I stopped having meaningful conversations with everyone in person anymore. My neighbors won't even talk to me anymore. I get a hello in a tone that says please don't respond.
No one I know wants to talk about anything other than what happened in church or their flower gardens.
So I take my anxieties about the world outside of my suburban neighborhood and post them online, either in small replies (or longer ones sometimes), and my weekly video podcast, The Village Oak Tree.
I sleep better knowing I've told someone, even if I've never met them, about what I think is going on regrading climate change, poverty, politics or the genocide in Gaza. That will just have to do. Everyone I know, including my family members, don't want to talk about any of that. I guess it's easier to just think about the kids, the next best resteraunt, or the kids schools or whatever. Everyone wants to live in their own personal bubble and wishes for the bad things to go away.
I would rather deal with things now instead of ignoring the problems. If you wait, when it hits, you won't be prepared. Maybe that's the point.
I think it's definitely the point. As the Peter Thiel crowd keeps demonstrating, they think safety for them matters, but safety and protection for everyone else is a waste of their money. They don't even want to evacuate people from disasters anymore. They want everyone to keep working until they drown. I'm with you. I feel better at least having put my thoughts out into this space and to know that even though we're scattered around everywhere, we're not alone.
I really have very few friends IRL. Those few would fit fine in this circle. We get together obey lunch or dinner once in a while to talk about things both personal and outside the personal. Other than that, I do my talking here. My wife and I know a few of our neighbors in passing, but that's it. The list of things you don't talk about in polite company has gone from "sex, politics, and religion" to an entire paragraph.
I spend much of my day being a "communications node," reading newsletters and Substack, then getting info out to the people who need it. My morning starts with coffee and a few Stoicism newsletters. After breakfast, what I can get done outside before the heat drives me inside. The rest of the day is communications. At 8pm, that stops and I read fiction or non-fiction books until bed. I had to set a hard line with scrolling, so I came up with a schedule. I was never one to doomscroll after bedtime, but making your own schedule and sticking to it might help.
I'm with you. I have a schedule like that. I get up, and after making breakfast, I eat and watch my news videos or read some news. After a couple cups of coffee, I head to my office or grab my laptop to read emails and email newsletters, which takes me into the half day. If I have a household project, I get it done as I can that day. Wednesday's are my podcast days, so I spend the day getting all of that ready to go.
No matter what, I'm finished by supper time or a little after and I read a chapter or two from a real book before the lights go out.
We met one of our neighbors from across the street last night as we were heading out for our nightly walk and they barely said hi to us. And they used to be so nice. Maybe it has something to do with the Irish tricolor flag I have hanging from my flag pole on the front of my garage. That and my weekly podcast, you think? He is a former Marine.
The other neighbors are notorious gossips and definitely do not care for me as I don't hide the fact that I am not a Christian believer. That and my wife is Chinese in a nearly 99% white Christian neighborhood. But that is how we find ourselves in the 21st century. Still living in a tribal mentality. If I were to try and garner support for some kind of community survival activity, I would get nothing but cold, stony stares and maybe a polite no. Mostly the stares though.
This is a beautiful essay, Jessica. I just lost a friend of 45 years because she was "sick of my moaning and groaning about the world's problems." She blocked me from all communications. Yet I know deep down that she feels all of what I feel. She has a 26 year old son who works high up in tech (AI) and I think she believes he is part of the problem. I'm going to re-read your post -- it makes me feel a bit better about things. Thank you!
Whew. Yes. Saving this one to come back to and share with folks. I spend a fair amount of time with people in their grief about what has happened in their relationships and communities, and often we have to talk about the structures and what’s happened/happening behind the scenes to control public perception. It’s put people on completely different pages, which is easy to miss unless you know what you’re looking at. So many people are confused and wondering what happened.
And sure, there is absolutely a point at which “doomscrolling” can become the mindless nervous system activation habit that the name implies…but long before that there is something else (that gets lumped into the same category) that’s closer to spending intentional time seeking out unbiased information, and reality testing what’s coming through the filters of social media. That discernment often has an added benefit of ungaslighting and connection with people who are also aware and interested in such things.
It’s unfortunate that for a number of complex and interconnected reasons, we’ve landed at a place that the majority of people have no distress tolerance (to use a therapy term), and therefore default to “good vibes only” - often without realizing they’re doing it. Wellness culture has infiltrated therapy, and rebranded and packaged new versions of this as “boundaries” and “self-care” and “protecting your peace”. And it’s a real fucking shame that this is a major contributing factor to all the division that’s happening, even among people with a lot of shared values and commonality.
