The Blindboy Podcast - A mental health plan for when the News is overwhelming

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

How I manage feelings of anxiety and depression when the News cycle gets me down. So that I can have compassion, empathy and be functional, while still keeping informed and caring about world events. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What's the crack you anemic queevas? Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. It's the 1st of March. It's Shrove Tuesday. I hope you're enjoying your tasty pancake. I spoke a little bit about Shrove Tuesday and some queer traditions around it in last week's podcast. It was a particularly beautiful morning today. Usually the first 10 days of March are horrendous. The first 10 days of March are often the death rattle of winter. They're very aggressive and windy and dark but this morning was absolutely fucking beautiful. I get up at half seven. I went for my run and there's something so special about that time of the morning it feels like nature is letting you in on a little secret I wanted to drink the sky it was the most beautiful

bright blue color that just radiated a sense of vitality and life and there was a carpet of frost on the ground sparkling at me like sugar on a priest's pancake and the sunlight there was this enthusiastic spring sunlight not that peachy sideways glimmer that we got from winter and I went down by the river and there was fog licking the top of the water and cormorants there was fog licking the top of the water.

And cormorants, there was cormorants diving down and being pure cunts to the eels and the elvers. And big lanky shadows of poles and trees. Nature showed me its bare arse this morning and it was a glorious hope. And when I got into my office, because I ran into work, when I got into my office, I didn't need or want coffee because the morning had imbued me with the caffeine of existence. So instead, I got a Coke Zero, but they didn't have any Coke Zero. They had cherry flavoured Coke Zero. So I had a cherry flavoured Coke Zero, which I later found out had caffeine in it. But I didn't want the caffeine. It was given to me involuntarily by the Coca-Cola Corporation. But fucking beautiful morning.

I needed that. So what I want to speak about this week is the news this week has been quite distressing Ukraine has been invaded by Russia and it's quite upsetting and it can elicit a feeling of anger

it can also be frightening and it begs the question should I or how can I enjoy a beautiful morning in Limerick when there's so much suffering happening in Ukraine

or in Palestine or in Yemen for that matter that's a legitimate question I asked myself this morning it's a legitimate question I asked myself when I'm enjoying a meal this week. I get a little sense of guilt or a sense of shame. I ask myself if I'm uncaring or if I'm a bad person. And when I start thinking like that, that's when I know I have to engage in a bit of self-examination and self-reflection. So that's what this week's podcast is going to be about.

So that's what this week's podcast is going to be about. How do we manage and maintain our sense of emotional and mental well-being when the news is terrifying and frightening and saddening? And I'm doing this because a lot of people asked me to do this. I got a lot of DMs on Instagram in particular about this specific issue. And also it's worth pointing out, this is an incredibly difficult podcast to make because I live in safety. I live in safety. There's no war happening here in Limerick

and chances are if you're listening to this outside of Ukraine you too are also most likely safe. So it can sound incredibly selfish to even mention my mental health or our mental health when other people are going through a humanitarian crisis.

And I'm dreading putting this podcast out on Twitter in particular, in Twitter where things are willfully misinterpreted and taken out of context because you can win the video game of Twitter by having the best complaint. But I just want to make it clear before I even begin, that's not what this

podcast is going to be. The reality is, is that when the nose cycle is distressing, we experience that as distressful. And that can be overwhelming to the point that it's not helpful to anybody. And this podcast is going to be about how I enact self awareness around that so that I can be a more compassionate and useful person. The other option is to pretend that this doesn't happen, that stressful news cycles don't stress us out and we engage in a performative way and don't acknowledge our emotional reality. What this podcast definitely won't be about is making other people suffering about my emotions or my feelings or treating people's suffering as an inconvenience that makes me upset. And I want to speak about this in a well thought out way where we are both

minding our mental health while at the same time maintaining compassion empathy and awareness for a humanitarian tragedy and keeping ourselves informed so please have that faith in me before you switch off and start getting angry so last thursday i woke up and the first thing i saw on the news was r has invaded Ukraine. So immediately my anxiety went quite high. That was frightening information. Then I went on to Twitter and that made it about 100 times worse because I'm not just seeing news. I'm seeing other people's anxiety about that news.

