Life is weird these days. In my teaching life, we are back to school, five days in person, and singing with essentially no restrictions on what we do in class or our performances (we do have a mask requirement, but aside from that school is pretty much...dare I say...normal). I am reconnecting with my students again, making music and doing things more or less the way we used to. In my personal life, my partner and I bought a house together, she started a new job, and our relationship is going strong. I'm vaccinated, most if not all of the people I care about are vaccinated...things there are great.
And yet.
I say life is weird because despite all of that, the world at large has never felt so absolutely out of control. Things "out there" haven't gotten better since the pandemic shut everything down, in fact one could argue things just keep getting worse. As a person with an anxiety disorder who is also a serious future-oriented thinker, I go into a complete and utter spiral whenever I think about things beyond my own bubble.
It's hard to be optimistic about the future of our species these days...take your pick as to the reason. What will be the thing that finally ends us?
*Will it be the pandemic that continues to rage out of control, killing people and mutating into new variants, even though we have a free and effective way to slow or stop the spread of COVID-19, because a large portion of our population (at least in this country) refuses to get vaccinated?
*Will it be the devastating and increasingly irreversible effects of climate change, which are clearly a now problem, not a "30 years in the future" problem...with rising temperatures, drought, wildfires, intense hurricanes and floods?
*Will it be the rising Christofascism embraced by the political right wing of our country, restricting the rights of women and pretty much anyone who isn't a White male, and enacting racist voting laws to cling to minority White supremacist rule?
*Will it be the unfathomable income inequality of late stage global capitalism concentrating most of the wealth and resources in the hands of a tiny percentage of our population while an increasing number of people are forced to work for low wages with no security, social safety net, or hope of building generational wealth?
*Or will it be just the general disintegration of any sort of social contract or belief in the rule of law, as entitled people flout public health orders, take the law into their own hands, and berate and attack public officials like say, school board members and teachers, because of whatever Fox News has whipped them into a frenzy about this week?
In conclusion, things are bad. Things are real bad. Do enough reading and thinking about all of this, and it's not hard to come to the belief that we are very much doomed. If you have an anxiety disorder like I do, doing all of this reading and thinking basically makes you too paralyzed with fear and depression to do much of anything.
So I limit how much news I read, refuse to think to hard about how royally fucked we are, and I go to work where I teach teenagers how to sing for a living.
On some level, this is absolutely insane. I keep going to my little job, and coming home to my little house and my little life, while the world quite literally burns around me. But I oscillate back and forth between feeling immense guilt for not doing more to try and fix the world, and the acceptance that right now I am literally doing all I can do. I am trying to show up for my students every single day and give them something positive in their lives, while protecting my energy enough that I can continue to show up for my loved ones and not dissolve into a fatalistic, sobbing mess.
The cognitive dissonance is real. I'm either doing something incredibly important or I am doing something that couldn't matter less considering the trajectory our world is on. In my darker moments, I start thinking why are we even educating these students at all? Why are we all just pretending that these young people are going to be headed out into a world that looks like the one we went out in? Let's dump the choir class, and the math class and the English class and just teach them the skills they'll need to survive in the fucked up Mad Max world that seems destined to arrive?
But in other moments I have a little hope. I really need it to be hope by the way, and not just denial. I have hope that maybe there is still time for our civilization to pull itself out of the nosedive we currently find ourselves in...and furthermore if there is ANY chance of that happening, then the young people are going to be the ones to do it. So I keep doing what I'm doing, trying to give my students positive memories and art and beauty and empathy. And I try not to let myself feel guilty when I actually enjoy it like I used to! Does anyone else find it really hard to avoid feeling guilt when you experience joy or have any fun these days? It's like...how dare you feel joy when so many people are suffering and everything is clearly so bad.
Finally there's a third way of being that sort of makes peace with the other two viewpoints: if we are indeed completely screwed, as I fear we might be, then how do I want to spend my last years? Do I want to spend them doomscrolling and worrying and agonizing over all of the things that are wrong and living in constant rage at the people who seem so blatantly committed to ruining things forever? Or do I want to spend them experiencing joy and doing what I'm good at...giving others joy by making music with them?
There is some existential dignity in that; in trying to do good, even when the odds are almost certainly not in your favor. There's a quotation from one of my all time favorite TV shows, The Good Place dealing with the concept of doing good even when there may not be any reward for you in the end. I come back to it often when I try to reconcile how my life fits in the ever-expanding dumpster fire of 21st Century life:
"I mean, why not try? It's better than not trying, right?"
So I keep trying, trying to do my little bit of good while not dwelling too long on the larger world as a defensive measure to keep my sanity. Singing Through the Apocalypse, if you will. Maybe it will make a difference, maybe it won't, but we have to be the ones to give our existence meaning, no one else is going to do it for us.
So yeah...that's where I'm at these days.
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