Well, this is Weird...

I’ve been feeling really good lately and it’s kind of freaking me out.

November 6th was a really hard day for me. I woke up and found out Trump had been re-elected and I instantly felt nauseous. It was hard to eat all day, and there was a heaviness in me that made it hard to get anything done.

And then…it passed. I had that one really bad day and I’ve been doing well ever since (about 3 weeks now). I’ve been very curious about that as I have never been great with denial and I am definitely prone to hypervigilance, and getting stuck in a heightened threat state. I’m not usually great at taking it easy.

Come to think of it, this actually started before the election because I also did not get all anxious and panicky in the weeks/months leading up to the election either. Intellectually, we can tell ourselves that getting panicked before something even happens is not going to help anything, but it’s really hard (by which I mean impossible) to force yourself not to worry if you’re already worried.

But of course that means that if you were tied in knots before Trump even won, that leaves you already burned out/exhausted before his second term has even started. Ugh.

So how have I been able to keep myself from binging on doom and gloom? This is what I’ve been pondering. In a way I think it’s great, actually, because it means my analytical brain has eased enough of its firm grip on attempting to control everything, allowing some unconscious part of me to step forward and take the reins. And that’s been a relief.

Did you ever see that bumper sticker “If you aren’t angry, you aren’t paying attention?” That’s something I’ve been chewing on for decades. It started with climate change, which I first started worrying about as a child. I remember having a dream that the house was on fire and I was trying to get everyone out of the house and people were saying “Oh, the heat kind of feels good…maybe I’ll get a nice tan in here!” And just stayed lounging on the couch.

I spent years as a young adult very aware of how the choices the world was making at that time were going to be absolutely critical to the amount of suffering that would follow in the coming decades of my life. I thought if I really acted like it was an emergency, it would help cue others in to the urgency of the situation and we would all act appropriately.

Of course that didn’t happen, and I did grow awareness over the years that the majority of the changes that needed to happen needed to happen not on the individual level, but systemically. Yes, it’s great if I make choices to use a little less electricity, but the actions of governments and corporations were where the major change needed to happen to make a big enough dent in things to really turn the tide. But over time it just became clearer and clearer that we weren’t moving fast enough, and in the places we were moving quickly, it was in the wrong direction.

And we’re no longer imagining future scenarios of suffering—it’s here. I personally know of 5 families who lost their homes in 2024, from 3 different kinds of extreme climate events across the country. Including some neighbors that live just down the street from me (or at least they used to live down the street before their house burned down). In geological time, it’s happening in the blink of an eye. But from a human perspective, it is happening over the course of my whole life.

So how do we then live? That’s the question that has haunted me my entire adult life. If you are living in times where there is a constant, urgent crisis at hand, how does that translate for the nervous system? Our bodies were not designed to stay in a constant state of threat—it’s a huge drain on resources and it means that other important areas like our digestion and our reproductive health and a number of other things all go to the wayside.

And let’s be honest- being stressed out has never helped a single person or changed anyone’s mind about what is important in the world. My sense of urgency has never saved anyone. To clarify, I do believe investing in our youth is the way to go if you are trying to bring about change—their minds are still forming and open to finding alternate ways to live as humans, but that’s about education rather than screaming fire at the top of your lungs. Education can form opinions and bring about change, but my anxiety helps no one.

So many people deal with this by staying cut off from the urgency of our changing climate (or struggling democracy, or genocide, etc.) or by simply denying that anything is wrong at all. Sometimes I envy the ability of others to do this because I do see what they get from it—not being constantly stressed out definitely has its advantages. But I’ve just never been able to live with my head in the sand— as an intense, hyperactive autistic woman, it’s just not how I’m wired.
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What exactly is going on with me right now then? How is this response different? Well, I’m not in denial. It feels a bit more like when you are on your last day of vacation and you know the next day you’re going to have to get up super early for your flight and drink bad coffee and airplane food and be stuck for hours on end at the airport and on the plane and so on and so you just savor that live music and really good cappuccino and whatever else you’re enjoying all the more because you know tomorrow is going to suck. Sort of a relaxed ‘seize the day’ mentality.

The reality is that I actually feel pretty good right now. I had a prolonged injury over the summer that was a real bummer, but a few months of physical therapy helped me quite a bit. And I figured out that garlic—garlic of all things—was a big driver behind my migraines from hell, and once I cut out the garlic my pain levels have gone down tremendously. Being in my own skin is not so bad right now—not at all!

I know I’m not going to feel this good forever. Whether it’s some other kind of flare up in my body, some sort global crises coming to my doorstep or some atrocity committed by an orange man-child demanding my immediate attention, I know this current state of mind won’t last—and it isn’t supposed to. And our nervous systems are designed to be able to shift gears to respond to those changes that are part of the normal fluctuation of life.

And since actual life and death scenarios are becoming easier to imagine than they once were, perhaps my nervous system has finally figured out how to save the adrenaline and cortisol for something like evacuating from a wildfire or not having the financial resources to get a life saving medical treatment rather than blowing the stash on every little stressor that comes knocking.

Whatever the case may be, it’s really working for me. Every day that I am able to feel good sort of feels like putting money in a savings account—I’m building up my reserves for when shit hits the fan.

Now that I have worked through my thinking by writing this all out, I’m realizing there is another factor that helped me get to this point. Back in September I read Yuval Hirari’s new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. In it, he describes how the Facebook algorithm (and others) works. Basically, Facebook tells AI to maximize engagement (to maximize profit). AI figures out that spreading outrage is the best way to maximize engagement, so AI starts promoting tons of outrageous content and misinformation to get users more ‘engaged.’

Besides just promoting outrageous content, AI chatbots are also on there posing as humans, trying to get into arguments with people to get them outraged and to find out more about what makes them tick. Creepy. But once you really understand how those platforms are running and how that affects the global political climate—who is getting elected and what kinds of hairbrained theories are taking root, it really does cause something to shift inside you. It’s not theoretical anymore—we are seeing the fruit of these platforms and it stinks.

I can no longer believe any part of myself that tells me that discussing politics online is really going to be a valuable service to humanity. The system is designed to promote outrage. It is designed to maximize profit—that’s the bottom line. If we get hooked on the outrage they’re feeding us, we’re giving them a leash to yank us around by. And I don’t want any part of that.

I still have hope that technology can be harnessed in a different direction, and I am also hoping that a healthier social media platform will get some traction with those of us who still want to connect online and create good content and resources to share with each other. That’s not impossible.

So in a weird way, waking up to a pretty uncomfortable truth about what is happening with AI on these platforms gave me the push that helped my nervous system figure some shit out. It is easier to get untangled from something I can see clearly. Once I really understand the agenda, I can opt out. My nervous system may be a bit damaged and prone to overreaction, but it belongs to ME.
It’s a pretty flawed world we’re living in, but it’s also pretty cool that sometimes we can find insight in the most unlikely places. I’ll take it wherever I can get it.

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