Splinter: How to Stay Sane in a World That’s Gone Mad

We are living through the breakdown of American democracy and the elite capitulation to it, a maddening state of affairs where everything around us keeps deteriorating while the Very Serious People in the Beltway continue acting like it’s still 1996. If you feel like you’re not going at least a little crazy these days, you may actually be going crazy and have become too inured to the status quo (like the folks who think it’s still normal to hang out on a Nazi website that creates CSAM and constantly removes women’s clothes in their pictures without their consent).

It seems as if everyone is fraying at the edges a bit, with some high-profile accounts leaving Bluesky this week thanks to being dogpiled over some of the most innocuous posts you can find. Bluesky is never beating the no chill and lack of reading comprehension allegations, it seems, but I also don’t think that this dynamic is native to Bluesky. It is everywhere. The rational outcome of a mad state of affairs. I am no therapist—I just see one every week—but as someone who has ridden this Trump-driven wave of madness for the last decade as my career pivot, I feel as if I have come out the other side of it with some slight authority to dispense advice on how to make it through a decade of this bullshit with your sanity (mostly) intact.

Go Outside

Seriously, touch grass. That has become a meme in our internet-poisoned society, but we really are internet-poisoned. The fascist autocracy is releasing propaganda photos of their operation in Venezuela with Twitter up on a giant screen in the background. For many people, the MechaHitler site filled with CSAM and sexual harassment has ruined their mental health (what a shocker!), and their addiction to their doomscroll is destroying their brains. This is in part due to substituting the kind of light they get, as sunlight is demonstrably better for the human body than your phone’s light is.

Sunlight makes you healthier. Ditching your blue light for the sun’s rays is not a trick of the mind; you are getting more Vitamin D by exposing yourself to the sun. Vitamin D will help strengthen your immune system, cardiovascular health, muscle function, and as Dr. Charles Garven told the Cleveland Health Clinic, “Sunlight seems to activate a specific part of the brain called the pineal gland, which is related to the production of serotonin and other neurotransmitters.”

Just going outside for a measly half hour per day will dramatically boost your mood and your serotonin levels. A lack of serotonin is believed to play a role in depression and anxiety, and depriving yourself of it allows you to spiral. It’s not a meme, it’s science. Go outside, get some sun, touch grass. You will feel better. I promise. I know this is a common suggestion, but some things, like not drinking bleach or injecting it into your skin, are well-known good advice for a reason. Vitamin D is good. Get more of it. If you are stubborn and stuck in your ways like me, my next piece of advice is a good way to make sure you take this one.

Adopt a Pet

You have no control over Venezuela. You have no control over Trump federalizing the National Guard and sending them to cities you don’t live in. You have no control over RFK Jr. destroying the CDC, or a cowardly ICE agent shooting and killing someone driving away from them in Minneapolis. A big reason why politics can make us spiral so quickly is because its consequences do reach us and our loved ones, but control over its causes is completely out of our hands, absent a collective movement. Fixating on whether Trump is going to invade Venezuela again because they won’t hand him the Nobel Peace Prize is wildly unproductive for your mental health, and a pet will help you understand what truly matters from a here-and-now perspective. Give them a treat and watch them light up, and you will begin to get a sense about what directly impacts your life.

Whether it’s a dog or a cat, or an animal needing less regular care like a fish, pets will ground you. Your pets don’t know what’s going on in Venezuela, but they do know that you are here in this moment and they love you and want you to rub their belly. They need food and water to survive, a kind of immediate care and monitoring that gives you control over something meaningful. This modern world is not built for animals, and it is our humble task to guide them through the harm our society has created for them around every corner they want to stick their cute little noses into. My dog would die without me, and that profound truth has given me a day-to-day mission well beyond the purview of politics. I can glance at my doomscroll, see something shocking to my core happen in Minneapolis and feel terribly helpless and anxious, but I can’t tell you enough how much of that anxiety dissipates when you pet a good doggo who just wants love. We suffer a deficit of love when we see one of our neighbors gunned down by a fascist police state like we did yesterday, and it’s important to find ways to fill our cup of love back up so we don’t burn out. Pets are an endless well of love.

I am a dog person so I am biased in favor of those perfect creatures, but I understand that not everyone is as privileged to live in a place that allows them, nor can live a life that they can afford themselves, let alone the additional costs that a large and hungry creature creates, so I don’t want to fixate on the most perfect pet of all. All animals are perfect, and our relationship with them is very special. It’s not a one-way street. Nurturing them and providing for them provides you with a mission that reading the news never could. Feeding your bearded dragon or hamster has a far larger impact on your life than worrying about dormant Venezuelan oil wells and which imperialist companies will hijack them next. The internet has provided us with a window into every crevice of the world, but it doesn’t change the limits of the physical reality you inhabit. You can only do so much, and providing for another form of life who grows to love you is one of the best ways you can ground yourself in a nurturing world that directly impacts your own. We are all in pain right now, and our pets are here to help.

Volunteer or Donate to Charitable Causes, or Run for Office

But you shouldn’t just completely opt-out of politics. We are citizens after all, and we do have a responsibility to our fellow man. You need to take care of your own health first, because you cannot help others if you are struggling to stay above water, but one very productive way to work the anxious political energy out of your system is to go into your community and actually do something about it. Dismayed that children in the richest country in the world are going hungry? Bring some canned food to your local pantry and take some direct action and feed them. You can’t do jack shit doomscrolling about events happening thousands of miles away, but I promise you that your local food bank needs help either through your labor, money or your pantry.

