I was talking to a friend the other day about everything going on in our lives right now and she remarked that it seems like everyone is going through a lot these days. I responded that it seemed true that everyone seems to be having a rough year and that no one who I talked to regularly wasn’t having a difficult time at some point in the last month. As I’ve thought about this conversation further, I’ve added in my on-going thoughts about how long it has been since I last felt at peace for more than a single day. Because, if you think about it, the last eight years have been full of fairly dramatic moments, events, and entire years, to the point that it now feels difficult to properly contextualize anything outside the scale of my day-to-day life. Plus, since stuff is happening relentlessly, there’s no opportunity for anyone to take a break, make some space, and try to recontextualize things, there really isn’t a way to fix this problem in a way that doesn’t contribute to the on-going problem of being constantly overwhelmed. I mean, the last quarter of my life includes Trump’s presidency, all the crimes related to that, the 2020 election, all the crimes related to THAT, the complete enshitification of pretty much the entire internet (though I’d say this marks just the conclusion of that process since it began far earlier than 2015), the various police murders of people they were arresting or just encountering in the course of their state-sponsored violence (which has going on for much longer than the past 8 years but feels like it’s been getting worse), all the mass shootings (which have been going on most of my life and seem to only be getting worse), and so much more.

I mean, just last week, the Speaker of the House got voted out of office in the shortest time period yet recorded and I just moved on from that news. It’s too big to think about what that means in the grander scope of the utterly fucked up US political scene, especially because this is just the beginning of this particular novel event. It’s only going to keep going on and who knows where all of this is going to stop. Like, this is a huge thing, but the last president got impeached twice, incited a goddamn insurrection, and attempted to overturn an election. Not to mention all the shady shit he did prior to that. How am I supposed to contextualize the Speaker of the House (an absolute shitbird who I’m glad is gone even if it he wind ups getting voted back in before this post goes live because at least his name in the history books will always have that footnote attached to it, the feckless piece of shit) being voted off the island when the goddamn most-recent ex-president has yet to be tried or held properly accountable in anyway for what seems like fairly textbook treason (take your pick between the insurrection, the election interference, and the theft of state secrets)? How am I supposed to take any of this seriously when it’s all a giant farce put on by a cadre of power hungry assholes who don’t give a shit about anyone as long as they get theirs?

The worst part is that I’ve lost context for more than just the awful stuff. I got to participate in two big movements in the past few weeks that involved bullying giant international corportations into making treatment and testing of tuberculosis more available for people in the less fortunate parts of the world (mostly as a social awareness compaign to help shove home all the work a lot of other organizations and groups have been doing for years). I got to join the Green Brothers (Aka the Vlogbrothers) and all of Nerdfighteria (the name of their online community) in raising awareness about two giant corporations trying to squeeze as much money as they could out of the people still struggling against tuberculosis, a disease that is still a very real problem in the world despite being so strongly depicted as being a wasting disease relegated to centuries past. I got to watch it all play out from within the throng and I felt nothing when it came to pass. Sure, I’m glad it worked (and better than I ever expected it to), but I can’t bring myself to feel any particular way about this. It should be a huge victory, but I’m so separated from anything that could properly contextualize how big this is that all I can do is think about most of the satisfaction coming from being aligned with a bunch of people on the internet in pursuit of a common goal. That’s always a nice thing, you know (as long as the power of the collective isn’t weilded for evil, of course)? But it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment on the scale it ought to.

These days, everything that happens feels either too big to wrap my head around or so disconnected that it becomes unremarkable. I have no way to react to any of it beyond acceptance and mild amusement, frustration, or whatever. I can’t seem to break through this burnout. It absolutely sucks because I set out, back when Trump became president, to maintain my sense of scale no matter what horrible things happened. I wanted to make sure I was appropriately horrified any time some new terrible thing happened and I managed to hold onto that through all of 2020. It is only in the past year or two (probably the past year) that I’ve become too jaded and numb to keep things in their proper context. It’s not for nothing that I think of the period from November of 2022 to June July of 2023 as the most difficult of my life. I’ve survived so much and wound up getting mostly done-in by sheer exhaustion and burnout from being so consistently overwhelmed for so long that I had no choice but to let myself become numb to it. How else was I supposed to keep moving forward through all that?

I just hate looking out at the world, at things I know should shock or surprise me, that should leave me struck with awe or filled with rage, and find myself thinking “well, it’s just another day in the modern world, isn’t it?” I can’t stand feeling so worn down. It’s positively destroying on it’s own, even aside from all the overwhelming things in life that keep me so worn down that I can’t even muster up a proper emotional response to once more living to see some new fresh hell unfolding in my country. All I have left is the knowledge that, despite all this, I’m still trying to make progress. That I’m still trying to recover or recontextualize or do anything that might eventually dig me out of this hole. The trouble is, though, that I can already feel this starting to fade in one aspect of my life. I can feel it creeping in at work, as I struggle with not just an incredibly busy few weeks, but the return of all the problems that have made my work life a living hell over the past two and a half years. This isn’t something I’m going to be able to just muddle through. I’m going to need to figure something out and take some kind of action. If only I wasn’t so overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out…