By Anna North, Image: Getty Images/fStop, Vox, January 27, 2022
That’s the question facing a lot of Americans as we stagger into 2022 still carrying the burden of a pandemic on our shoulders, plus some other burdens including but not limited to the increasingly devastating effects of climate change, the real and disturbing threats to democracy, and the seeming inability of the highest levels of the US government to address these dangers. It’s even boring to talk about how much any of us — parents, students, cogs in the broken-down capitalist machine — are dealing with at this point: “Does Anyone Want to Hear About Burned-Out Moms Anymore?” Amil Niazi asked at The Cut. That was in August 2021.
Now, in January 2022, many Americans have been dealing with fear and stress for so long that it’s become a kind of numb fatigue permeating everything. “When you’re anxious all the time, it really just saps your energy,” Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychology professor at Kent State University, told Vox. “You don’t want to do anything.”
This lack of motivation obviously impacts our individual lives, but it also affects our communities and the country as a whole. Americans are disengaged from the news and numb to politics, our circuits overloaded from months of crises and coup attempts. Some experts say we’re losing our ability to empathize with one another; others say we’ve been steeped in badness for so long it’s become difficult to imagine a better world. At this point, “I wonder where people are getting their hope from,” said Kali Cyrus, a psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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