Every Saturday afternoon, on my way home from work, I go drive by people protesting wearing masks; on Water Street, in downtown Kelowna, just before the bridge crossing the lake to Westbank. I have seen them there for the past few months, cheering and jeering at those who drive past, with signs declaring that a face mask is the work of the devil or used as an obscure way for the federal government to brainwash its citizens. This group is relatively small, ranging roughly between twenty to thirty people. And yet, everyone sees their message, is exposed to it and has to process it; and worst of all, it slows down traffic to the speed of a drunken snail covered in molasses. These people really depress me, more than usual.
What’s the point to these people’s protests? Half of the signs that these people hold are not even directly related to wearing a mask; some simply have generic simpleton buzz-word filled slogans typically involving the words “freedom”, “rights”, “control”, “my choice”, etc. While another quarter proudly declare that COVID-19 is a seasonal flu despite it having existed for every season of the year now; and the last quarter of these people, so about half a dozen or so, are actually “protesting” against wearing masks, despite a majority of people in Kelowna don’t seem to wear them from my personal experience, and there not being a hard law declaring that citizens must wear a mask while in public spaces. It’s really just a mess of confusing disinformation and misplaced zeal. I have to drive by these people at least once a week, and, as one would assume, it gets exhausting quite quickly.
Then after I get home from work and after plodding along with the joys of homework, I get to unwind with a barrage of negative, depressing, worrying and miserable news from every online platform imaginable. And when you finally get some free time from both school and work to see how your, just as busy, friends are doing, half the conversation is commenting on the miserable situation of the planet; I think I may know more about each of the American political parties than the entire Canadian political system in its entirety. Eventually it’s shoved down your throat so much, that even when doing something completely unconnected to social media, you cannot help but to unconsciously begin to think of whatever headline you last read that’s bouncing around and begin to draw comparisons to whatever you are consuming. I worry a lot about the state of the world.
However, as a side effect of the exhausting twenty-four-hour news cycle from every available facet of social media, I have found myself becoming much more easily lethargic and overwhelmed by whatever my current reality needs me to deal with. Sometimes it manifests while eating a meal and suddenly you stop eating despite still feeling hungry but it’s simply too much effort to continue eating; other times it is in leaving an online zoom class partway through because you feel that it will be too exhausting to do anything other than lay in bed or sit in a chair and stare; or leaving a blog post ignored and not writing it until the last minute before it’s due. Hypothetically, of course.
So, if everything seems to be overwhelmingly negative for the past forever in recent memory, what is there to do to cope? Well it’s nigh impossible to escape your reality forever, as it’s what you are stuck with, but you can escape it for just a little while. Over the course of my relatively average and uneventful twenty years of life I have noticed that I have been consistently drawn to media, whether in the form of literature, video games, movies or tv shows, that is often dystopian, apocalyptic, etcetera (I know, how edgy). Given the relatively annoying events from over this year, I noticed that I have found myself being drawn increasingly darker forms of media. Maybe I’m a depressed, maybe it’s character development, probably a little bit of both.
One of the main reasons for doing so, I believe at least, is that I keep looking into these dystopian settings as a different form of escapism. Realities where humanity has scoured itself clean from the Earth’s surface by way of nuclear fire and now lives in the pits of depravity beneath the surface, to space age epics in which humans created a galaxy-spanning empire, fell to the ravages of artificial intelligences of their own creation and the remnants are the xenophobic, superstitious peoples who now thrive as they impose an authoritarian rule so brutal that it makes life in any historical dictatorship have seemingly tolerable living conditions. Science fiction is great in general at showing the worst of our species. Rather than spending my free time with these medias to temporarily go to a better reality, I instead seek out worse ones so that when I look at everything else going on across the planet, I can go “see it’s not so bad, this can be fixed one day.” It works only sometimes. There’s always the small cynical part of the brain that looks at these dystopian realities, compares it to what you’re living in and goes “we’re not too far off, one day we’ll be there and you’ll be responsible for your complacency.” In theory anyways.
But this doesn’t always work, sometimes it just makes your mood that much more miserable. So instead, you could run back in time to childhood innocence. Instead of spending my time in the aforementioned dreary fictional worlds, with my mood slowly swimming between melancholy and despair, sometimes I need to seek out more positive forms of media to remember that the world was not always a seemingly terrible place. To meet this need, I have been found that the natural world provides the best remedy, provided that you don’t look too deep into the survival aspect. Just things with wholesome endings/messages or involving the greens of spring and summer seem to help my headspace; even if I am too busy to go do something outdoors, and there isn’t much right now due to the oncoming winter. Some of my personal favorites include rereading specific scenes, the most wholesome ones, from books that you love, casual watching of any bits of the Shire from both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit because nothing is better than the soundtrack from those bits, exploring old fairy-tales involving fantastical elements that can give thoughts and dreams of a better reality. Really anything works from your childhood that causes you to reminisce on happy memories. Everyone needs a break from time to time, so here’s the epitome wholesomeness in my opinion: https://youtu.be/KQetemT1sWc
Well what’s the point of all of this? To complain? To cry out for attention? To preach? To finish this assignment so I don’t fail the class? Well I don’t know; that’s up to you because I have other work to go procrastinate on and you’ve probably zoned out from reading these blocks of text. So have a good day and remember to stay hydrated.