apparently this is called derealization and is a dissociative thing which makes a lot of sense for where i was at the time, depressed and insanely lonely in grad school (3/n) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derealization …
-
Show this thread
-
it's quite easy for a reasonably privileged very online person such as myself to come to regard all news as very fake in an emotional sense: it only shows up in your life as words on a screen, doesn't affect you personally, indistinguishable from the rest of your feed (4/n)
2 replies 1 retweet 29 likesShow this thread -
people occasionally complain about other people making really callous jokes about whatever's in the news but honestly i get it. it's easy to end up in a situation where likes and RTs feel more real than the deaths of thousands of people half the world away (5/n)
1 reply 2 retweets 29 likesShow this thread -
i don't intend for this description to shame anyone btw, it would be a terrible idea to try to feel the emotional reality of every single news story. the world is way too big, that's not a thing we were ever meant to do, we dissociate from it to protect ourselves (6/n)
1 reply 0 retweets 28 likesShow this thread -
the funny thing about realness is that it's not very continuous. IME the realness switch gets flipped in a very discrete way. one picture too many of an empty costco or whatever and suddenly what was just another shitty part of the news cycle feels like a Thing (7/n)
1 reply 0 retweets 35 likesShow this thread -
i occasionally make fun of rationalists here on the birdsite but more power to them for being relatively quick on the uptake. the rationality community gave me years of practice taking seriously that civilization was not safe and the world could end and that helped here (8/n)
1 reply 2 retweets 34 likesShow this thread -
and now for the coronavirus /
#SobSquad crossover you were all waiting for: there is a kind of denial you can end up in about how safe the world is or you are fundamentally, and it can be a substantial emotional block to taking something like coronavirus seriously (9/n)1 reply 1 retweet 30 likesShow this thread -
this is a block that can be worked through, although it's not exactly pleasant. it is very close to learning to accept on an emotional level that you are going to die, and everyone you've ever loved or ever will love is also going to die (10/n)
1 reply 1 retweet 26 likesShow this thread -
3 years ago death felt extremely fake to me, so i started working through my relationship to death by trying something a friend suggested to me: imagining every single person in the world dying that didn't work, but an improvised modification i made to it did (11/n)
2 replies 0 retweets 18 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @QiaochuYuan
i did a similar thing a few years back, looked at how often people died, then started making micro-obituaries, telling the life story of a dead american in ~11 seconds, starting the next one immediately afterwords took me maybe two minutes to start crying
2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
theres a surprising amount of detail you can tell in 10 seconds, but it also really shows how theres no way to properly mourn them all, not nearly enough time to truly know the people you care about
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.