I went out west for the first time in my life last week, sat on some rocks, stood in some tall grass, jumped into some canyons, did mom stuff, hung out with cool guys, and otherwise experienced life. I still did work, including work on disinformation around our withdrawal from Afghanistan, but also tried to disengage as much as I physically could. My mind and body had begun to break from the stress of recent months and I needed a reset.
Not everyone was pleased with my trip. Part of our bizarrely puritan culture means having to deal with strangers on the internet who want you to apologize for being human. How dare you seek the briefest of joys when others are suffering, sinner? It didn’t matter that my father had recently died, that I was still recovering from an assault, and had begun to clench my jaw so much that an old, damaged nerve had begun to sizzle again. It didn’t even matter that a trip out west served as the perfect platform for my continued geolocation challenges — a big part of my work. What mattered was that I wasn’t being Mother Theresa.
Demanding that everyone be Mother Theresa in whatever capacity is actually a phenomenon common for both the left and the right, no matter how much both sides pin it solely on their political opponents. The thing about it? It is convenient. As clichéd as it sounds, when we’re busy ripping into someone else, we don’t have to be busy with building something better, or at least sturdier. The latter is harder.
A peculiar feature of living in our extremely interconnected world is that we are frequently stuck putting on a performance for others
In this context, it was especially interesting to read both private and public opinion on the subject of the war in Afghanistan and how the whole of society is to blame for what happened over there — and what will happen now that the United States has left. The funny thing about collective guilt is that if everyone is to blame, then nothing much can be done. You can just give up then.
The disconnect between the military and civilians was suddenly most obvious then. Many veterans and veteran-aligned organizations and people were proposing specific solutions to specific problems related to the withdrawal of our troops, and everyone else was merely generalizing.
Guilt is powerful, but ultimately accomplishes little — it’s like puncturing a hole in yourself and letting the energy drain out. Awareness is mostly pretending to care about things by mentioning them and thinking you have done important work. You have to do both less and more than that to be an effective member of society — you have to care, to act, and to know your limits.
A peculiar feature of living in our extremely interconnected world is that we are frequently stuck putting on a performance for others, simply because it is expected of us. It robs us of our time and energy, but it makes us look good online. It’s very hard to refrain from being performative when so many bad things are happening around us all at once. Social media breaks down boundaries — for better and for worse. We know what’s happening in the world, but we also can’t gather enough strength and don’t have enough time to act effectively for the good of the world, it would seem. Or simply for the good of the person standing next to us.
A friend of mine who had done a lot of important work in studying wildfires in California was recently on his honeymoon when some angry cousins of his decided to stomp around the family group chat and express surprise that he would leave for his honeymoon at a time like this (if you haven’t heard, the fires have been extra terrible out there). He had given his best, but his best was never going to be enough for some people. He wound up having to block some of his cousins’ numbers. It was a good thing that he did that. How else was he supposed to gather strength to continue with his work?
A lot of our interactions online — or on the phone, or otherwise not in person — are mean, but at the same time, very shallow. We don’t really know what the other person is going through. All we know is that we have an outlet for our own meanness.
I’m guilty of that as much as anyone, so — again, I am not Mother Theresa, nor do I want to be. But I still think it’s important that in this tumultuous time in particular, we learn to disengage as much as possible. I don’t care if other people say that it’s a privilege. So what? Take care of yourself, people. No one else is going to do it for you.
Image credit: camilo jimenez