And helping them helps you. Feeding hungry people is a holy mission that stretches beyond the bounds of any one religion. Community is a powerful word that is often overused and hollow, but caring for that unhoused person you always see on the corner is community. Feeding your neighbors is community. Making people’s lives better around you is community. We spend so much time decrying this neoliberal era that is collapsing into fascism, where basic government services to help folks have been pillaged by the rich, that we forget that we can still do something about it. The lesson of our time is that we cannot fully solve collectivist problems through individual action, but that doesn’t mean individual action has no impact or is meaningless. Your life has meaning, and your reach only extends so far, so give your life some meaning seeing how far you can help.

If you feel strongly enough that you can withstand the doomscroll and want to incorporate politics into your day-to-day life, run for office! You’ll be shocked at how easy it is to win local races and make a tangible impact in your community. Look at the schmucks who are in power! Literally anyone can do it!

Political and economic concepts are abstract, but getting someone their next meal, or finding them shelter for the night, or getting them the medicine they need, are very straightforward political acts, and are personally rewarding in a way that can give you hope about politics in America. A big reason this all feels so intractable and intimidating is because politics operates on longer timeframes than basic human needs do, and the problems we need to fix require true generational efforts. If we are to right this sinking ship, it will bear fruits that only our children and grandchildren will see, and that is difficult to accept for a society with two large generations of 20-, 30- and 40-somethings aging into adulthood, but it is the hand we have been dealt, and all we can do is play it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed worrying about elections 10 or 34 months from now, but think about all the meals you can help deliver to the needy through charities like Meals on Wheels in the meantime. Helping other people helps you too, because it gives you a sense of control over political outcomes in a way that despairing about national politics never will.

Find non-Political Hobbies

Some poisoned politics watchers may decry this as selfish, but it does neither you nor anyone else any good to be thinking about politics all the time. One of the worst lessons many of us on the left internalized is that we have to know everything in order to be good, informed citizens, but our brains are not wired to know everything. This notion really took root during the rise of the TV age, where a nightly summary of the news was how you caught up on the events of the world, and that kind of periodic news consumption is productive and healthy. Plugging your brain into a constant firehose of vetted and unvetted information is not the same thing, and you are not doing anyone any good by constantly being online and aware of every atrocity taking place all over the world.

We all have hobbies, whether it’s just watching sports or TV shows and movies, working with our hands to make something, or playing sports or doing other outdoor activities, but if you find politics and its existential dread taking over too much of your life, replace some of the time you spend on it with another hobby. I have advocated before about how I think golf is a good answer to the masculinity crisis, as a game where you keep track of a score that only affects you is a good tool to teach you how to deal with your own bullshit and learn whether or not you are a liar, but whatever interests you is healthy. As someone who grew up playing sports, I would recommend an athletic activity due to the physical and the mental health benefits that exercise brings with it, but replacing your doomscroll with any mundane little activity that only affects you is one of the best upgrades you can make in your life.

As the world crumbled around us in 2020 and I reflected on my first four years of covering politics, I realized that I had changed in pretty profound ways by staying plugged into the 24/7 news cycle. The workday never really ended for me. I had become unhappier, more morose, and just a generally more unpleasant person to be around in my day to day life. I realized that as much as trying to stay plugged in to the facts for my readers had filled me with a purpose that still humbles me to this day, I overshot and absorbed the hysteria of the news cycle into myself, which made me less capable at analyzing the news. I had become too close to it, a reflection of its madness, and this affected my emotions, my reasoning, and eventually, my writing. In a weird way, Paste Politics’ demise in 2020 was a good thing for me, because it allowed me to do a hard reset on my life and my writing.

So I traded a few hours of my doomscrolling day for swinging a golf club. The frustration of trying to fix my slice that made me quit golf in the first place was cathartic, because the improvements I made were entirely under my control in a world spiraling out of control. No longer was I fixating on a pandemic sweeping across the globe with impacts far beyond the reach of any one human, and now here I was, on a lonely driving range with a little white ball, desperately trying to figure out how to mold my baseball swing into a functional golf swing. I eventually did it, and golf has kept me away from unhealthy levels of doomscrolling ever since. I also added cooking to this doomscroll replacement list in recent years, and this time around covering the Trump madness has felt very different and more in control for me. The regular breaks I take from reading the news have given me a clarity I did not have the first time around when I chose to inundate myself in it.

Writer’s block is a real thing, and the best way to treat it is to walk away from your writing and stop thinking about it for a minute, and I think this dynamic expands to all forms of critical and emotional thinking. Our brains are not wired to take in this much information all the time, and shutting that input off to watch reality TV or do some other mundane task is an existential exercise, and you shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling like you’re taking a timeout from an increasingly bleak reality. Rest is a very important part of life that our depraved hustle culture has devalued to the disbenefit to our own mental and physical health.

Don’t worry, the madness will still be there when you get back, I’ll be here covering it for you, and you’ll be in a better headspace to absorb it. If we’re going to get out of this mess, it’s going to take each and every one of us, and we can’t do it if we’re all spending our time trapped, doomscrolling in Trump’s universe and driving ourselves insane. Touch grass, get some Vitamin D, adopt a pet, volunteer in your community, find a hobby, and root yourself in the day-to-day realities of life you can control. Soon you will find that the things you cannot control are much less existentially overwhelming.