Other people who aren't in Ukraine, people in Ireland, England, America. I was seeing other people's anxiety and other people's immediate thoughts of terror and this set me over the edge. I felt frightened, helpless and sad. So immediately I made a decision. I banned myself from social media completely and said that I'd check a reliable news source twice a day and that's it, to keep myself informed. And I did this for my own emotional boundaries. I do want to keep informed about human suffering.

I feel a responsibility to keep informed about human suffering. I feel a responsibility to keep informed about human suffering but I don't want to allow myself to become so overwhelmed with anxiety that it starts to impact my capacity to function emotionally and think critically and that's what was happening as soon as Thursday morning hit I looked at social media and I looked at the news if I didn't create boundaries for myself there and then I knew that I would end up experiencing a purposeless amount of distress and the important word there is purposeless distress that has no purpose Me having a full-blown panic attack in my living room in Limerick is not going to stop horrendous world events. It's also not going to

alleviate the suffering of anyone who's victimized by horrendous world events. The only purpose that that serves is to cause me to function poorly. It doesn't make me more compassionate. It doesn't make me more empathic towards other people suffering. In fact, it kind of shuts it off. And it makes things a little bit about me. And it's a barrier to compassion and empathy. It will increase the likelihood that I engage in unhelpful or harmful behaviours. I'll lose my capacity to

think critically. I'll start to share disinformation. I'll try to control what feels uncontrollable by posting my terrified emotions, thoughts, opinions and predictions online while being fully convinced that I'm doing the right thing. Helping fucking no one and upsetting other people. And for me personally, because I have such a large social media following, I have to really be on top of this. Like imagine I tweeted to a quarter of a million people. I'm terrified we're fucked. Because that's what I felt like doing on Thursday morning.

Because I saw other people tweeting that. People who weren't directly involved in the situation. People in the comfort of their own homes becoming emotionally flooded, experiencing panic. They tweeted this shit, not from a place of authority or information, but to try and control their uncomfortable emotions. And I almost took that energy on. And if I had taken that energy on and didn't challenge it I'd have caused quite a bit of distress to a huge amount of people but if I take a step back I won't. To simplify it further to explain what this podcast would be about think of any stressful situation you've been in. Have you ever had to call an ambulance because there was an accident? Have you ever had

to be involved when a fight was being diffused? Think about how you would behave and how the outcome would be if you were able to maintain a level of calm while still caring deeply about the situation versus caring about the situation but being in a state of panic or in a state of rage. It's not helpful to the situation and it can make it more difficult for other people who are trying to be calm. Only by consistently minding our mental

health and our own emotional boundaries can we be that person who is calm in a stressful situation. So that's why it's not selfish or self-centered to be thinking about your own mental health when news about other people's suffering is distressing. It's a position of generosity rather than a position of self-centeredness. So I'm going to speak about how I actively try to do this and if it's of benefit to you, you're more than welcome to listen. So when I make a choice to not go on social media, so what I'm doing there is I'm recognizing that there's information on here that's causing me purposeless distress. Okay. I'm feeling now overwhelmed by other people's anxiety, other people's fears, other people's anger, other people's opinions.

I'm now overwhelmed by this and this is causing me great distress. So I shut out social media. I go, there's the problem. There's the source of information that's hurting me. Get it the fuck out. I don't actually need it. Second one is the news cycle. I made a choice to check the news twice a day on a reliable source, and that's it, to keep myself informed.

I do not need to be scrolling through somewhere like Sky News all day long I do not need that that doesn't keep me more informed the purpose that serves is to increase my anxiety hugely so I don't need that either but I do want to address the phrase burying your head in the sand because a lot of people are taking the approach that I'm taking, which is to step back from the flow of information to mind ourselves. And some people who are doing this online are being shamed. And the specific phrase that's used to shame these people is, you're burying your head in the sand.

And I completely disagree with that. I think that position lacks criticality. There was a fella in ancient rome by the name of pliny the elder and he was born in like ad 23 right so that's 23 years after the fucking birth of christ but pliny the elder was he was a philosopher he was a writer and he was a philosopher, he was a writer and he was a naturalist but this is nearly 2000 years ago so he would have been like a David Attenborough before David Attenborough existed Pliny the Elder is credited with

more or less inventing the modern encyclopedia Pliny was an incredibly important person in the history of Western thinking and Western thought and he wrote a book called Natural History. I don't know the name of it in Latin. Naturalis Historia. He wrote a book called Natural History which was effectively an encyclopedia written 2,000 years ago about the world, about botany, about animals, horticulture, minerals. He tried to get as much knowledge about the known world

