It feels like no matter where I turn some septuagenarian, or older, is making life miserable for myself and others. Usually these are older white Christian conservatives, obsessed with a delusional sense of reality that no longer has a basis in fact, or perhaps never did.
There is a disproportionate amount of wealth concentrated in the older generation and those who will inherit it will probably be even worse with that money than the last generation. Certainly we see evidence of that already, anyone in their 30’s who has parents who help them out VS those who don’t have that have radically different outcomes. For some reason those lucky enough to come from good families ascribe laziness and bad attitude to those who don’t have the family support, as if they are somehow enjoying “self made success” while mummy does their laundry for them.
No generation previous needed this kind of assistance well into adulthood, but this infantilisation of working adults has happened because of the hoarding of wealth, refusing to pass on the torch in workplaces and just blocking change for the sake of stoking petty politics. Most of us will never own our own home but all the politicians want to talk about is whether it’s OK to dehumanise trans people or not.
I’m 36 this year. For most of my teens I thought there’d be some kind of tipping point where the conservative boomers would fuck off or at least let the next generation step in, but that hasn’t happened. Back in the 1990’s you could be a girl and wear jeans and be empowered, now this is considered some kind of woke statement. As if we recently invented this idea of women and men being equal.
The faces of my two dogs, my cat and my husband are all that keep me going. Knowing they need me gives me just enough to get out of bed in the morning and start moving… but I’m struggling to do even that without having a breakdown. My husband and I have medical expenses we can’t afford and are borrowing money to survive right now. I run my own business and just feel this immense pressure on my shoulders, that again is compounded by how unfair the world is right now.
Anyone got any advice for coping with this late stage capitalist hellscape?
Take a hiatus from social media and from doomscrolling- it can be so incredibly damaging.
Old people squeeze their eyes & ears shut so that they will neither see nor hear the
cries of painscreams of agony as the world burns, and they say: “This is fine”.Ngl, there is some merit to that - maybe that is how they survived as long as they have, as opposed to those that died young (selection bias). I too could become a zombie, numb to the world, and I would then exist even after it ceased to. But I choose to live - and that means to suffer, especially when my brethren and sistren all across the world suffer too.:-( It is not madness to feel pain when things are WRONG - I would argue that it is, in fact, sanity.
All that is the context for why I agree - we NEED to stay connected, but not 24/7; also it helps to balance doomscrolling with positive experiences: as described in what I thought was a super-excellent article on that subject.
I can’t even figure out what “doom scrolling” is supposed to be. I just regular scroll.
It’s regular scrolling but when the longer you do it, the worse you feel, but you still feel compelled to do it, it’s called doom scrolling.
Like, compulsive social media use? I heard about it first in 2020 I think and I thought it was about being glued to reading bad news. I suppose that could overlap.