Pandemic, late stage capitalism, spoonies, and a helpful tactic.

[flamingsword]

Two things about our current frustrations: external circumstances and internal circumstances.

So many of us have been taught to measure our worth by our productivity under capitalism. But we are under late stage capitalism right now, full of shit like “lean staffing”, supply chain problems, depressed wages, the gig economy, and the constant grind of “hustling”. We have looming problems like the threat of homelessness, the threat of starvation, and the threat of literal death by plague. The economic caste system in place where other people judge how much basic human dignity we deserve based on things like race, religion, gender presentation, ability, political leaning, and wealth is also a drag on the human spirit. We were not built for these things, and they are not about us. We need to decouple these things from how we judge our merit and our worth.

Internal circumstances: most of us have weird mental/medical shit going on, either to ourselves or to our loved ones. We are all worried about that, even if just on a suppressed, unconscious level. We are in the middle of a global freaking pandemic that does not appear to be going away. We are worried about that, too. (Even the people who like to go maskless to prove how “not afraid” they are, are aware that they are risking death right now, and it weighs on the mind, making them shorter tempered and shittier to people. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.) There’s probably a lot of other stuff going on in our lives and minds that we might be trying not to consciously acknowledge, or else be swept away in a flood of overwhelming feelings and potentially panic attacks. Our minds are full of pit traps right now, and it is not conducive to living an efficient or high-performance life under capitalism, which makes us judge ourselves by the standards of our employability and our ability to not care about these stressors. We are literally being judged by our callousness as though it is a good thing right now, and I just want to point out how fucked that is from every direction.

I don’t blame any of you for trying to handle those big feelings in an over-functioning way, I do the same thing. But sometimes you can choose to voluntarily take a break from sanity to cry and hyperventilate and be held for a couple hours until your brain has gotten rid of some of the overwhelming feelings, before your body decides when to throw you a bigger panic attack on its own schedule, which is inconvenient, to say the least. When you pick the timing, you can go back to being a sane adult later, after the headache and crying hangover. It works,mostly? I have been taking occasional days to be not-okay and my mental health is way better for it. I recommend trying it at least once. If you do it, please make sure to have eaten recently, to drink water and get electrolytes before the crying. Make sure your family/partners know what’s going on and have the bandwidth to take care of you at that time, and plan ahead to make the transitions as smooth as possible. Then offer to do the same for them, because we’re all in this broken world together and the issues we have with that are larger than ourselves.

We have power to handle these things together, and to change the world, if slowly. There is hope of things not always being like this. Good luck.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for the reminder that we all need places and people to collapse with! No one can be strong all the time.

[flamingsword]

<3

[dewline]

It's both me AND my loved ones, right now. Two of whom are in the same house full-time right now.

Picking the timing...is dicey.

[flamingsword]

I’m sorry this is such a rough time for you, and that you might have to negotiate for a while to line up times and availability of spoons. Scheduling stuff like breakdowns and fights is not a thing we are ever taught in our culture, as though only “spontaneous” emotions are valid or worthy of holding space for. But we either make room for grief or it will make room for us.

We are adults; we can hold our feelings inside for when we have time to unpack them and fall apart, most of the time. That may take doing things on a few separate days over the course of a month, and some people have children/caregiving or 28 day work “weeks”, or other responsibilities that can’t be handed off easily. But if we CAN make time to fall apart, even for just a few hours of grief over the millions we buried this last year, then we should absolutely start putting in the work on the psychic backlog of our emotions.

I hope you get your chances to line up food, water, electrolytes and someone to hold you for a while at the end, and if you pick up any tricks doing it, then please let me know. If there’s a way to not get a headache from crying, that would be great to know.

[sabotabby]

Thanks. Yes. This is a good reminder.

I spent most of the weekend when I had unexpected spare time doomscrolling, which is bad, actually.

[flamingsword]

Doomscrolling feels like armor, like if the next post brings us information, that we can somehow use it to protect ourselves or make sense of the senseless. But most of what it brings us is more anxiety and the sense that we are alone in out fear, which does bad stuff to us. It's a hard trap to get out of.

The last couple weeks I'm in a project of limiting my fb usage to two days a week, and mostly just checking on the list of people who I know need checking on. I have to do my best to trust that people will contact me, and make posts asking people to contact me directly, off of facebook. I got a few people to friend me on Discord, though? So it's not going that bad, on the whole. I also defriended a bunch of people who don't talk to me about important stuff, to deliberately decrease the FOMO that the small world effect has in my network. It's going okay so far.

[sabotabby]

Weirdly, the doom has mainly been removed from my doomscrolling. It's reflexive, compulsive behaviour. The algorithm means that I see 50% cat posts, 30% inane shit from friends, 20% ads, and almost no news content. I compulsively heart-react the cats, which isn't helpful irt the algorithm. But it's not adding to my life.

Discord is great—all of my conversations there are pretty well focused on things I'm interested in, and the ability to mute channels is amazing.

[dewline]

Muting channels?

[flamingsword]

Yeah, if you are on mobile, swipe the channel to the left and at the top it will let you mute notifications from that channel. On the board I run, there is a #cursed channel for people who enjoy that sort of humor, but about half of the people on my server have it muted. It’s not for everyone, so I wanted people to be able to opt out.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, it's a great feature. It lets you turn certain channels off so that you don't get notifications from them unless someone specifically tags you. I always mute the video game, anime, and fitness channels on all my servers and then I can still participate in discussions I find interesting without being swamped with content that I don't care about. It's a temporary feature, so you can do it for, say, a TV show that you don't want spoilers for, and then unmute after you see it.

[dewline]

Thanks to yourself and to flamingsword for your advice on this. It'll be helpful in dealing with life on other peoples' Discord servers in future.