and put it into a book called Natural History, and this is the world's first modern encyclopedia. But Pliny is also credited with popularising the idea that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they're frightened of something. I think he was around Libya, where we'd now call Libya, and he saw ostriches. And Pliny, or someone that Pliny spoke to, observed these ostriches sticking their heads in the ground

and came to the conclusion that when an ostrich feels threatened, it will stick its head in the ground in a real idiotic way. So the ostrich is basically going, if I can't see it then it doesn't exist and this led to a false narrative about ostrich behavior which Pliny recorded in his natural history book. Now the fact is ostriches stick their head in the ground to tend to their young to look after their eggs that they bury underneath the ground and the ostrich is the fastest fucking animal on land so if something's threatening an ostrich it runs away faster than anything else so ostriches don't stick their head in the ground to pretend that a threat isn't there but it did survive it survived as a phrase and it's it's used today to indicate a combination of a cowardice andocy, when cowardice and idiocy intersect.

And so Pliny was very unfair on the ostriches. And the great irony of Pliny the Elder is his death. Pliny the Elder was obviously an incredibly curious person. He fucking invented the world's first proper encyclopedia. But in the year AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, right? And this was no normal eruption. This was a serious event. If you've ever been to Pompeii or are familiar with Pompeii in Italy, which was a big enough city at the time, which is at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. And when Vesuvius erupted in 79, it covered all of Pompeii in volcanic ash.

And everyone was covered in lava and ash. And then they dug it up. And you can visit Pompeii now. And it's perfectly preserved. You can even see bodies of people that were encased in ash. There's even one fellow who was in the middle of a wank. He was having a wank. And you can see his body. Look it up, Pompeii wanking man

his entire world erupted into fire and he's like shit I've got about 5 minutes to live so he just lay down on the ground in front of his door inside his house and said fuck it I'll have a wank and now he's just preserved forever in wanking position but anyway that volcano

erupted in AD 79 and Pliny the elder couldn't resist now in fairness to him he was also rescuing a friend so Vesuvius started to erupt and he had a buddy who was stranded near Vesuvius but Pliny also wanted to document the eruption he wanted to see what it was like. He wanted to find out about it. And as Pliny's boat. Got closer to the shore. And him and the crew are watching Vesuvius erupt. The crew are saying.

Pliny man. There's ash falling on us. This thing's about to fucking blow. Like are you for real? You want us to go towards the volcano? And Pliny turned around and he said a very famous quote which is fortune favours the brave. Of course he was killed by the volcano and that's how Pliny the elder died. Pliny didn't have critical thinking in that moment. He shouldn't have gone straight towards a volcano. He was overcome by emotion and said,

fortune favours the brave. Fuck it, let's go ahead. And the great irony there is fortune favours the brave as a phrase that we know. It's used by militaries all over the world as their motto. It's what officers from the safety of their command post say to young infantrymen when they run to their fucking deaths in a war situation it's how

you achieve valor which is the institutional performance of courage and what people don't know is like they've forgotten this is the phrase of pliny the elder who died while sailing towards a volcano and falsely accusing ostriches of sticking their heads in the sand. So Pliny misread the ostrich. Pliny projected his own anxiety that he wasn't taking ownership of on the ostrich and when it came to a crisis situation Pliny made a foolish decision. He got himself killed and all of his crew because he was emotionally flooded. He didn't take ownership of his anxiety. He was too busy projecting it on ostriches. And we as a society have reinterpreted his last words to be something worth celebrating, to be valorous.

So I'm not sticking my head in the sand when it comes to information about Ukraine in particular. But what I am doing is consistently assessing my relationship with my sources of information so that the emotions I experience are healthy and helpful rather than unhealthy and unhelpful. And this is quite a complex, it's not complex, this actually isn't a complex concept. It's just that we don't use the language of emotional literacy in our culture. It's not part of everyday conversation, emotional literacy. So what I want to do is introduce emotional literacy to this conversation. And I'm going to go into it in a bit more detail later in the podcast.

