The Constant Stress Of The World Constantly Ending
As Gabrielle Drolet said, “this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a series of increasingly alarming events we slowly become desensitized to.” How many crises will we live through, before we realize that there’s no normal to return to? And how do we live with that?
News has always, by design, been stressful. It’s a drama, writ large, with the omniscient assumption that someone should do something. But this impotent ‘democratic’ injunction has been easy enough to ignore. Until now.
Now the news—all coughs and elbows—intrudes on ordinary life. We read the news not to see what is happening there, but here, and that’s a dreadful way to be. It means that far from consuming other people’s misery, you are the misery. Being in the news is dreadful. You’re very close to the obituaries.
Things like health indices have long existed, but when you start checking them for your health, you’re one step closer to the infirmary. And now we’re all familiar with this—infection rates, hospitalization rates, the corruption of those rates—all the accounting and discounting you need to make before making simple decisions, like sending the children to school, or going out for tea. It’s exhausting, and that’s before you start…