I really appreciate you writing this because I think about it often but haven’t managed to write about it yet!
Very well said. Loss of distress tolerance is definitely something I've been picking up on. I was noticing it back in my Medium days, and now it seems to be getting worse than ever, reinforced by the algorithms and pursuit of "vibes" for quick profits. Feel free to use my post as a launching pad for an article and let me know when it's ready. I'll help share.
Thanks so much for that offer! And oh boy…people do not want to hear about how a certain virus is contributing to this loss of distress tolerance because it has been shown to damage the vagus nerve and cause nervous system dysregulation. The realities of majority of the world racking up multiple infections that cause cumulative damage is a real buzzkill to the “good vibes only” club.
Brain damage with every infection even asymptomatic cases. I think all the air catastrophes and close calls are an example of Airborne Blood Clotting Virus SARS2 wORF8 infection brain damage. SARS2 disabled me. I continue to wear an N95 respirator if I go out. The other virus that utilizes ORF8 is HIV. HIV can lay dormant until it doesn’t. I will be happily wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Thank you for the distinction between having to sift through mounds of information in order to find quality material versus simply doomscrolling. There is a huge difference.
This feels very familiar. I’ve been talking about these big pictures things for several years and I’ve noticed how people have gradually checked out and stopped engaging, as they turned toward what gives them more comfort. Yesterday I saw a photo of a bird that had clearly been created by AI and there were thousands of likes and comments, people oohing and aahing about how beautiful it was. And I thought “THIS is where we are now?! We’re creating fake birds so we can lull ourselves with pretty pictures while we pretend we’re not killing off REAL birds?!”
I just got my grandfather’s uk birth certificate. I’m in the US but have one son in the UK and the other planning to move over there in a few years and can get an Ancestry visa to live there. I don’t plan to be stuck here essentially alone with my husband in our old age.. my husband doesn’t agree….we’ll see how the next few years evolve…
I agree with you. You’ve got to be aware and think ahead
Have you tried having a conversation about the genocide in Gaza? Mass starvation, desperate helpless people being massacred every day trying to get to a miniscule amount of aid, in a militarized death trap, as they are being treated like cattle, gunned down by quad-copters, burned alive in tents, blown to pieces by 2000 bombs targeting refugee camps, hospitals, children waiting at a water collection sites, schools, churches... War-crime, after war-crime, Every. Single. Day. This is our new normal and it does not stop at Gaza, the ruling class is demonstrating what they have in store for any of us. International law, humanitarian law, the Geneva convention no longer exist. Never again, is now.!This is the holocaust of the 21st century, and the world looks away.
Do you go over to Caitlin Johnstone's newsletter and demand to know why she's not talking about the climate crisis or the greatest mass disabling event in generations? I don't, because I have respect for what she's doing, even if she doesn't touch all of the issues I care deeply about, certainly not in every post.
This is a proactive blog. If you want something done to your liking, do it yourself. You’ll be happier by the way it turns out anyway, because the article will be yours.
vagabondlove, like you i've been consumed by what's going on in gaza, for a number of reasons - direct connections in palestine, solidarity with fellow hcw's in gaza who were being targeted & describing the horrors they were dealing with from day 1, US/EU/Aus complicity. unlike covid or climate change, this genocide is a result of intentional psychopathy directed at a very particular group, who like fish in a barrel are unable to flee, even like the rohingya do, on rickety boats from bangladesh to aceh.
there is almost no-one i can talk to about this either irl or online, aside from the palestine community on twitter that's developed over the past couple of years. i find most people don't have empathy, can't relate. i do hear patronizing sympathy, "poor them." there's an element of racism & islamophobia even in self-identified progressives who are quick to defend other marginalized groups.
What I am describing—the act of sitting with dread, grief, helplessness without trying to fix or escape—is both a spiritual practice and a form of mental health care.
It’s grounding the nervous system and consenting to reality.
It’s tending to trauma and touching transcendence.
It’s psychological integrity and contemplative depth.
When I read your essay I sense an invitation to stay with reality instead of bypassing it. You're pointing to a kind of clarity that doesn’t come from quick solutions or dopamine scrolls, but from being intimately present with discomfort, confusion, and fear.
It's a great point. We don't have to fix everything, certainly not in a day or a week, but we need to see it. We can support or empower people who *can* fix the things we can't.
