Putting the life back in science fiction

This is small entry, but as many people reading this know, working on climate change has mental health effects.  There are articles on the web with such heartwarming titles as:

When the End of the World is Your Day Job

Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist

Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome: Scientists Speak Out

One college teacher contacted me, because he wanted to use Hot Earth Dreams as a text in his class.  One of the things he asked was what book should be paired with HED to offer a complementary view.  Unfortunately, I probably pissed him off, because my answer was a book on mindfulness. Anyway, after I suggested that, I never heard from him again.  But it was an honest suggestion.

Here’s the thing: I’ve suffered too.  My chiropractor got to know me very well as I wrote HED, and after I released it, I started suffering from what I’m now sure were symptoms of anxiety, although they felt like fairly scary diseases at the time.  What has worked for me in dealing with this is mindfulness meditation.  You don’t have to become a Buddhist to learn it, but it’s worth remembering that the fundamental Buddhist truth is that life is unsatisfactory, but that it’s possible to escape it through embracing the suck rather than trying (inevitably unsuccessfully) to avoid it.

It’s not just about anxiety and depression either.  There’s also guilt, because I’m part of the problem and I don’t feel like I’m doing nearly enough to solve it.  There’s fury, when I see these self-preening…okay, I won’t go on a three paragraph rant about all the politicians and moguls I see, but I get as stressed out imagining them getting their just and gruesome desserts as I do when dealing with depression.  And there’s frustration, of course, and sadness, and the endless chores of dealing with others’ denialism, nihilism, and constant changing of the subject, because anything’s better than trying to do something that requires suffering.  That’s a whole unholy brew, and that’s just inside my own skull.

Just based on my own limited experience, if you’re dealing with similar crap and don’t want to try self-medication, I’d recommend Bhante Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English.   It’s short, sweet, and it’s helping me.  There’s no magic here: it’s more about putting in the hours learning how to patiently deal.  The only difference is that, unlike the other things I’ve tried so far, it does seem to help.  I’ve also downloaded an app from the American VA for using mindfulness to deal with conventional PTSD, and that helps as well, mostly because I use it to keep track of how long I meditate each day.

Hopefully this will help some of you.  Let me know if it does, or if something else works as well.  There’s enough suffering out there without people suffering alone with this too.