But I'll give you a quick example. What's happening in Ukraine at the moment is undoubtedly quite sad. It's making me feel quite sad. I'm upset about what's happening and I'm sad about what's happening. That's an okay and rational response because I'm thinking about the people who live there. I'm thinking about the people who live in Ukraine. I'm thinking about the fact that this time last week they had a life as normal as mine and now they're refugees and that makes me feel very very sad because this isn't about burying our heads in the sand. A bad thing is happening

and it's appropriate to feel sad about that but I would like to make a distinction between sadness and depression. They're both caused by the triggering event which is sad things are happening in the world but one can be constructive and the other one can be unhelpful or purposeless. In short, sadness can motivate you. Depression causes you to shut down. Sadness is still unpleasant. But when you're sad, you can still think of ways that you can help. You can think critically.

You can have an awareness around what you're sharing online you can have a think about how you might try to help some type of humanitarian aid you can engage in all this flexible problem solving style thinking when you experience sadness but when the sadness becomes overwhelming and develops into depression then you can lose your sense of agency so when you experience depression and you look at the news or you think about the situation that's making you feel depressed you convince yourself that everything is hopeless you become cynical towards any constructive way that you might be able to help. The lens of depression can be quite irrational if you've ever experienced it. You can end up blaming yourself for world events,

regardless of how much sense that makes. Depression can make you feel like you want to give up. With depression, you're not eating properly. You might stop caring for yourself. A lot of stuff can happen with depression, which doesn't really serve a purpose. Depression can make your self-esteem so low that you push other people away. Depression is very draining. And when you experience it for a week or so, even a little bit more, you can start to lose empathy and lose a sense of compassion and it can turn into anger. So I'm working on my sadness. I'm working

on being aware of the sadness that I feel about world events right now, but maintaining boundaries so that that sadness doesn't develop into depressive behavior or depressive thoughts and one way I do that is by controlling the flow of information that I receive if I stay on Twitter all day or if I read the Facebook comments under articles about Ukraine and I do this a lot all day and I'm exposed to other people's emotions, reactions, feelings, arguments, then I will find myself in a situation where my sadness is drifting towards depression. I know that's going to happen. The majority of information about Ukraine on the internet at the moment is not particularly informative it's mostly opinion from uninformed people so

I don't need to read a 63 thread argument between Niall from Tullamore and Donal from Galway about what NATO should do or about what's happening I don't need to read that I don't need to see that I don't need to see that. I don't need to see Niall and Donal having a fight because Niall and Donal live in Galway in Tullamore and they're not particularly informed and their

heated argument it's not even about Ukraine because it's 63 comments long. So after comment number three, Niall and Donal, who are trying to control their emotions by arguing about Ukraine, they have themselves convinced that they care deeply. But really, they're trying to regulate their emotions.

And after the third comment, it's not about Ukraine. It's a fight between Nile and Donal and it's two people who are angry and emotionally flooded just shouting negative emotions at each other and if I read that

and if I step into that virtual space because I'm so bombarded with information because two minutes ago I read an article from a journalist or I saw a video my brain can't keep up with that my brain is now in a heightened state

of threat analysis so Nile and Donal's uninformed shouting argument filters into my internal world as authoritative information. And I'm so overwhelmed that I can't tell the difference. And then I walk away feeling very, very upset. I don't fucking need that.

It doesn't serve a purpose. It makes me upset. It doesn't help anyone who's in a humanitarian crisis so I'm going to walk away from that I don't want to see any arguments between Niall and Donal how many people this week have seen a Niall or a Donal

or a Brendan or a Maeve or a Declan how many of these arguments have you read and walked away feeling like oh shit nuclear bombs are going to drop in my house tomorrow. Because that's what happens when you're in a heightened emotional state. You don't have your boundaries up and it gets in. It's like being in a room full of people who have fucking coronavirus.

You think you're grand and tomorrow morning you have a cough because they're not wearing masks and neither are you. So I'm just going to leave the room and focus on my feelings of sadness myself. So that's one boundary that I've put up and that's not burying my head in the sand. Now the other major boundary that we can put up and we can have awareness around regarding our channels of information. I want to make a distinction between journalism and reporting and news media and I'm making that distinction because I have huge respect for journalism and I have huge respect for journalists. I've worked closely with serious journalists that have a lot of integrity in my BBC series. Worked with a lot of journalists for that.

