Don't Let Them Take Your Mental Health Too
Complacency or defeatism would be a mistake, but carving out a bit of normality amidst a descent into authoritarianism feels like defiance
It didn’t go away as much this time.
During the first Trump presidency, I called the feeling “my occasional bouts of existential dread,” sort of joking, but also serious. Now it’s constant, as many of the things I feared in his first term are happening in his second. There’s a weird bit of solace in no longer going “what if?” or “there’s time to stop this.” But still, living through it is worse. When I stepped away from the news for a few weeks, the feeling eased a little, but didn’t go away.
I’m a news junkie and regular participant in political social media, and take a break once a year, cutting myself off from both. I stop my now decades-long routine of reading news at breakfast, don’t open any social media site, temporarily unsubscribe from any political podcasts, and try to avoid seeing or talking about it with anyone. A friend calls it my “cleanse,” like I’m eating nothing but blended veggie shakes for a week, except for my brain.
I especially recommend this for daily users of social media, political or otherwise. Get out of Information Age rhythms, even if only for a week or two. That might go double for people who produce content as well as consume it, especially writers like me who are constantly composing things in their head.
Smartphones and social media mean you’re constantly “on,” or at least always could be, and a lot of people treat the always-changing instant stimulus as a boredom cure, myself included. There are benefits—information, insight, connections, solidarity, jokes—but they come with downsides. It throws everything in your face, making events feel like they’re happening to you personally, and collapses context such that serious things like war or abuses of state power, and less serious things like celebrity gossip or sports, blur as if equally important. In 2025, there’s a lot of fear, along with an unhealthy dose of doomerist defeatism. Political social media in particular has a culture that treats posting online as both the cause of and solution to major problems, when it’s at most one factor, and only in aggregate, not individual.
Stepping away from that is good for my head.
I focus more on family and other things close to home. I helped more with friends who have both infants and dogs, like I had not long ago. I do yard work and home improvement, and this time had the not-young-anymore experience of lingering shoulder soreness after drilling into bricks and stone.
I dive into the NBA playoffs, my favorite annual sporting event, and this year was blessed with the best New York Knicks run in 25 years. And the team that knocked the Knicks out, longtime rival Indiana Pacers, plays such a fun style that I can’t help but like them.
I finally played Baldur’s Gate 3, which is very well done, and I wanted to love, but only liked.
I read fiction, for which I usually don’t have the time or focus, namely sci-fi and fantasy. I read about the real world so much of the year that when I read fiction I prefer books that take place in another universe, even if it reflects ours, as they often do.
Though that too ended up being less of an escape than usual. This break I read “The Tainted Cup” and its sequel, “A Drop of Corruption,” by Robert Jackson Bennett, and loved both. They’re murder mysteries in a fantasy setting—a unique one, rather than an analogue for medieval Europe, where the supernatural is more biopunk engineering than wizard spells—and unless that sounds like it’s really not your thing, I highly recommend the series (third and reportedly final volume to come).
But in the second one, Bennett includes a “high fantasy”-style kingdom that’s a mess on the inside. As in the real world, autocracies aren’t better or more efficient than liberal democracies, they’re just sometimes better at covering it up, and projecting a self-aggrandizing fantasy.
The author made those connections explicit in an afterword that calls autocracy stupid, and criticizes both the fantasy genre and the 21st century public for fascination with kings and nobility (or their modern authoritarian and rich equivalents). Though Bennett doesn’t name anyone, I took that as a respectful but pointed shot at authors like Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, and a deliberately disrespectful shot at autocrats, their supporters, and a lot of media that covers them.
I also had the amazing parental experience of my nine year old urging me to read a book, which I ended up liking a lot. It’s called “Impossible Creatures” by Katherine Rundell, a fantasy that clearly owes something to works that came before—though what doesn’t?—remixed and combined with new ideas until it’s something all its own. The reading level is in the range of Narnia, The Black Cauldron, and early Harry Potter, a stage or two before Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. If you like any of those, or Greek mythology, you’ll probably like this.
As I read, my son wanted to know what part I was up to, and could barely contain himself from spoilers. It was great.
The World Keeps Going
One of the striking things about these breaks is that I don’t miss much. Some details sure—and the associated comments, arguments, jokes, and analysis on social media—but the main dynamics of stories I follow are the same.
In mid-June as in late May, U.S. Constitutional democracy and civil society are under government assault. The White House is still using bad faith accusations of antisemitism as a pretext to attack academia (where I and a bunch of people I care about work). The war in Ukraine appears no closer to ending. Gaza, and the Middle East more broadly, are bad and could be getting worse. The trade war is still stupid, destructive, and self-harming, with no deals that put the U.S. economy in a better position than before Trump’s tariffs.
Though big things are in a similar place, as in previous years, more happened this time, and some broke through my informational cocoon. In a way, that’s further confirmation that we’re living through a volatile, significant moment in history.
