A Smaller World

How can we be happy in a world flooded with devastation? This question has pressed on my mind for the last three years as we lived through a pandemic, saw race-driven murders and racist systems rear their heads, as climate change ravaged our planet, insurrectionists tried to siege our capitol and Democracy, and we watched a war begin. Honestly, I haven’t been happy, not consistently or without tremendous effort. Somedays my sadness is an ocean, and I kick my legs and flail my arms with all my mustered force just to stay above the surface. I’m tired, and the inky ocean floor sinks deeper and deeper each time I engage with the world.

Our brains weren’t designed for this load. The world evolved too quickly for humans to keep up. Our brains were meant for small communities and simple life, not worldwide webs, and international relations. Too much. Our quaint personal lives and realities cannot compete with the insurmountable amount of dread the world generates. My happiness feels selfish when the whole world’s trauma exists only a few keyboard strokes away. Every awful event and every awful prediction for the future is available for your perusing. I try to avoid the collective trauma now, but it appears, on my Instagram feed, or a news notification, or the YouTube home page. Someone kidnapped, a child assaulted, a species endangered, a climate heating, a mass shooting, a white supremacist in office, a country invaded. It seeps under my skin, a parasite sucking happiness from my body until I retreat to my bed in a dark room unable to exist. Too much.

I endeavored to separate myself from the wider world, to shut down my feelings for things beyond my control. I can’t fathom how to do it. I think and feel about news stories for years sometimes. They inform choices in my own life, oftentimes through the fear they invoke. In my actual wedding vows, I talked about the end of the world and how it seemed less terrifying with my husband there. The end of the world in my wedding vows. I evidently failed at separating the world from myself, so all I can think to do now is separate myself from the world. Throw every bit of technology I own away and move somewhere surrounded by nature. My heart breaks under the weight of the world, my body goes leaden. I don’t want to be informed on the global scale. I don’t want to know every political happening. I don’t want to know about every stranger’s trauma. I don’t want to know any of it anymore. I just want to know my neighbor’s names and their kid’s birthdays. I want to know about my friend’s break-ups, and their promotions. I want to live a small and simple life, a quaint life in a quaint world. And maybe that is the answer to the question of happiness: to be present in our own lives and our own communities where we actually have an impact. Maybe we should all make our worlds a little smaller.