Suzanne Harrington: Mindful avoidance is the only way I'm getting through the US election
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: "Every time someone starts talking about which candidate might win the You Know What in You Know Where, I mindfully leave the room."
When people say they are practising mindfulness your first impulse might be to headbutt them, which may be an indicator that you’re a prime candidate for it – mindfulness, not spontaneous violence – but as the entire world goes blue from holding its breath, now is probably a great time to give it a go.
Given the state of acute anticipatory anxiety we find ourselves in regarding the spectre of a grudge-laden orange fascist with multiple personality disorders hovering over world power – again – mindfulness is our only recourse. That is, mindful avoidance.
I’ve been practising it for weeks now. Every time someone starts talking about which candidate might win the You Know What in You Know Where, I mindfully leave the room. I have mindfully tweaked the radio to broadcast nothing but dance music, and have been mindfully avoiding television news forever. More recently I have mindfully come off social media because it was doing my head in.
I say mindfully. It’s not really. It’s more ostrichly with a dash of that other headbutt-inducing term du jour, self-care. I am taking care of my mind. The School of Life, an organisation which promotes emotional education, has a publication - – which looks at how our media consumption impacts us. From insomnia to anxiety to despairing of your fellow humans, it confirms what we already know – that we are media-saturated, media-demented, media-poisoned. Our minds, evolved to process stimuli more slowly, are overwhelmed.
Five hundred years ago, the information consumed by your average citizen over their entire lifetime is what we now absorb in a single day; around 74GB of data, or the equivalent of 16 movies. Our minds then have to sift this daily data tsunami into real, fake, entertaining, enraging, terrifying, funny, relatable, offensive, useful, alarming, and cats destroying Christmas trees.
Algorithms, tweaked to bombard us, mean we keep on clicking, creating the endless kerching cycle for the megalomaniac tech bros. And that’s just on a normal, bang-average day. An unremarkable day. Any old day.
A day without the You Know What hanging over the world like a bucket of nuclear waste balanced above a door about to be shoved open by a maniac. A day when the tech bros are neither banning their newspapers from expressing You Know What related opinion, like Bezos at the Washington Post, nor bribing voters with cash incentives, like Musk in the swing states. A day when we are not horribly worried that our worst fears are about to become real – again - thanks to millions of ordinary citizens You Know Where having allowed themselves to be sucked into a vortex of mass delusion.
I have mindfully withdrawn. Disengaged. Books, bingeing on box sets, Bake Off, and other benign pursuits. Self-care used to mean a scented candle and a bubble bath – these days it means turning your phone the fuck off, and going for a walk. You’ll still be just as powerless on your return, but the sense of crushing despair may have eased a fraction. Momentarily.
