tension

Following this politics stuff online can be stressful and I'm trying to figure out why it's stressful. One idea that feels helpful to me is that I get stressed by the tension between two things. 1) the clean professional way of the world: mass media, academia, government, corporations all with their sheen of control, rationalism, level-headedness and inevitability and 2) the bonkers ecstatic tragic dayglo whatever that embodied real life is.

The stress comes from not just the tension between those, but the fact that the first one seems so dominant and is compelling and assumed as real by so many people. Engaging with the first one once you've accepted the 2) as more explanatory is stressful and you just want to yell at, shake, poke, shoot, anything at the people who assume the 1) is explanatory. Like to jostle them and free them. Maybe this is what Brecht was on about, maybe this is what every cool person is on about, whatever, I'm not claiming this is a novel idea, just that that tension is stressful!