How To Stay Sane in a World Gone Mad
Answering reader questions
I have a new piece out in Queer Majority, recalling all of the craziest things the religious right warned would happen if same-sex marriage were legalized, and what new research shows actually happened: “The Doomsayers Were Wrong About Same-Sex Marriage.”
This post answers some reader questions.
In today’s political landscape, how do you take care of your mental health and prevent burnout and apathy?
I don’t necessarily see preventing burnout as a sign of good mental health. Burnout can sometimes be instructive. It’s our mind’s way of letting us know we’re fixating too monomaniacally on a single thing and that we need more variety. It’s possible to be a political junkie and to manage your affliction by staying just beneath the threshold at which burnout would occur. I’d argue that’s worse for mental health than pushing yourself over the line, crashing, and then being forced to re-evaluate how you use your time and attention.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I, like the majority of Americans, was stunned and appalled.1 It didn’t spur me toward social justice activism, or to join the #Resistance. I was one of those people who adopted the “we must become better citizens” ethos. I’d followed the news and politics for many years by that point, but I took it to the next level. I was dialed in to all the minutiae, following every twist and turn. In my mind, “becoming a better citizen” somehow entailed increasing my information diet to rival Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote, an impossibly rotund glutton who ate until he physically exploded. I suffered the same figurative fate. I burned myself out. In early 2018, I took a nearly year-long hiatus from social media and the news. It was absolutely what I needed, and when I returned, my consumption habits were healthier than before I went down the rabbit hole. Becoming a writer has forced me to plug in more over these last few years, which I rationalize as being part of my job.
In terms of what constitutes healthy news consumption habits, I think we all pretty much know already. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that spending six hours a day watching cable news, or scrolling media feeds, or arguing with people on Twitter will completely rot your brain. Anyone who still needs to hear that won’t be moved by it. In some cases, they need to burn out to recapture that healthy equilibrium for themselves.
What role do you see for Jimmy Carter Democrats in a world where Trump and AOC are the two biggest "celebrities" of the right and left political spectrum? By "Jimmy Carter Democrats" I'm referring to that narrow band of Southern Democrats who believe in things like nuclear power and environmental sustainability, but also believe in personal responsibility and the Second Amendment. The best recent example would be Doug Jones, the Alabama Senator.
Doug Jones is an illustrative example, I agree. After Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions became Attorney General, Jones ran for his vacant seat in a special election against Republican Roy Moore, a former judge who had been credibly accused multiple times of sexual misconduct with kids.2 Jones barely won with 50.0 percent of the vote. When he ran again in 2020 against someone who wasn’t an alleged sexual predator, he was obliterated, winning only 39 percent of the vote to Tommy Tuberville’s 60 percent.
“Jimmy Carter Democrats”, as you dub them, have a real role to play in the culture and the national political conversation. Electorally, however, they are so sorely outnumbered in that region of the US as to be virtual non-entities. The rare Carter Dem who does manage to get elected will only be able to hold onto their office by becoming a Joe Manchin-like figure who is willing to break with the Dems so often as to almost be a kind of Dem-GOP hybrid politician. Culturally, I think there’s a real opportunity for moderate Southern Democrats to function as ambassadors who can bridge cultural divides, both across the aisle and between geographical regions. James Carville comes to mind as an example of someone who can speak across divides and get through to a far wider swath of Americans than most commentators in today’s day and age.
Do you think we’re doomed? Will our kids’ generation see some kind of reboot of civilization as has been seen throughout history?
If you sit down and try to list out all of the threats that could, under the right circumstances, cause a total civilizational collapse, the future can seem pretty bleak. Nuclear war, a much deadlier global pandemic, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, climate change, natural disasters, civil war, prolonged economic depressions, astronomical events like solar flares, comets, and meteors, totalitarianism. It’s a lot like sitting around pondering every conceivable illness, disease, and mallady that might befall you. There are countless ways things can go horribly wrong. But our ability to handle things that go wrong and to adapt to unforeseen problems improves year by year. As humanity grows larger in population, more interconnected commercially, more technologically advanced, and yes, gradually more enlightened as well, there is much cause for optimism.
A lot of this just comes down to personality and psychology. I’ve always been an optimist. Or rather, I’ve always been cynical about pessimism. I know it’s become trendy to signal one’s intellectual sophistication by articulating how everything sucks, but it doesn’t. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle have done for us collectively what WebMD does for many people individually. We have become societal hypochondriacs with a mild headache doom-scrolling our way into thinking we have stage 49 pancreatic cancer, the bubonic plague, and necrotizing fasciitis.
A couple years ago I wrote a personal essay titled “The Problem with Advice.” In it, I wrote, “If there is one thing I would tell my younger self, [...] it’s this: Nothing is permanent, almost every mistake can be fixed, and nothing is as hard as people will tell you it is.” I think that’s generally true not only for individual people, but for humanity as a whole.