I love this. I find myself feeling disconnected and alienated from friends and even family who seem to approach life as though things are normal. I don’t see people as blissed out but see them avoiding discomfort. The discomfort of disagreement, the discomfort of going beneath the surface, the discomfort of actually learning what we are facing. Nobody seems willing to engage with any depth. It makes me question myself…to a point. I can’t or won’t look away. Thank you for your writing!
What do you do when you're the "doom" that people are doomscrolling?
I've had people tell me that I should be ashamed of myself, like I'm some kind of pervert.
I've had people question my motives, my politics, my intelligence, and my very right to even have an opinion about "things only EXPERTS understand".
I must be a pretty pathetic example of a human being, if all I can write about is how the Climate Crisis has started the Collapse of our world. It takes a "sick individual" desperate for attention to keep peddling "doom and gloom" when what everyone wants is OPTIMISM and uplift.
If you connect with people who are working on problems like mitigating and adapting to climate change, you find great hope and optimism because we are immersed in creating solutions. We can do this. See for instance the Planetary Health Alliance. There is every reason to get involved and no reason to be silent and turn away. See also EcoAmerica. Personally I think about who would profit from my giving up, and that alone would suffice to motivate me not to give up. But mainly I don’t give up because I’m positively involved. See also the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, and also Fossil Free for Health. Reducing fossil fuel use immediately produces better air and water quality.
I have a friend whom I love, adore, respect immensely. She believes in chemtrails. She was told by someone in the government when she was a kid that what they were. Do I believe in chemtrails, nope. Does she know I don’t believe in them? I don’t bring up a topic to change her mind. I also know that things we believe impossible, happen. Science has to change and update its knowledge because we find out one thing isn’t true, never was true but given time, information and advancement of equipment and technology we are better able to understand a complex problem. My favorite example is from the Victorian era, to treat sexual disease they used mercury. Let that sink in. They thought it worked. To extent it did, but it also killed the patient. We now know better.
Your friend may have experiences that lead her to believe that there is no climate change. Another aspect could be she genuinely knows this but the fear is overwhelming and she is dealing with a low income retirement, where will she live, how is her health, and her kids are having trouble in different parts of their lives and she really can’t do anything but listen and offer emotional support. Not to mention the current economy, total censorship is in place in a lot of areas in our lives and the hits keep coming. No one can point and say this is truth and this is bullshit. No one. It is part of a broader environment, time in history where people are overwhelmed, mistrustful, lied to, and no direction as to where to go.
You have to make yourself a set of armor when going on the web. The first piece of that armor is who is writing this, why are they writing this, what are they getting out of it, is it a call to action? What do they want me to do? I am a man, woman, child, teen and I don’t have the experiences, knowledge or support to change this. What can I change. This is running through everyone’s mind.
I would also mention you have very concrete and high standards. If someone asks you why you moved you can say I moved here to be more in control of my life and surroundings, why do you ask? You will come across a lot of people who have lots of different experiences, incomes, history and knowledge. You can choose to find common ground, or not. You can define your community by your belief system, and what is important to you. It might work, it might not, who knows!?
I am saying we have enough bad news, bad time right here and now. Just because someone isn’t worried about the grid, global weather change, COVID, doesn’t mean they are unaware. Extending grace, compassion, reading the room, knowing your friends, what is going on in their life, is part of being in a well functioning community, and acceptance goes a long way to building a society.
I stopped having meaningful conversations with everyone in person anymore. My neighbors won't even talk to me anymore. I get a hello in a tone that says please don't respond.
No one I know wants to talk about anything other than what happened in church or their flower gardens.
So I take my anxieties about the world outside of my suburban neighborhood and post them online, either in small replies (or longer ones sometimes), and my weekly video podcast, The Village Oak Tree.
I sleep better knowing I've told someone, even if I've never met them, about what I think is going on regrading climate change, poverty, politics or the genocide in Gaza. That will just have to do. Everyone I know, including my family members, don't want to talk about any of that. I guess it's easier to just think about the kids, the next best resteraunt, or the kids schools or whatever. Everyone wants to live in their own personal bubble and wishes for the bad things to go away.
I would rather deal with things now instead of ignoring the problems. If you wait, when it hits, you won't be prepared. Maybe that's the point.
