No time for melting down
Hats off to Digby. She will be along presently with a recap of last night’s CNN-sponsored, Donald Trump freak show. The excerpts were bad enough. The intertubes are full of it this morning, literally and figuratively. The extremist right is gleefully declaring that liberals are “melting down” over Trump’s demented display of sociopathy. Yup, that’s our guy, they cheer.
Over at The Atlantic, Arthur C. Brooks examines the psychological impacts of working to make the world a saner, safer place. Fighting back can come at a cost. Activism can make you miserable. If you expect to sustain it, choose a variety that doesn’t. And work that doesn’t turn you into what you loathe and to us vs. them-ism.
The reflex my generation had for taking to the streets (pointlessly, for the most part) continues among the latest generational cohort of activists. The mental health impacts are a mixed bag:
Although nearly a third of the students believed that their advocacy work improved their well-being, 60 percent reported harm to their mental health. “There’s been times that at the end of the day, I’ll come to bed and I’ll just cry,” one interviewee said, “because I really don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.”
Brooks argues:
A compromise might be available through minimizing activism’s most psychologically harmful elements: hatred and defeat. A shift in perspective—from winning to helping—can address both problems. This could mean a switch from protesting homelessness to providing services for people experiencing homelessness—for instance, by volunteering at a shelter or soup kitchen—or from marching against the president to giving people a ride to the polling station. Focus on what you can do to ameliorate a situation rather than simply demonstrating your opposition to it.
An enormous body of evidence shows that the right sort of volunteering leads unambiguously to greater happiness. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that older adults who volunteered reported greater life satisfaction—but with an important qualification that would certainly have a bearing on younger people’s mental health. These adults found that their morale improved after they performed more frequent nonpolitical volunteer work (such as helping with social services), but that it was lower after more frequent political activity (such as party work).
I don’t know. Most of what I do is behind the scenes, work few people know about. Unsexy mechanics and logistics stuff that make a difference in election outcomes but don’t get headlines. For many nonactivists, politics is something that happens to them. A participant has a different perspective. It’s empowering to be on the field instead of watching from the sidelines. Maybe it’s like that old Irish joke: Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
The upside of staying in the fight is you stop feeling like roadkill. You still get run over sometimes, but you don’t feel so much like a victim.
Brooks, host of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast, suggests, “we need to balance fighting with loving, including loving more indiscriminately.” I’m not there exactly, but working out my frustrations here every morning helps keep me sane. For that, I’m grateful to Digby and to you.