We all know that perspective is very important, and that getting it can help an individual feel less sorry for him or herself. Unfortunately, getting that sense of perspective generally involves feeling better about one thing by realizing the stunning awfulness of everything else.
If you find yourself despairing about your life, job, height, personal problems, haircut, etc... you can play the "but I could be..." game, which involves reminding yourself how much more miserable most people are than you and with much better reason. There are, for example, children working in mines. I realize there are levels of terribleness worse even than that, but for some reason, that's the thought I return to in moments of profound self-pity. "So you missed Masterchef this week. Suck it up. There are children working in mines."
You can also choose to adopt a cosmic perspective in order to scare your blues away. Or at least, to scare away the blues you started out with. A few days ago, while contentedly contemplating the imminent collapse of Europe and the inevitability of my own death (you can contemplate both if you cut down on outside distractions), I came across this tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist and all-around amiable gent:
"In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day."
The really great thing about this observation is that most attempts to not worry about it end up bringing you right back around to the fact of your own inevitable death: what difference will it make if the earth is destroyed in five billion years? You will most likely be dead. And yet, I find it worrisome.
So if you're trying to put your own trials and sufferings in perspective, try one or both of the following strategies:
1) remind yourself that the world is fairly bursting with miseries that make yours seem insignificant; and/or,
2) remind yourself that the world will not always be bursting with miseries, because at some point, perhaps five billion years from now, it will cease to exist.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
I'm pretty sure I've written something along these lines before, but I'm going to assume that either a) you never read it, or b) that you are so profoundly depressed that any memory of it has been squished out of your head.
If you're not depressed, here's why you should be:
1) Youths from an impoverished underclass (along with people finally seizing the opportunity to act like assholes in public) are rioting in London and Manchester (UPDATE: I've since been informed that the rioting has spread to Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, West Bromwich, Bristol, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Gloucester, Oxford, Reading, Milton Keynes and Slough. Only slightly more places than I'd originally listed.).
2) Nations like the U.S. and England are teetering on the edge of some kind of yawning and distinctly unwelcoming abyss of economic disastrousness.
3) A generation of children in East Africa is in danger of being wiped out by starvation. Iman (beautiful, poised, articulate, and married to David Bowie) says that the whole thing was avoidable, but no one cared enough to avoid it.
So: we have metropolitan city-centres going up in flames, the prospect of Switzerland emerging as the source of trust-worthy currency, and children dying for no good reason (as opposed to all those children who die for great and unassailable reasons).
Because I'm alive now, and nobody alive knows what's going to happen, it's tempting to feel as though the world is in its death throes. That we're all just headed for a hellscape of underground bunkers for the Swiss and desperate, cannibalistic, above-ground scavenging for the rest of us (denied, even, the tastiness of the Swiss, regarded by many as the world's most delicious people).
But people can't have felt wonderful at any point in history. I'm sure the Huns weren't always optimistic and sanguine (two qualities popularly associated with the Huns) or the Allied powers jolly.
Which just means that instead of being in the middle of some dire and dreadful world-ending, epoch-ending epoch, we're just, as we always have been, in the middle of an epoch that feels that way. The world probably won't end; it will just go on feeling like it's about to.
Unless, of course, it does end. Just because it never has before, doesn't mean it won't.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Should the mysterious deaths of thousands of birds in Arkansas and Louisiana be seen as harbingers of doom? Do they speak of the End Times? The American South certainly saw an avian apocalypse, but are Those People on the Internet right in thinking that it was therefore God's go-to place for the first sign of the End of Days (I'm quickly running out of words and phrases that mean the world is going to end)?
While I am perennially convinced the world will probably end, I tend to think it will be because people are stupid and have access to stupidly destructive weapons. I am, after all, an earnest child of the 1970s. However, there is one thing that suggests that what happened to the 5,000 blackbirds and starlings that fell from the sky in less than an hour in a smallish area in Arkansas and the 500 blackbirds, starlings, and grackles that were found dead in Louisiana may well be an indication that Armageddon (last synonym) is on its way: who among us does not think that if God does, in fact exist, and does, in fact, want to kill us all, he'll announce his attentions in Arkansas and Louisiana? Can there be better places for signs of the apocalypse? Can you imagine how ludicrous God would be if He (I'd go with "or She", but I'm not that much an earnest child of the 1970s) decided to announce the end of the world in Denver, or Brampton, or Detroit? Actually, it's possible He is in the process of announcing the end of the world in Detroit. Have you seen Detroit lately? 5,000 dead birds might actually improve its appearance.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
I have received my second reader question! From someone who is not in the least related to me! Read on:
Let's say you're the parent of a very successful catastrophizer--should you feel pride, because so much of you lives on in a new generation? Or sadness and regret because your offspring has arguably been infected by your own congenital and over-arching pessimism?
- Anonynomous Individual Not
Responsible for Fathering the
Catastrophizer
Before going any further with this answer, I should make one thing very clear: you should always feel sadness and regret. Very occasionally, you may allow yourself to feel pride, or joy, or elation, but only because those sensations will add a certain piquancy to your subsequent feelings of sadness and regret. Don't be concerned about having to force the return of the sadness and regret; they will come back without much prodding because life is full of things that cause them.