I think it's definitely the point. As the Peter Thiel crowd keeps demonstrating, they think safety for them matters, but safety and protection for everyone else is a waste of their money. They don't even want to evacuate people from disasters anymore. They want everyone to keep working until they drown. I'm with you. I feel better at least having put my thoughts out into this space and to know that even though we're scattered around everywhere, we're not alone.
That's why we keep coming back to your musings ever day. We are a community of sorts. Given how people are these days, I'll take it.
I'm one of your subscribers, Terrance. 👋
I really have very few friends IRL. Those few would fit fine in this circle. We get together obey lunch or dinner once in a while to talk about things both personal and outside the personal. Other than that, I do my talking here. My wife and I know a few of our neighbors in passing, but that's it. The list of things you don't talk about in polite company has gone from "sex, politics, and religion" to an entire paragraph.
I spend much of my day being a "communications node," reading newsletters and Substack, then getting info out to the people who need it. My morning starts with coffee and a few Stoicism newsletters. After breakfast, what I can get done outside before the heat drives me inside. The rest of the day is communications. At 8pm, that stops and I read fiction or non-fiction books until bed. I had to set a hard line with scrolling, so I came up with a schedule. I was never one to doomscroll after bedtime, but making your own schedule and sticking to it might help.
I'm with you. I have a schedule like that. I get up, and after making breakfast, I eat and watch my news videos or read some news. After a couple cups of coffee, I head to my office or grab my laptop to read emails and email newsletters, which takes me into the half day. If I have a household project, I get it done as I can that day. Wednesday's are my podcast days, so I spend the day getting all of that ready to go.
No matter what, I'm finished by supper time or a little after and I read a chapter or two from a real book before the lights go out.
We met one of our neighbors from across the street last night as we were heading out for our nightly walk and they barely said hi to us. And they used to be so nice. Maybe it has something to do with the Irish tricolor flag I have hanging from my flag pole on the front of my garage. That and my weekly podcast, you think? He is a former Marine.
The other neighbors are notorious gossips and definitely do not care for me as I don't hide the fact that I am not a Christian believer. That and my wife is Chinese in a nearly 99% white Christian neighborhood. But that is how we find ourselves in the 21st century. Still living in a tribal mentality. If I were to try and garner support for some kind of community survival activity, I would get nothing but cold, stony stares and maybe a polite no. Mostly the stares though.
I relate to this so much. I have one friend i can talk to, and I guess that means I am lucky.
One more than most of us who want to survive what's coming. Good for you.
This is a beautiful essay, Jessica. I just lost a friend of 45 years because she was "sick of my moaning and groaning about the world's problems." She blocked me from all communications. Yet I know deep down that she feels all of what I feel. She has a 26 year old son who works high up in tech (AI) and I think she believes he is part of the problem. I'm going to re-read your post -- it makes me feel a bit better about things. Thank you!
I'm glad it helps. I think you're on to something. Thinking about these problems in the context of her son is probably too much cognitive dissonance.
Is this lifestyle estate the bargaining stage of grief?
Yeah, I'd say you're on target.
Whew. Yes. Saving this one to come back to and share with folks. I spend a fair amount of time with people in their grief about what has happened in their relationships and communities, and often we have to talk about the structures and what’s happened/happening behind the scenes to control public perception. It’s put people on completely different pages, which is easy to miss unless you know what you’re looking at. So many people are confused and wondering what happened.
And sure, there is absolutely a point at which “doomscrolling” can become the mindless nervous system activation habit that the name implies…but long before that there is something else (that gets lumped into the same category) that’s closer to spending intentional time seeking out unbiased information, and reality testing what’s coming through the filters of social media. That discernment often has an added benefit of ungaslighting and connection with people who are also aware and interested in such things.
It’s unfortunate that for a number of complex and interconnected reasons, we’ve landed at a place that the majority of people have no distress tolerance (to use a therapy term), and therefore default to “good vibes only” - often without realizing they’re doing it. Wellness culture has infiltrated therapy, and rebranded and packaged new versions of this as “boundaries” and “self-care” and “protecting your peace”. And it’s a real fucking shame that this is a major contributing factor to all the division that’s happening, even among people with a lot of shared values and commonality.
I really appreciate you writing this because I think about it often but haven’t managed to write about it yet!
Very well said. Loss of distress tolerance is definitely something I've been picking up on. I was noticing it back in my Medium days, and now it seems to be getting worse than ever, reinforced by the algorithms and pursuit of "vibes" for quick profits. Feel free to use my post as a launching pad for an article and let me know when it's ready. I'll help share.
