How to have equanimity in the face of collapse?

[toasty7718]

Everytime I read a news story about this current administration, I can't help but feel a sense of helplessness.

 

Not a single thing I can do will change the course of events and influence the powers that be...and I am laying witness to TV Shows like Black Mirror and movies like Idiocracy becoming real on a day-to-day basis. 

All of this has been spoken of endlessly ever since AI began to influence people's lives...yet this begs the question: how do I live a self-actualized life in the face of this?

In the rise of a totalitarian government with a demented leader?
Climate change?
Pollution?
Species loss?
Mega-corporation greed?
The vast majority of people offloading their intellect to AI and becoming idiots in the process?
Social media destroying the very fabric of democracy?

Just to name a few. I can go on and on...

But the main question here is something along the lines of how to live in response to this? How do you personally wake up and live another day despite what's happening right now?

[aurum]

30 minutes ago, toasty7718 said:

But the main question here is something along the lines of how to live in response to this? How do you personally wake up and live another day despite what's happening right now?

You focus on what you can control and living towards your highest values.

You don't need to fix the world.

[Bjorn K Holmstrom]

I feel this deeply. That helplessness is a legitimate response to what's actually happening.

Aurum's right about focusing on what you can control, but I'd add: the grief needs space too. Bypassing straight to action can be another form of numbing.

What could help, is finding that middle ground between "fix the whole world" and "just work on myself." There's a third scale: communal experiments, local prototypes, building fragments of alternatives with others.

Not because they'll necessarily scale globally or stop the collapse (though who knows what is possible?). But because the act of building them changes the relationship with despair, it becomes creative rather than just paralyzing.

I guess what I'm suggesting isn't "here's the solution" but more: what small thing could you prototype that embodies a piece of the world you want? With others if possible, because the isolation magnifies everything.

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

4 hours ago, toasty7718 said:

how do I live a self-actualized life in the face of this?

You don't. You just do your best to survive

[Hojo]

Falling for the energy suck bait. Just ignore and move on you dont even know if what you are seeing is real.

 

[Salvijus]

Drink some chamomile tea.