We Shall Not be Overwhelmed

How discerning attention can help us survive Trump 2.0: a guest essay from Andrew Boyd

Hi friends, Britt here. There’s a wise saying from adrienne maree brown that I carry around everywhere with me: “What we pay attention to grows”. These days, with all the attempts from perverse powerholders to “flood the zone” with their appalling news so we can no longer focus deeply on anything that might translate into resistance, it’s critical that we learn to apply skillful discernment to where and how we focus our attention, so we don’t grow the wrong things at this unthinkable time. This week I’m excited to bring you a wonderful guest essay on this topic from fellow Substacker Andrew Boyd aka The Tragic Optimist, where he describes a strategy of selective denial in order to not be overwhelmed or mentally harmed by this political moment and remain committed to changemaking in targeted ways. Read on for Andrew’s wisdom, and be sure to check out his Substack, which is full of writing that makes the apocalypse funny. Gallows humour for the win!

In the aftermath of Trump’s first election, when folks asked me how I was doing, the standard “Alright, not bad, how’re you doing?” response didn’t cut it. Instead, I’d say something like: “The world is fucked, but I’m okay.” Or: “We-e-ell, I’m trying to write a book about climate catastrophe in the middle of a political catastrophe. How are you doin’?”

These days, as we brace ourselves against the first shocks of Trump 2.0, I say something like: “Oy.” Or: “Fucking hell.” Or I just shake my head and lift up my hands in a world-weary so it goes gesture. Or, if it’s over text, I type out something like:

I’m often sad in the mornings when I seem to be more porous to reality (both personal & global), but once I go about my getting-stuff-done day, I manage to do okay, good even, sometimes even great.

Compartmentalization is key here. Like many of us, I’ve been avoiding the news, or at least carefully titrating what I read and watch.

I do this partly for my own basic mental health, but also because I don’t want to feel the way he wants me to feel. The fucker wants me to feel overwhelmed, psyched out, hopeless, lost in the miasma of flood-the-zone-with-shit post-truth info wars. He wants me to be outraged and scrambling to patch every hole in a ship of state he is wantonly trying to sink. He wants me to be shocked-and-awed by the barrage of executive orders. I. Don’t. Want. To. Give. That. To. Him. And I don’t want to feel that way. And I don’t want to scramble anymore.

Instead, I’m choosing a few specific ways in which I can contribute, whether that’s putting up resistance messaging on the Union Square Climate Clock, making Bernie-sized $27 donations to the next raft of key races and the key orgs like EarthJustice who are fighting Trump in the courts, or — leaning into a role I’ve taken to of late — supporting friends and colleagues who *are* scrambling (one of whom was running for DNC chair while others were disrupting it! :-)).

That said, I do (cautiously) check my feeds, and read the news. And I’m glad I do, because I sometimes come across cheekily brilliant strategic advice like: Shove the Presidency Down Trump’s Throat (basically: he’s lazy and bad at being President, so make him do it; summarized here on video if you prefer that). Or Ezra Klein telling us how Trump is trying to shock and awe us into believing he has unlimited power, but in fact it’s just chaos and overreach, so “Don’t Believe Him.” Or this guide on how to organize under authoritarian creep by Beautiful Trouble’s Nadine Bloch.

I also make sure to attend to smaller, more local, and personal things that I do have control over: exercise, correspondence, friendship, and life logistics. The latter has become a particular, almost obsessive, focus of mine. Every day, for example, I try to make one improvement to my living situation. This morning I cleared out a utility shelf that had been a dumping ground for miscellaneous items for over 10 years, carrying assorted pens and key chains down to the free box in the building’s lobby, and chucking a 2013 recycling guide into the, um, recycling. This “decluttering” is good medicine: strangely fulfilling, even bizarrely self-inspiring. Hell, if I can clear out a 10-year-old utility shelf, I can do anything!

And, of course, I also try to get in my four hours a day of writing; on such things as the piece you’re reading right now, and this book, an irreverent “feminism for guys” manual. Obviously such writing does nothing in the short term to address the current barrage of Trump executive orders and such, but it might eventually help counter how the “crisis of masculinity” has been weaponized to fuel MAGA and Trump’s rise. I’m trying to play the long-game here.