Thanks so much for that offer! And oh boy…people do not want to hear about how a certain virus is contributing to this loss of distress tolerance because it has been shown to damage the vagus nerve and cause nervous system dysregulation. The realities of majority of the world racking up multiple infections that cause cumulative damage is a real buzzkill to the “good vibes only” club.
Yep, that certain virus has opened the door to some very awful things. We're watching it change the course of history.
Brain damage with every infection even asymptomatic cases. I think all the air catastrophes and close calls are an example of Airborne Blood Clotting Virus SARS2 wORF8 infection brain damage. SARS2 disabled me. I continue to wear an N95 respirator if I go out. The other virus that utilizes ORF8 is HIV. HIV can lay dormant until it doesn’t. I will be happily wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I had missed this idea. Something new to drive me nuts...or drive me to trying for avoidance....
Thank you for the distinction between having to sift through mounds of information in order to find quality material versus simply doomscrolling. There is a huge difference.
This feels very familiar. I’ve been talking about these big pictures things for several years and I’ve noticed how people have gradually checked out and stopped engaging, as they turned toward what gives them more comfort. Yesterday I saw a photo of a bird that had clearly been created by AI and there were thousands of likes and comments, people oohing and aahing about how beautiful it was. And I thought “THIS is where we are now?! We’re creating fake birds so we can lull ourselves with pretty pictures while we pretend we’re not killing off REAL birds?!”
This is phenomenal and hit a lot of points I’m not good enough to articulate.
Thanks for writing it.
Thanks for reading. :)
Love your articles. You are teaching us how to live in community. It is the future. You give me
hope and I am sure 1000 of other people as well.
I'm glad. Thanks for reading. :)
I just got my grandfather’s uk birth certificate. I’m in the US but have one son in the UK and the other planning to move over there in a few years and can get an Ancestry visa to live there. I don’t plan to be stuck here essentially alone with my husband in our old age.. my husband doesn’t agree….we’ll see how the next few years evolve…
I agree with you. You’ve got to be aware and think ahead
Have you tried having a conversation about the genocide in Gaza? Mass starvation, desperate helpless people being massacred every day trying to get to a miniscule amount of aid, in a militarized death trap, as they are being treated like cattle, gunned down by quad-copters, burned alive in tents, blown to pieces by 2000 bombs targeting refugee camps, hospitals, children waiting at a water collection sites, schools, churches... War-crime, after war-crime, Every. Single. Day. This is our new normal and it does not stop at Gaza, the ruling class is demonstrating what they have in store for any of us. International law, humanitarian law, the Geneva convention no longer exist. Never again, is now.!This is the holocaust of the 21st century, and the world looks away.
Do you go over to Caitlin Johnstone's newsletter and demand to know why she's not talking about the climate crisis or the greatest mass disabling event in generations? I don't, because I have respect for what she's doing, even if she doesn't touch all of the issues I care deeply about, certainly not in every post.
i came across one of caitlin's essays fronting a reactionary rag called 'druthers' - full of antivax propaganda.
she's not doing anything that deserves any respect from me.
Ugh, that's disappointing. I wondered why public health never even gets a nod over there.
This is a proactive blog. If you want something done to your liking, do it yourself. You’ll be happier by the way it turns out anyway, because the article will be yours.
vagabondlove, like you i've been consumed by what's going on in gaza, for a number of reasons - direct connections in palestine, solidarity with fellow hcw's in gaza who were being targeted & describing the horrors they were dealing with from day 1, US/EU/Aus complicity. unlike covid or climate change, this genocide is a result of intentional psychopathy directed at a very particular group, who like fish in a barrel are unable to flee, even like the rohingya do, on rickety boats from bangladesh to aceh.
there is almost no-one i can talk to about this either irl or online, aside from the palestine community on twitter that's developed over the past couple of years. i find most people don't have empathy, can't relate. i do hear patronizing sympathy, "poor them." there's an element of racism & islamophobia even in self-identified progressives who are quick to defend other marginalized groups.
How do you read my mind?! This is spot on from my point of view. Thank you for sharing it.
Thanks for reading!
Stop doomscrolling, sure. But then what?
Sit with what rises.
Not to fix it, not to escape it, but to know it.
The dread. The grief. The helplessness.
As you learn to rest with “what is” and surrender it,
sometimes a solution appears.
And sometimes it doesn’t.
But clarity always does.
