Out from Under (slowly)
a brief interruption
It’s been a month (or two). I’ll be honest—I’ve never been a big believer in the idea of seasonal affective disorder (the fact that it acronyms to SAD makes it all the more suspect for me). At the same time, though, it feels wrong to suggest that we’re not affected by sweeping changes in our environment. So there’s probably something to it, even if SAD doesn’t quite rise the level of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
February is a challenging month for me, even when it’s relatively mild (and it hasn’t been). There are times here in upstate NY where it feels like the snow will never end, where leaving the house feels risky (the wrist I broke a couple of years ago still aches sometimes). On top of that, the mismatch between the academic/fiscal year and the calendar year means that there are all sorts of decisions and deadlines that surface in February and early March. And then, of course, there’s the near-constant stream of political updates issuing from Washington.
Just about every newsletter I read has at one point (or several) made reference to the classic Bannon strategy of “flood[ing] the zone with shit,” and it’s become to clear to many that this is their administrative modus operandi as well, whether it’s gaslighting other countries’ leaders, letting a crew of unelected lapdoges ransack our own country’s private data, or churn out piles of executive orders copypasted from the fascist chumbucket that they lied about disavowing during the campaign. That’s when they’re not outright attacking our allies, threatening them like street gangsters, or sucking up to the worst people on the planet.
Frankly, it’s exhausting, and it’s cold comfort1 to be told that exhaustion is the intended outcome. I’ve written before about how I had to pull a near-complete social media detox back in 2017 in order to make my anxiety levels and blood pressure manageable, and honestly, I find myself in a similar position now. The knock-on effects of the chaos in Washington are often unavoidable, and they make consistent, principled resistance much more difficult.
It hasn’t helped that some of our news outlets, as Parker Molloy described recently, have inadvertently cast themselves in a promotional role by repeatedly and frequently “breaking” news of this blizzard without engaging in critical thought. I finally had to cancel some of the notification services I use (see ya later, NYT) for all of the wolf they were crying. I just don’t need 5-10 emails a day about every random, stupid idea that appears on the circus peanut’s social media accounts.
Caitlin Dewey wrote a couple of weeks ago about “How to stay sane *AND* informed,” which itself is worth a read, but she focuses primarily on Matt Kiser’s What The Fuck Just Happened Today?, a newsletter that only publishes once a day, and aggregates a host of “first-order” news and information sites. Dewey shares a few other possibilities, but her primary point is this:
Kiser’s big recommendation, to me and other deluged readers: Reintroduce the edges to your media diet. Seek out content with a clear beginning and end, something you can pick up and put down at will. An NPR podcast has edges, for instance; an NPR livestream doesn’t. Kiser’s newsletter has edges, too, though the homepages he tabs through each morning are edgeless.
Dewey has a number of suggestions for news aggregators; as I said above, her entire post is worth the time. The trick, for me at least, is to find the tools to clear a path forward without feeling weighted down by the massive drifts that pile up on either side of it. And the problem, of course, is that we now inhabit a media environment that incentivizes and capitalizes on edgelessness—the commercially sponsored doomscroll is, sadly, the purest expression of online culture as it’s developed over the past decade or so.
And that’s a topic that I’ll return to, just as soon as I post this. Stay warm, stay sane, more soon.
Even colder comfort are the feature stories about folks experiencing voters’ remorse over having chosen the Leopard Eating People’s Faces Party. My preferred metaphor is to say that they voted to put the piranhas in charge of the swimming pool and trusted them to stay just on one side of it. But the point’s the same.