We're feeling the anxiety, too. And we're going to use it.
Anxiety is a normal human reaction to abnormal times like these. Here's how we plan to make our anxieties as productive as possible.
It’s been a week, hasn’t it? Magda is slo-o-o-owly recovering from a nasty, two-week summer cold, but not before she gave it to Mike. Meanwhile, Doug is able to type again three days after a hornet sting turned his left hand into an empanada. (FYI, the best treatment is to wash with soap and water, apply ice, take Zyrtec, and destroy the nest over your back door with extreme prejudice.)
Oh, and representative democracy suddenly feels like a rickety beach house while SCOTUS keeps hacking away at the stilts.
Does it feel weird and empty to watch people roll out the bunting and fireworks at a time like this? Of course it does. But there’s always tomorrow (the Caesar salad’s 100th birthday!), and the day after that, and the next four months until Election Day. And the best we can do is acknowledge our anxiety and do whatever’s in our power to make it as productive as possible.
The first step is to recognize that there are other helpful sources to consult, such Lori Gottlieb’s book and Substacks from
(who wrote about consulting historical perspectives) and Episode 22 guest (who outlines her own action strategy). These are the voices that remind us we’re aligned with a lot of smart, capable people.We also know that younger voters are the big election prize this year, and we’re making an action plan to get as many of them in front of a ballot box as we can. You probably have some young people in your life who are feeling so disgusted and helpless that they’d rather tune out of politics. But they might change their minds if they knew how much this means to all of us.
We’ll be outlining more details about this in Episode 51, which will arrive a week from today. We’ve also been talking a lot about another surreal challenge of our 50s—that when our kids arrived some 20 years ago, we couldn’t have foreseen feeling genuinely distraught about the world we had just brought them into.
So forget the fireworks. We’re taking the hornets down.
Thanks for sharing my perspective. I keep having to remind myself every day...I'm here to be helpful, not argue with strangers, especially on the Internet, and especially when I have no control over what happens next. *Whatever* happens next, nothing's going to change whether I vote and how I vote, so just about everything else is noise, and it's not good for my mental health!
Thank you for including me here. I’m glad it’s helpful. Something has to be.