I saw that Elon Musk left Washington, completing one of history’s worst instances of “government should be run like a business, everyone’s stupid but me, oh wait this is actually hard, never mind.” He’ll leave a lot of damage, still corruptly rake in government money, and publicly agitate for awful causes. Even in the best case scenario, we’ll be dealing with DOGE-related damage, and whatever computer code his operatives snuck onto government systems, for years.
I briefly got pulled back into the news by Ukraine’s big drone attack against Russia, which is right in my academic wheelhouse, and read up enough to put it in context, answering questions here. But then I quickly checked back out.
I also joined a podcast for an interesting discussion about fascism. I made an exception because host David Artman invited me before I went on break, because it was a broader conversation, not about the most recent events, and because his “Grace Saves All” podcast focuses on religion, not politics or national security, which is a different audience for me. You can listen here.
Someone told me there won’t be protests allowed in Washington, DC during the military parade the president ordered to honor himself on his birthday. Cut “someone told me” and that would’ve been a serious contender in a Most Unamerican Sentence contest ten years ago. Or twenty years. Or fifty. Or eighty.
Don’t let anyone tell you the United States was always like this. People who say it is want the democratic backsliding to work, or mistake cynicism for insight in a way that aids the authoritarian project, perhaps without realizing. America has never been perfect, of course, but rule of law, checks and balances, and rights expanding rather than contracting was better.
I heard about the ICE raids in Los Angeles, and deployment of the National Guard. It bled into entertainment news—one of the things I read to keep myself occupied in the absence of political news—with headlines appearing next to movie reviews. And I have some family in the area, who called me to talk about it.
I heard that Trump spouted bullshit about the raids and protests against it, using terms like “invasion” and “insurrection,” unsubtly chosen to create a pretext for using laws that objectively do not apply. Immigrants are clearly not a foreign military attacking America. Peaceful protestors are exercising core Constitutional rights. And anyone who breaks the law in association with a protest is an alleged criminal subject to arrest, indictment, and trial, not engaged in armed rebellion.
It’s quite a “get out of laws free” card. A power-abusing regime doesn’t need to change legal statutes, which requires an act of Congress. Just pretend that the language of existing laws means something different, and voila. It reminds me of the great Sartre quote about how when fascists bullshit like this they “are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
A lot about these raids is messed up—they hit graduations, and left little kids alone at playgrounds—but the most messed up part may be sending in some Marines. Not many, and they’re not really doing anything, at least not yet. Because, again, there’s no foreign military invasion or domestic insurrection for them to fight. But operating on U.S. soil crosses a very big, well-established line, codified in the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
It sets a terrible precedent, and functions as a test, seeing which military leaders oppose it—identifying them for purges—and if any seem eager. Nothing good will come from that.
LA is scheduled to host World Cup games in 2026, and the Olympics in 2028. Those events bring in tons of foreigners, including a lot of brown-skinned Spanish speakers. How will that work? Global sporting events go smoothly enough in established authoritarian states (2022 World Cup in Qatar, 2018 World Cup in Russia, 2022 Winter Olympics in China) and in liberal democracies (2024 Summer Olympics in France, 2020 in Japan). But the United States is now somewhere in between, without the order of the former or the freedom of the latter.
But the lawbreaking Los Angeles raids might have gotten California governor Gavin Newsom to actually oppose Trump’s authoritarian abuses. Until now, he’s acted like his presidential ambitions are best served by appealing to Trumpists, as in his friendly podcasts with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk.
Living With It
I never completely forget what’s going on in the world, even when skipping day-to-day details, though my news break does help me think bigger picture. One result this time, a thought that had been percolating throughout the year but solidified now: I have more sympathy for people in history who did normal things while living through descents into fascism, most famously but not exclusively in Nazi Germany.
If anything, popular understanding of fascism focuses too much on the Nazis—and not the whole thing, but the later years, especially as depicted in movies—which can lead some to wrongly assume that if circumstances aren’t exactly like 1938 or ‘39 Germany, then it isn’t fascist.
“What would you have done?” is a fairly common question, and people like to think that they would have acted to stop it. Or at least that they wouldn’t be carrying on with their normal life while it happened, as if it’s immoral to do so.
That’s similar to how, when most people imagine living in the Middle Ages, they think of themselves as knights, or ladies of the court, or whatever, rather than as dirt-poor serfs, which the vast majority were. These are massive historical forces, not the sort of thing individuals could arrest if only they wanted to badly enough.
In that light, carving out some normality feels like defiance. To some extent, moments of relaxation or joy are a middle finger to the people trying to take all that away.
Though there’s something unsettling about that too, especially for people who see what’s happening and know that some remain unaware. The national and world order degrade, but many carry on as if nothing’s happening. Alan Elrod called that “the unbearable normality of creeping authoritarianism.”
I’m certainly not telling anyone to be complacent or totally check out. After all, that’s what authoritarians want you to do. How bad this ultimately gets is an open question, and the only way out is a critical mass of society rejecting it. If you see opportunities to do something, large or small, then act.
But recognize that keeping your sanity, caring for your loved ones, and giving even a moment of respite to anyone under direct government threat is something. Not world-changing, sure, but not selfish complicity either.
They’re taking so much. You don’t need to let them take your mental health too.