand why that is, remember that each person with a mental illness will see and react to things just a little bit differently that someone who even has the same diagnosis.

Also remember, that the external motivations of those of us so afflicted work in unexpected ways.

I no longer have suicidal ideation since the endgame of abrupt climate change has placed an event horizon on my life anyway. I merely have to give in to every sybaritic pleasure I’ve ever wanted to indulge in and wait for the inevitable.

Having a 10-year (or less) event horizon on societal collapse, renders quite a bit of the things that deeply worry me, well, moot. In a way it’s like the tagline of my all-time favorite movie ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

  • Or this. This is a pretty good way of dealing with things.

The fuel that runs my conditions and all their attendant symptoms are the things ordinary people worry about all the time but get blown out of proportion by myself. Things like: worrying about keeping my job, whether everyone can be made to like me, will I ever find my purpose in life, am I going to die of cancer, whether I have enough to retire on, etc. etc.

The likelihood of social collapse due to global climate change has freed me from all that.

The one thing I have learned is not to worry about things that are out of my control and climate change and societal collapse are WAY out of my control.

And to add something else that must be admitted: the medications I am on make it very easy for me not to worry about things I can’t control. The downside is that I’m unable to experience joy.

It’s a necessary tradeoff, unfortunately. Me unmedicated is not good for myself or anyone else.

I have dark thoughts sometimes

I’ve spent a lifetime vainly trying to find a mission. Climate change and societal collapse has given me one: you’re reading it. And my podcast as well.

Why do I do it?

Because I can and do feel terrible for the people mentioned in this article because I used to worry as they do – to the point of being all but dysfunctional. It’s not their fault – worrying about having your future cut short is very legitimate.

Being something of an empath, I don’t have to personally know the people in the article to image the pain they are in. Everything I do now is an attempt, in some small way, to help them.

I believe we must not lie about what is coming. My greatest fear, one I still possess, is being blindsided by bad news. Setting people up to be blindsided by the sudden realization that climate change and its attendant societal collapse was not a Socialist plot by evil scientists is going to hit people very hard.

Not that people shouldn’t protest or do what they can on a local level to help the earth, but we need to be realistic: for every tree we plant, Brazil cuts down 30 and the industrialized nations pump untold millions of cubic tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the threat of a giant methane threat looms. And with Trump and Johnson in charge of the US and the UK, things will just get worse.

Physically, most people can bear a surprising amount of pain and stress. Mentally, things are a different story nowadays. Western societies, especially the US, have given their people the expectations that each succeeding generation will have it better than the one before, technology will free us from our mundane existence and provide us with so many wonderful toys, and human progress is measured in an ever-increasing GDP which will one day make everyone rich.

or not. . .

The whole idea that everything in that preceding paragraph set us up for this disaster is something people are not handling well. They shouldn’t be expected to.

This is not license for people like me to run around pointing at people and screaming ‘you’re all gonna die and you deserve it you bastard Capitalists!’

Most people simply believed what they were told. And why would the government and corporations lie to us? In the absence of other competing information, what were people to think? Surely a climate Armageddon seems so far-fetched!

Although I consider myself an agnostic now, I was raised Catholic. In Catholic school, while my eyes glazed over during most classes, it seems that Catholic social teaching, derided as it was at the time by many of my classmates, stuck. And the whole ethos of Catholic social teaching can be summed up thusly: ‘we are made for service to care for all men.’

The masses of people are going to have a hard time imagining their hopes, dreams and aspirations being cut cruelly short. They deserve our care and sympathy, not derision. The denialists, well, OK, they deserve derision, but ordinary people need care.

I’m 56 years of age. It’s easy for me to say I’ve had a good run. But for my sons, for your children, for those embarking on their adult lives, for lives of those being born now, this is a monstrous thing.

Even if we can hold civilization together for 10 years or more, our children will remember these times of relative plenty as they live on a globe radically different than the one they knew just a scant decade ago.

What will we tell them? How will we prepare people for this? How do we ease the pain of knowing, of realizing? How can we nurse humankind into their fate?

There’s an oft-quoted line from the movie Braveheart: “Every man dies. Not every man really lives.”

And there’s another, just as important: “I’m so afraid. Give me the strength to die well.”

Pennsylvania irregular militia, c. 2039

Regarding the first quote it is imperative that we assist people, not to stand in frozen terror, but to go out and live as they have never lived before; to try everything they’ve ever wanted to do; go everywhere they’ve wanted to go. If you feel called to devote the remainder of your life to the Earth through Extinction Rebellion or another group – great! Bucket lists must be honored. Enemies must be forgiven. We must reconcile ourselves to whatever spirituality we seek. For the love of all that’s holy – live with reckless abandon. The future truly is now.

Climate dystopia? You’re living in it!

As to the second one, if what I have suggested people do in the paragraph above is done well, then dying well, whenever and however it comes, will come with satisfaction of a life, perhaps shorted than we envisioned, but just as well lived as any longer.

When I was in Catholic elementary school, we had a nun who taught math to the junior high grades. In our intentions said at the beginning of class, she would make us all pray for a happy death.

Happy happy death death happy happy death. . .

As you can imagine, this was quite a shock to 13-year-olds. But as she explained it, the concept was very important. In her mind, when the time came, we should look with favor upon our lives as servants to God and God would look favorably upon us and, thus, we had nothing to fear from death but only the grand expectation of an eternal afterlife.

For those of us not Catholic or Christian, a ‘happy death’ can mean being reconciled to all that is good in your life, forgiving yourselves and others of transgressions, and having a minimum of regrets to how one has spent their time on Earth. Or it can mean whatever the bloody Hell you want it to mean.

I know one day that I will face the fear that my medication and psychology has buried. Until that time, I must do what I can to help people with the transition.

So, I dedicate this to all of healers of the Earth, of humanity, the people in the helping professions, all those who believe they are their brothers’ keeper. We all have work to do.

Yeah, I know, it’s Doreen Virtue, but I wanted to throw some niceness out there