Feeling pride that part of you lives on in the next generation can quite easily be made to result in profound depression (although all things, obviously, can be made to result in profound depression). First of all, that pride is necessarily bound up in the fact that you yourself will die, a fact which is likely to be interpreted as a downer. The individual in whom your qualities (fine ones, I will admit) will live on will also die, possibly without issue. Even if that individual were to produce offspring, those offspring would eventually die, and so on. Even if you belonged to a family that regularly produced progeny, all of whom inherited your qualities, remember that the world itself will most likely shrivel up and disappear at some point in the vast expanse of future time. Your pride will, one way or another, be short-lived.
You should absolutely believe that it is because of your style of parenting/doomed genetic bequest that your child has developed catastrophizing tendencies, because as you've indicated, that line of thought will undoubtedly produce more sadness and regret. However, if you were lucky/unfortunate enough to produce an even vaguely observant child, that child, one way or another, would have grown up catastrophically. The beige and brown Ford Fairmont had nothing to do with it.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
If the apocalypse predicted for December 2012 is correct and he has not, for some reason, succumbed to other, more personal ultimate catastrophes, what's a boy to do? Could you please Go Survivalist?
If, against all odds, the self-proclaimed experts are right and, against all odds, humans of the earth have not all expired mysteriously of natural causes by that point, this self-proclaimed expert recommends that...well, you see, it all depends.
My answer to the question from "what's a boy to do" was predicated on the idea that the earth would be destroyed completely. Decimated. Annihilated. But you're right, right-thinking critic, the previews for That Film suggest various cataclysms, not total ruination. Of course, if the latter had been represented, it would have been a very different film. Possibly a better film.
But the problem with cataclysms, you see, is that they're so very unpredictable. Floods might hit one area; earthquakes might afflict an entirely different area. Lightning might knock out one power grid, leaving another completely untouched. I just discovered (damn you, Nova Science Now!) that there are mysterious tremors under the American midwest that presage a coming earthquake disaster. I've been avoiding California for years, and now I realize that unintentionally avoiding the midwest for years has also been prudent.
I haven't even begun to address the issues that will be raised by the roving bands of human criminals. They exist now; they will certainly exist in the world after Event Two (Event One being the Big Bang. I'm trying to lay the groundwork here for my own post-apocalyptic mythology so that eventually I can write and sell a film script). People will smash windows and steal food; people will kill one another over canned beans and the right to repopulate the world by breeding with Nicholas Cage.
Should you stockpile weapons that will most certainly be repossessed by The New Authority (film script again) and used to kill you? Should you retreat to a bunker that will be shaken and shattered by earthquakes? Should you retreat to a midwestern cabin and then discover you should have watched Nova Science Now?
Absolutely. Do any or all of those things. Amass canned and dry goods. Learn how to hunt local vermin and cure their meat. Keep band aids around. That kind of paranoid preparation is the hallmark of a good catastrophizer. However, every good catastrophizer should also know and be haunted by the fact that whatever preparations are made, they will be undoubtedly prove to be either disastrously inadequate or disastrously futile.
Happy New Year!
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
The Catastrophizer will now, for the very first time, respond to a reader's anxious question for Dear Catastrophizer. This is the very first anxious query Dear Catastrophizer has received and I am pleased it takes as its subject a classic catastrophizing issue: the end of the world. I can only assume that questioners-on-the-cusp will be moved by the manner in which I inflame his anxieties and send in their questions as well, as this is also the only anxious query Dear Catastrophizer has received.Dear Catastrophizer: I fear we are living in the end times. The Bible, the Mayans, Nostradamus, the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, all point to these being the end of days. Predictions say this will be the last Pope and the last President. It's all gonna blow on December 21st, 2012. What's a boy to do?
Well, a boy should catastrophize. That's the short answer. However, I've always been of the opinion that short answers are the hobgoblins of little minds, so I will elaborate (and do this despite the fact that I suspect the questioner, desperate to capitalize on the negative buzz generated by this site, is a representative from the publicity arm of the studio responsible for that Nicholas-Cageless-Nicholas Cage movie released recently).If the prognosticators are wrong: It doesn't really matter, because you will ultimately and inevitably face your own personal apocalypse in that you will die. Ultimately and inevitably. As Philip Larkin wrote in his poem "Aubade": "Most things may never happen: this one will." The world may endure forever and forever after all those Illuminati have begun to fertilize sickly and shifty-looking geraniums, but that will make absolutely no difference to you personally because you'll be very dead. Will that catastrophizing be for here or to go, sir? Either way, you'll be needing it.There is a good chance that the prognosticators will prove to be entirely wrong, because, and listen (because I assume you're reading this to yourself aloud in order to invest it with the proper resonance) carefully, gentle catastrophyte, because this will prove to be an invaluable aid to you in the future: when it comes to the future, nobody knows jack. If you want, find a few friends who are also fond of cowled robes, start meeting at mysterious, preferably ruined locations, convince yourself you're controlling the fluctuations of US currency, and issue a decree through some well known, alarmist website indicating that the world is going to end on some random future date. If you're going to try to do this thing right, go to the trouble of ensuring that this date corresponds with the world-ending date posited by another cowled-robe crew. Then simply wait and see how many people, on the eve of your Day, throw their belongings into the sea. I'll bet there will be a few. People like to get themselves worked up every fin-de-siecle or two.If the prognosticators are right: please see paragraph one of "if the prognosticators are wrong" above.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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