That’s not mental health content.
That’s spiritual practice.
It's both, isn't it?
Yes,
What I am describing—the act of sitting with dread, grief, helplessness without trying to fix or escape—is both a spiritual practice and a form of mental health care.
It’s grounding the nervous system and consenting to reality.
It’s tending to trauma and touching transcendence.
It’s psychological integrity and contemplative depth.
When I read your essay I sense an invitation to stay with reality instead of bypassing it. You're pointing to a kind of clarity that doesn’t come from quick solutions or dopamine scrolls, but from being intimately present with discomfort, confusion, and fear.
It's a great point. We don't have to fix everything, certainly not in a day or a week, but we need to see it. We can support or empower people who *can* fix the things we can't.
I love this. I find myself feeling disconnected and alienated from friends and even family who seem to approach life as though things are normal. I don’t see people as blissed out but see them avoiding discomfort. The discomfort of disagreement, the discomfort of going beneath the surface, the discomfort of actually learning what we are facing. Nobody seems willing to engage with any depth. It makes me question myself…to a point. I can’t or won’t look away. Thank you for your writing!
That very much reminds me of Stoic philosophy. Change what you can, accept what you can't. You must sit with it to decide which is which.
Your trouble having conversations with friends about climate change feels eerily similar to the ones I attempt to have about rentier-ism with mine
I truly appreciate your voice. Keep Going <3 <3 <3
What do you do when you're the "doom" that people are doomscrolling?
I've had people tell me that I should be ashamed of myself, like I'm some kind of pervert.
I've had people question my motives, my politics, my intelligence, and my very right to even have an opinion about "things only EXPERTS understand".
I must be a pretty pathetic example of a human being, if all I can write about is how the Climate Crisis has started the Collapse of our world. It takes a "sick individual" desperate for attention to keep peddling "doom and gloom" when what everyone wants is OPTIMISM and uplift.
Yet still, we PERSIST.
If you connect with people who are working on problems like mitigating and adapting to climate change, you find great hope and optimism because we are immersed in creating solutions. We can do this. See for instance the Planetary Health Alliance. There is every reason to get involved and no reason to be silent and turn away. See also EcoAmerica. Personally I think about who would profit from my giving up, and that alone would suffice to motivate me not to give up. But mainly I don’t give up because I’m positively involved. See also the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, and also Fossil Free for Health. Reducing fossil fuel use immediately produces better air and water quality.
I have a friend whom I love, adore, respect immensely. She believes in chemtrails. She was told by someone in the government when she was a kid that what they were. Do I believe in chemtrails, nope. Does she know I don’t believe in them? I don’t bring up a topic to change her mind. I also know that things we believe impossible, happen. Science has to change and update its knowledge because we find out one thing isn’t true, never was true but given time, information and advancement of equipment and technology we are better able to understand a complex problem. My favorite example is from the Victorian era, to treat sexual disease they used mercury. Let that sink in. They thought it worked. To extent it did, but it also killed the patient. We now know better.
Your friend may have experiences that lead her to believe that there is no climate change. Another aspect could be she genuinely knows this but the fear is overwhelming and she is dealing with a low income retirement, where will she live, how is her health, and her kids are having trouble in different parts of their lives and she really can’t do anything but listen and offer emotional support. Not to mention the current economy, total censorship is in place in a lot of areas in our lives and the hits keep coming. No one can point and say this is truth and this is bullshit. No one. It is part of a broader environment, time in history where people are overwhelmed, mistrustful, lied to, and no direction as to where to go.
You have to make yourself a set of armor when going on the web. The first piece of that armor is who is writing this, why are they writing this, what are they getting out of it, is it a call to action? What do they want me to do? I am a man, woman, child, teen and I don’t have the experiences, knowledge or support to change this. What can I change. This is running through everyone’s mind.
I would also mention you have very concrete and high standards. If someone asks you why you moved you can say I moved here to be more in control of my life and surroundings, why do you ask? You will come across a lot of people who have lots of different experiences, incomes, history and knowledge. You can choose to find common ground, or not. You can define your community by your belief system, and what is important to you. It might work, it might not, who knows!?
I am saying we have enough bad news, bad time right here and now. Just because someone isn’t worried about the grid, global weather change, COVID, doesn’t mean they are unaware. Extending grace, compassion, reading the room, knowing your friends, what is going on in their life, is part of being in a well functioning community, and acceptance goes a long way to building a society.