537 Reasons We Worry About the World
How listing hundreds of world’s issues in a video made me realize the risks of socially responsible burnout.
A walking commute gives me time to think. Sometimes, it makes me think too much. Especially on this summer day, when I was contemplating why I feel so pessimistic about the world.
You know, the usual. Everything’s wrong, we’re all going to die soon, society is going downhill… Trying to get to the root of the feeling, I told myself: “Michal, don’t be so general, everyone can complain like that. What exactly is wrong?”
So I started coming up with these topics in my head. One by one.
Net neutrality,
Racial profiling,
Solar energy,
Yemen war
Fake porn…
It continued, not only through my walk home, but also through the dinner.
Pyramid schemes,
Volcanoes,
Climate change,
Pension funds,
Nerve agents…
And when I found myself lying in the bathtub, still finding new issues to feel bad about, I realized I’m never going to remember them all. I evacuated the bathroom right away, almost blacking out in the process, and started my computer.
Veganism,
Tipping,
Fracking,
Surveillance,
Suicide…
Spending the next three hours, I not only wrote down everything I could come up with on my own, but also searched through the internet for all the things people care about, every issue that needs fixing and which we read about in the media. The result: Four hundred items.
Though I still felt this can’t be all of it, with new ideas popping into my mind from time to time. So I took the list to work. My coworkers must have looked excited when I asked them to let me read this lengthy account to them. But they held through and with their help, the list grew by over a hundred more topics.
When I finally got tired of this whole exercise and getting new ideas started to feel more and more difficult, the list stopped at number 537. Over five hundred topics and issues that people all over the world are trying to solve every day and then other people are writing about them, fundraising, protesting, forming groups, movements and organizations.
And so to give some meaning to this exploration, both depressing and exciting at the same time, I put all of these issues into the slightly ironic video below. Maybe when watching it, you’ll be able to see my internal descent with each minute passing.
What surprised me most about the process was that both I and my colleagues agreed that these are not some exotic, unknown issues that only a few people care about. The list would be much longer with such niche items. These were topics we all knew and we could say at least a few basic facts about each of them, along with a short explanation on why they’re important.
And then it hit me. This is why I feel bad about the world. I don’t only have to think about sustaining myself and navigating the already complex world of career choices and personal relationships. Every day, when I look at billboards, listen to the radio, watch a TV show, read news, watch documentary films and talk to other people, I am reminded of at least five hundred and thirty seven topics and how I should feel responsible for helping to solve them, if I am to be allowed to think about myself as a socially responsible person.
Sure, I don’t feel responsible for actually going to Africa to treat people with cholera. But people who do go there can find many ways of engaging you mentally in their cause. Asking for donations, creating informational campaigns, writing articles or making films, for example.
I don’t want to diminish the importance of each of these topics. But their sheer number just shows us we can’t let ourselves think about all of them. We can’t walk around without a filter in our brains, taking in all of these things.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to filter them out consciously. So we often have to turn to being picky about what information we consume in the first place. We have to treat our attention as a non-renewable and valuable resource (issue #424: Attention economy). If we want to help with solving some of the problems, we need to carefully select the topics to engage with, whether based on what we are interested in, what are our skills, or where we can do the most good with our effort.
And finally, when confronted with the issues that didn’t pass the selection, we need to learn to say, both to ourselves and to others: “No, I am not responsible for this.”
We need to do this if we don’t want to add another item to the list: a socially responsible burnout.
