The Constant Stress Of The World Constantly Ending

As Gabrielle Drolet said, “this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a series of increasingly alarming events we slowly become desensitized to.” How many crises will we live through, before we realize that there’s no normal to return to? And how do we live with that?

News has always, by design, been stressful. It’s a drama, writ large, with the omniscient assumption that someone should do something. But this impotent ‘democratic’ injunction has been easy enough to ignore. Until now.

Now the news—all coughs and elbows—intrudes on ordinary life. We read the news not to see what is happening there, but here, and that’s a dreadful way to be. It means that far from consuming other people’s misery, you are the misery. Being in the news is dreadful. You’re very close to the obituaries.