How can the Democratic Party nominate Kamala Harris without her having gone through the primary process and without having received a single vote? Does that present any legal or constitutional issues?
Let me answer the second part first. Political parties are never mentioned in the US Constitution. There are three constitutional requirements to run for president: being a natural-born citizen of the US, being at least 35 years old, and having been a US resident for at least 14 years. Beyond that, a candidate must file the appropriate paperwork and comply with various state laws in order to appear on the ballots in those states. As for the parties themselves, they are private organizations that are largely unregulated beyond a few weak campaign finance laws.
That’s the answer to the letter of your question. The spirit of the question is, “Isn’t this undemocratic?” Yes and no. For a candidate to be nominated without the party’s registered voters having voted for them is undemocratic. At the same time, parties didn’t use primary elections to select their nominees until the 1970s. Prior to that, everything was decided on the convention floor or in back-room deals, and that didn’t stop the overwhelming majority of Americans, both then and now, from comfortably saying that America was a democracy in the 1950s. Furthermore, two-thirds of Dem voters wanted Biden to step down, so while Harris might not have been Democrats’ first choice had there been a full and robust primary, very, very few Democrats are complaining right now. The only people I see balking are Trump supporters. Harris’s presumptive nomination is not perfectly democratic, and yet Democrats have, by popular will, assented to it. It’s both democratic and undemocratic. There’s a Schrödinger’s Cat joke in there somewhere.
Many of the sustainability practices we’ve been encouraged to do, such as recycling or the organic food movement, either aren’t actually effective or don’t end up doing what we expect. What kinds of things can regular people do in their everyday lives for themselves and/or the planet that will actually produce change instead of just virtue signaling?
It’s much easier to answer the “what can we do for ourselves” portion of the question, because as individuals we have the power to transform our own lives, but transforming the world requires vast numbers of people acting in concert. Individually, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the products we use are all hopelessly contaminated with toxins, pollutants, and compounds we don’t want in our bodies. It’s obviously still worth trying to avoid the most concentrated or dangerously polluted sources, but total avoidance is a pipe dream.
One thing we can control is taking in lots of nutrients known to aid the body in flushing unwanted garbage out, such as fiber (rich sources: whole grains and legumes) and antioxidants (rich sources: berries and dried spices). Fiber functions like an indigestible sponge, soaking up all manner of refuse as it passes through the body. Only five percent of Americans consume the recommended daily intake of fiber. Antioxidants, a nutrient after my own heart, hunt down free radicals (unstable molecules that can be caused by pollution and radiation, and which can damage your cells and contribute to many health problems).
As to what we can do for the planet through individual action, that’s a tougher and somewhat more disheartening issue. I wish I had that “one weird trick” to recommend to people, but I’m not sure there is one. Governments and the very largest corporations have an outsized impact on the environment. The most influential thing an individual person can do is to try to influence these entities, and the most direct way to do that may be by calling your Congressperson or local representative. It seems quaint in 2024, but Congresspeople do take calls from constituents, and it does still make a difference.
How can someone become more mindful and self-aware regarding politics and everyday logical fallacies?
Have principles. Take the time to really figure out what you believe, why you believe it, and what your first principles are. Then go through a bunch of issues and see if you can find contradictions (everyone has them, from straight-up cultists and shameless hacks to philosophers and political scholars). I ran this exercise out loud for myself last autumn when I wrote “Cancel Culture Comes for Anti-Semites.” In that piece, I tried to reconcile my loathing of anti-Semitism with my opposition to authoritarianism, and my belief in free expression, privacy, proportionality, and the importance of intent.
Being principled ultimately means that your loyalty to principles has to supersede your political or tribal loyalties. Something you hate when “they” do it has to be just as distasteful when “we” do it. Humans are not born with these habits of mind. They require cultivation, and the very picosecond you begin making that effort, you instantly vault ahead of 90 percent of humanity who make no such attempt. Every time you feel a strong opinion form in your mind about some issue, press pause and ask yourself “Does this jibe with my principles? Does it contradict other things I believe?” Become interested, even fascinated, with the question “Am I a hypocrite?” I reflexively ask myself this easily a dozen times a day. The answer is still yes, but I’m definitely less of a hypocrite than I used to be because of it. At bottom, it begins, as all worthwhile things do, with giving a shit.
See also: “We Need Safe Spaces — From Politics”
And now for something completely different…
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Someone on Twitter summed it up nicely in 2020 along the lines of “In America, everyone knows who will get the most votes, but nobody knows who will win.”
Moore successfully sued comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for defamation of character in 2022 for portraying him as a pedophile in his 2018 Showtime series Who is America?