I also like this idea and would be interested in more reading. Pinterest comes to mind - scrolling “mindlessly” through Pinterest still influences you with lots of images and ideas, then there’s lots of decision making in creating something in your own space that’s “Pinterest worthy” so you can post your own picture so you’re also participating along with your friends (or “friends”). Facebook/Twitter also have the endless scrolling/input in our brains problem, on top of echo-chamber issues. And that was all around in the Before Times.
One of the things that’s been exhausting to me in this marathon of a pandemic is that going out is now fraught with a whole new layer of having to decide things. I’m vaccinated. Do I wear a mask? Numbers are terrible here, should I wear my N95? As I’m walking around the grocery store, I was going to go down that aisle but there’s someone who pulled down her mask to talk on her cellphone (WHY) so I’ll get other stuff and have to remember to circle back later. When I’m done shopping, I opened my car door and then sat down and then sanitized my hands, is that okay? Crap did I touch my steering wheel before I sanitized?
YES, this has been very hard for me too. I feel like my decision-maker is very overloaded right now just on basic stuff. Never mind anything complex or any life changing decisions.
A few years ago, I stopped watching the news because of the whiplash. It completely weirds me out that in a span of 15 minutes, they can give me 30 different ‘blurbs,’ and the woman who was just looking into the camera with a face full of sympathy for the horrible tragedy she just reported on can pivot to a new camera, and instantly flip to a new headline about the bear terrorizing local dumpsters or the festival that takes place this weekend. WHAT?! You just told me hundreds were killed in a building collapse, I AM NOT READY TO MOVE ON YET.
Like, I was a fan of “slow” movements even as a teen/college student – but as an adult who now gets pressed from everywhere and everything to go faster faster faster, man, fuck that noise. Slow down. Literally smell the roses.
the work of The Nap Ministry has been incredibly important for me to gain some clarity and compassion for myself and others. she talks about rest being a portal out of capitalism into life itself
I don’t have good resources handy but this is an area of interest of mine in the neuro-biology space. It’s one of the reasons I started limiting my car/transit usage, actually.
This is alllll my opinion and veeerrrry loosey goosey theory but I don’t think our bodies and brains are optimally adapted for everything to be level 10 all the time in ANY area, not just decision-making. We all are familiar with the decision fatigue of scrolling and having to make a million micro decisions while doing so, but for example perhaps a tiny part of why long car trips are so exhausting is our brains trying to process visual information around us that is incongruent with how our bodies are designed to move through the world, while simultaneously not getting any other sensory information from exterior surroundings.
oh poop I need to go to a meeting but don’t want to leave this drafted or I’ll forget to come back and finish my rambly conjecture!
super like! my mental health is in the shitter since I’ve been taking the bus to work more than biking aaaaaaahhhhhhhh it’s so real yet so hard to make the right choice when societal messaging makes it a “hard” choice but it’s so good for your health
I wonder if part of what perpetuates this manufactured urgency is the reaction to it versus the reaction to the opposite? It seems like culturally we are increasingly taking someone’s stated comments about their feelings on their own life as proof of how privileged or obstacle filled their lives have been overall. If you are frantic and negative your life is hard and you deserve empathy as a person going through a lot, if you are not frantic and are mostly at peace then you are obviously privileged and have never had any struggles, and are actually part of the problem.
I see this with certain political perspectives too, with people assuming lots of things about a person based on their opinions, like “if you think x then obviously you are y type of person from z background,” and it’s…often wrong? It’s very simplistic and weird.
yeah, i mean, it’s tricky, right? because there are some very well-documented and oft-repeated patterns in a person’s race / gender / background / identity that show up in the way that people think, and i don’t think that it’s wrong to recognize them.
like i recently was on a diversity workshop at work, where one white guy dominated every discussion talking about how hard it is for white guys nowadays, and how he’s not that bad, he actually is an ESL speaker because his nanny spoke spanish to him. i mean. that is rich white male nonsense and there’s no use pretending it’s not.
of course the relationship between identity and opinion is not hard and fast in any way, so we can’t be too dogmatic about it, but i also think it doesn’t serve us to act like there’s not patterns there.
i do think our culture (capitalism) puts a premium on being busy / productive for its own sake, and i also think that there are a lot of people whose position in life keeps them barely operational, at or over the edge of what they can reasonably handle. maybe if the people who are running around unnecessarily slow down a little bit, they can have a little space to contemplate and help improve the plight of the folks in the second group? i dunno.
Oh man, that’s so insane because I also know a rich white guy who describes himself as ESL because of his nanny, lmao. I agree there are definitely patterns worth pointing out when we discuss inequity and discrimination, but I also think there are always people who fall outside of generalities, kind of like with anything (gender roles come to mind). I think very few people fit neatly into a box.
I guess to me the difference is the context. So if we say male violence is an issue, and we point to statistics like the fact that 95% of violent crimes are committed by men, that seems fair. If we say women get lighter sentences than men for the same crimes, we can point to the 66% gap as a way to show that, and that also seems fair. But when we are in a conversation and someone says, “I think x” and the response is, “well then you must be z”…I think that’s a major issue and super dogmatic. It’s like taking something meant to use to describe population trends and applying it to individuals.
I was just thinking about that whole “I identify as an attack helicopter” debacle in relation to all this because it’s such a perfect example.
They are becoming more available. I know people still waiting for their first appointment that they booked a while ago and I know plenty of people who say they will get it but haven’t got around to booking. So I am hoping it motivates them
I wonder if/hope that they’ll have the pediatric vaccines available at CVS’s and the like, if they’re only available through pediatrician offices I feel like it would be a stampede in the first few weeks and they’re overwhelmed enough as it is right now. I did just ask our pediatrician if they have the kids flu shot yet and they said probably in a couple weeks so hopefully we can get that done first, then Covid (eee!!!) separately.
I don’t think this will be the stampede you think it will be. I hope I’m wrong, but anecdotally even the people I know who rushed out to get their own vaccine have told me they’re planning to wait on their kids’. It will be interesting to see what happens. I still have to wait for the group after that but I’ll be watching the 5-11s closely.
If it weren’t for delta, I would probably be one of those people. If we were just facing the OG variant, Latte has so little exposure and everyone around her is vaccinated, it takes the impetus away. But with vaccinated spread and possibly higher severity for peds on delta, that shifts my equation.
When you’re around those alarms all shift (and the sound of a ventilator cycling) you hear phantom alarms and vent cycles for days. I specialized in vent patients at my last job, and I would dream of the sound of the vent whooshing. It’s quite weird how your brain carries those around. You can become quite deaf to them at work (alarm fatigue is a huge problem, especially for ICU nurses) but then they just play in your brain constantly. It wasn’t until I had been off work for probably 6 months that I didn’t hear phantom vents and alarms, and it’s been two+ years and I still sometimes dream them. It’s not just me either lol I’ve talked to other nurses about it and there’s stuff published on it.
