How I'm Staying Sane

For now, anyway.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s “The Mysterious Horizon” via Artvee.

In the fall of 2001, I told my meditation teacher about my stress over a future event I was dreading—I can’t remember what. He told me about another student, a mother of two who had just lost her husband in the 911 attacks.

“She said she couldn’t stop thinking about how awful the holidays would be,” he said. “I told her, ‘So let them be awful. You don’t have to rehearse for that now.’”

His words were clarifying and oddly liberating. Bad times are unavoidable, but you don’t need to extend the misery by pre-gaming them.

I’ve been trying to hold onto that lesson this week.

Misery doesn’t ask permission; it just shows up, unwelcome and unannounced and parks itself in your psyche. But, so far at least, I’ve found a few ways to keep it under wraps, so I thought I’d share them.

Earlier this year, my husband and I ditched our cable plan and started getting our live news from a free app called Scripps News [¹UPDATE BELOW], rather than CNN or MSNBC. We ended up saving more than money. Now, instead of watching political hacks bloviate about their predictions and parsing poll numbers, we watch … the news. The Scripps News reporters beam in from all over the country—Montana, Texas, Illinois—giving recaps of the day’s events, providing background and context to the laws passed, court cases heard, union battles waged, etc. They tell you what happened rather than broadcast endless speculation about what some former congressman or press secretary thinks might happen. I’ve been surprised by how much mental space this has freed up. Watching news from other countries has also helped—we get BBC News for free on the PlutoTV app.

I’m also getting a lot out of the work of journalist Oliver Burkeman, whose 2021 book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is a cheerful reminder that we have limited time on earth—four thousand weeks is the average human lifespan—so it’s a good idea to get clear on how you want to spend it. I’ve read Four Thousand Weeks twice, and while I continue to do many things that, in theory, are not how I want to spend my one wild and precious life—hello, Instagram—I’m now aware that I only have 958 weeks left. If my career suffers because I’m spending a sunny, temperate Saturday (which are in ever shorter supply) on a hike rather than in front of my laptop, so be it.

In Burkeman’s new book, Meditations for Mortals, he reflects on the way many of us responded to the 2016 election:

It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling (although they certainly were). It was that they’d started “living inside the news.” The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives—more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event. They seemed significantly more personally involved in whether Trump would fire his Secretary of State, or who he might nominate for the Supreme Court, than in any of the local or personal dramas unfolding in their workplaces or families or neighborhoods. Their motives were generally good, so it seems a little churlish to point out that this behavior in no way makes the world a better place.

Living inside the news feels like being a good citizen, but it actually cannibalizes the time you could spend trying to make matters better, says Burkeman.

I recognized some of myself in Burkeman’s description. After the 2016 election, I tweeted and posted like my life depended on it. I marched. I phone-called. I rallied—the whole resistance shebang.

I have no regrets about this—the Cassandras were right. And many of the things I did were productive, like knocking on hundreds of doors in 2018 and helping to flip my congressional district from red to blue.

I do regret how much I allowed those fuckers to invade my inner life. I regret the rage tweets not because I was wrong, but because they did nothing to help the situation. All they did was fester my own misery.

So. Here we are again. I want to do my part to help mitigate the terrible things that will be happening soon, and I’m grateful to the acquaintance who recently posted about state and local actions that can truly make a difference. But I’m not going to live inside the news. My life at the moment is good. I’m not handing it over prematurely.

In Meditation for Mortals, Burkeman tells the story of Erik Hagerman, who, to the disgust of many, completely cut himself off from the news in 2016—even wearing headphones playing white noise at his local café so he couldn’t hear the other customers talking about politics. Hagerman used the time that he wasn’t consuming news to restore a wetlands area he’d purchased, and he plans to preserve it for public access. Burkeman:

It used to be said about certain horrifying news events that “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” But that’s a relic of a time when people had attention to spare, and when it wasn’t in the vested interests of media outlets to stoke as much outrage as possible. In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.

Life feels extremely precarious right now, but that understanding has also put things into focus for me. Those criminals might ruin the future. I’m not giving them today.

How are you doing?

1. Since I published this, Scripps News has had massive layoffs and the channel is now a shell of its previous self. We’ve switched to BBC News.