This kind of compartmentalization helps me get through the day, and stay focused. I believe it’s also essential to the next wave of resistance we need. Here’s why:

Almost a year ago, long before Trump 2.0, I was invited to speak to a small undergraduate creative writing / critical thinking class at Pratt in Brooklyn. Students were assigned to read a few short chapters from Better Catastrophe, which we discussed in a very open, conversational way. The most striking moment came when one young woman spoke about being “overwhelmed,” describing an unending torrent of broken bits of the world — from horrific images of Gaza, to climate disaster porn, to GoFundMe requests from friends without health insurance — all coming at her on her socials. She felt paralyzed, unable to act, uncertain where or how to begin. Being yanked around by all these urgent requests for aid and action left her unable to act on even one, and so she mostly disconnected, and then felt pretty shitty about it. I’m sure many of us know the feeling. “How am I supposed to care?” she wanted to know.

Her question hung in the air. Other students were nodding, murmuring agreement. It felt like it wasn’t just her asking the question, but her whole generation. In fact, the entirety of 21^st Century humanity, psychically battered by the attention economy and polarized politics, wanted to know the answer to this question. And here we were. I better have a good fucking answer.

I told her it was okay to protect her heart with denial and compartmentalization.

Not the answer she, or the professor — or even I — was expecting. But I felt she needed someone to give her permission to look away and not have that be seen as a personal moral failure.

I told her: You don’t need to care about any of it. You can ignore it all. All but one thing. And as if re-staging a scene from City Slickers (Jack Palance, holding up a finger: “just one thing”; Billy Crystal: “wait, what’s the one thing?”; Palance: “that’s what you need to figure out.”), I told her: so long as you choose one terrible thing to pay attention to — and, crucially, do something about — then it’s okay to block out all the other terrible things if you need to. This one thing should be something you profoundly care about, that you can bring your gifts to bear on to make a difference. Once you figure out what that is and get busy on it, you might find that all these other terrible things don’t assault your conscience nearly so hard.

I referred to this approach as “selective denial” and “selective attention.” (Terms I made up on the spot, though they do echo some earlier writing on “the wisdom of denial” from Better Catastrophe and “the tragedy of commitment” from Daily Afflictions.)

It’s okay to titrate the bad news, I told her, to only let in what you can handle at any given moment. Do what you need to do in order to keep yourself grounded and stay in the game. You don’t have to stare unblinking at the apocalypse, you can squint at it. Selective denial is okay so long as you’re also practicing selective attention, I told her. Choose one terrible problem to focus on, to act on — whether that be Palestine, or climate, or corporate corruption, or whathaveyou — and gather all the gruesome information you need on that one problem so you can act well on it. And, if necessary, let that one terrible problem break your heart, so you can also feel all you need to feel in order to take on that problem with your full self.

And then — because your heart can only handle so much — you’ve got to trust that countless other good souls out there — who, just like you, are practicing their own mix of selective denial and attention — are taking on all the other terrible things that your heart can’t afford to pay attention to. It’s an ecosystem of resistance. Don’t get suckered into the hero/martyr thang that you have to be everything for everyone at all times. You absolutely don’t, and moreover, can’t. We’re all on Team Resistance together, and we all sub in and out as needed. If you can do your bit, and trust that other folks are doing theirs, then you can ease up on yourself, give yourself permission to not pay attention to the whole horror show, or even block it out of your heart entirely if that’s what you need to do.

I don’t think she’d ever thought such emotional gymnastics were morally permissible. She seemed to welcome the approach as a kind of reprieve, a redemption. As, more recently, have many friends, paralyzed by Trump 2.0, whom I’ve shared it with over these last few weeks.

And don’t just take it just from me. In the last week I’ve come across quite similar counsel from folks wiser than I: Here, for example, is TPM’s Josh Marshall channeling the Serenity Prayer, enjoining us to stay calm amidst the storm, even as we (strategically) oppose! oppose! oppose! the worst of Trump 2.0. And here is Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter telling us “They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance.” as she lays out a brief and brilliant series of steps you can take to orient yourself. Her wisdom has since gone viral on TikTok and elsewhere, including on Rob Brezny’s Free Will Astrology IG page, proving that even astrologers can join the Resistance! (And unlike a lot of the Internet, the comments on all these posts — at least as of this writing — are actually a joy to read.)

So, if you’re looking to onboard yourself into Resistance 2.0, this kind of calm and focused approach might be just what the doctor ordered.

Let me close with a blessing:

May selective denial (and attention!) grant you permission to block out, or at least background, whatever bad news you need to, so you can stay sufficiently focused, grounded and mentally healthy to act on your “one thing” while trusting others to act on theirs.

Compartmentalization for the win!

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Please tell me in the comments whether this wee homily was helpful to you.

I continue to believe that even in the midst of this nearly-worst-of-all-possible catastrophes, there is still so much we can do to get a less-worse catastrophe, and maybe even a better one. If there was ever a time to be tragically optimistic, this is probably it.

Love and solidarity to you all.

Andrew

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In community,

>Britt