MLK Day, the Inauguration, and TikTok
Everything, everywhere, all at once
We are living through absurd times. Today is, of course, the celebration of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday (and yet, Alabama and Mississippi will recognize Robert E. Lee instead). In the strangest possible plot twist, the presidential inauguration of an absurd, orange man who wormed his way into politics by leveraging a stint on a reality show and a racist lie about a former president’s birth certificate is happening on the same day. All this while TikTok, a social media app with 170 million users, has been turned off, then back on again, in response to the prevailing winds of political favor (this thread by Dr. Jess Maddox is one of the best things I’ve read on all that). The political machinations around TikTok have at once radicalized and alienated several younger generations further away from the Democratic party, and effectively put the nail in the coffin of American exceptionalism when it comes to “free speech.” Absurd times, truly.
A young friend reached out recently because she was feeling overwhelmed and anxious. When I asked why, she said, “doomscrolling.”
Trying to keep up with, never mind anticipate or respond to, all the news of these absurd times can easily trigger those feelings of overwhelm and anxiety. It’s important to remember, as I told my friend, that there are lots of Doom-Peddlers out there, people who get attention and make money (often the same thing in the attention economy) by spreading doom. By ginning up our anxiety, they get to keep making money. It’s a hamster wheel of doom-anxiety-spend. Understandably, a lot of people are feeling off-the-chart anxious right now because of this but you don’t have to join them. (I learned this the hard way, over long years of teaching college when my anxiety level would start to climb during exam weeks until I reminded myself that I’m not taking exams anymore and don’t have to participate in the anxiety that students are feeling; I’ve also changed the way I teach to try and minimize the anxiety that I unintentionally generate in students, but I digress.) So, it can be useful to remind yourself that just because other people are anxious doesn’t mean you need to be.
If you’re still feeling anxious about the state of the world, you can take your power back by finding ways to ground yourself. Turn off screens, touch grass, get your body moving, talk to real people face-to-face, listen to music that soothes you, cook or bake food that nourishes you, walk your dog, play a board game that makes you giggle, craft something, make some art, meditate, read a book, keep a journal, volunteer to teach someone to read, write a letter to someone who is incarcerated, join a protest march. Or, go to a friend’s birthday party in an artist’s studio, which is what I did last night just before the snowfall (images above and below from artist Pyaari Azaadi). These are all ways to detach from the doom on offer in our world and connect to your body, to other people, to the planet in ways that are meaningful, and we’ll need lots of these in what’s to come.
Getting grounded in your body and detaching from the news is one strategy, and a good one, but I’m not sure it’s enough on its own. Another way to manage is to simply allow yourself to find ways to enjoy the absurdity of it all, which is easier if you’re not attached to the outcome.
Absurdism is actually a philosophical school of thought, often associated with the writer Albert Camus. Basically, the idea is that the world is absurd and irrational, and we can’t find meaning because it doesn’t exist but I find this too nihilistic to be sustainable. There’s a twist on absurdism that gives me great joy and it’s captured in beautifully in “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once,” a 2022 film that won a bunch of awards and has stayed with me.
The plot is a loopy one that follows three people through different incarnations with lots fun martial arts style action as the characters jump timelines. The message in the film, as the characters all find their way back to each other over time and space, is that we can find meaning in an absurd world, through the power of kindness, empathy, and choice. It’s a message that lines up with all kinds of faith traditions, that we make the sacred through our choices, especially when we choose each other and the path of kindness and empathy over division and cruelty.
It is this that anchors me today, on this most absurdest of days: finding ways to remain in choice, in kindness, and in empathy.