And was left with a huge amount of respect for what they do. But it's important for us to make a distinction between journalists and the business of media that they operate within because news media is a fucking business and a situation like what's happening in ukraine is very good for the business of news media similarly for the arms industry what the media wants is your continual consistent attention because if this happens they earn money from either through advertising or through your data when you click and this isn't bullshit this is reality and even though the news that you're consuming that information could be coming from quite diligent

journalists and it's truthful and factual information it is presented to us as entertainment and that entertainment doesn't necessarily have to be pleasant i don't want to be too highfalutin but i'm going to present the the theories of a philosopher called john baudrillard french philosopher i've spoken about baudrillard before on earlier podcasts and Baudrillard's theory of hyper-reality. Baudrillard's most famous essay or theory is called The Iraq War Didn't Happen. And he was speaking about the 1991 invasion of Iraq by the US. And when he says the Iraq War didn't happen, you're thinking, what the fuck do you mean the Iraq war didn't happen? Well, the argument that Baudrillard was making was,

yes, a war happened in Iraq. However, the world did not experience that actual war. What the world experienced was the war through the lens of the media. The Iraq War of 1991 was the first proper war that happened when 24-hour news channels existed. So it was presented as highly edited entertainment. Highly edited entertainment that was one version of the truth. Therefore, Baudrillard can say the Iraq war didn't happen because what we experienced was the entertainment version of it and that's called a hyper real simulacra. I'll try and explain this as simply as possible. At the start of this podcast I mentioned that I had

a cherry flavored Coke Zero, okay. Now when I Coke Zero it was nice it was all right I'm not gonna go getting it again it's a nice change but when I drank this cherry flavored Coke Zero I recognized the flavor as cherry flavoring but it doesn't taste anything like an actual cherry I've tasted actual fresh cherries actual Actual fresh cherries taste a little bit like a slightly bitter plum. They don't taste like cherry flavouring. If I'm being honest, cherry flavouring tastes more like marzipan. Cherry flavouring is kind of a strong almond taste. So cherry flavouring is what's called a hyper real simulacra. And I explain why. So real actual cherries, like I said, they taste like little plums. Okay. But there's this

liqueur, an Italian liqueur called Maraschino liqueur. And the Italians have been making this for about three or 400 years. And the thing with Maraschino liqueur is the Italians get loads of cherries and they I don't know what the fuck they do with them they ferment them but the thing is they ferment the whole cherry and within the pit of the cherry the bit you don't eat there's kind of an almond like compound so when you drink maraschino liqueur it tastes a bit like almonds. Then when they invented artificial cherry flavoring they didn't base it on actual cherries they based it on maraschino liqueur so this is why cherry flavoring tastes a bit like almonds. But because my Coke Zero says cherry flavoring when I drink it I go

yum yum the taste of cherries even though it doesn't taste anything like cherries, so now I can't tell the difference of a copy of a copy I'm consuming something that is hyper real and I'm so bombarded by the information I can't tell the difference and only through that critical

analysis that I've done right there can I actually use my senses to go, this isn't fucking cherry, man. This is some weird marzipan shit. I just think it's cherries. And media and news is a bit like that. So you've got a cherry, then you've got maraschino liqueur, which is like a mediated version of a cherry. And then you have cherry flavor, which is a copy of that mediated version. That's a hyper real simulacra and the media is a bit like that. You have the actual event that happens.

Then you have the journalist reporting on that event, that's the mediated version. But then you have how the news channel takes that information and presents it as entertainment. It presents a version of truth that is designed more to elicit emotions in us than to appeal to our criticality and that there is a hyper real simulacra. So just yesterday I looked at the front page of Sky News and the front page of Sky News. And the front page of Sky News, there was a big photograph. And it was of a woman crying right up close. So that's the first thing I see.

And I feel deep sadness and anxiety. Because I'm presented with the close up image of a woman crying. And then right beside her is the headline. Russia's nuclear forces put on enhanced combat duty. So what's happened right there? First image, a human being genuinely crying. It's an actual photograph that a war photographer took of a Ukrainian refugee. I'm a human being, empathy is a feedback loop.

I see this face, I experience her terror, sadness and loss and I feel it. Now I feel anxious. Without even thinking I've moved on to the headline. Now the headline is about nuclear, nuclear fucking war. The headline is about Russia putting its nuclear forces on high alert. Now I'm not engaging with that sentence with any criticality whatsoever because I'm still overwhelmed from the natural empathic response to that woman's face

so my anxiety is on high alert I've seen the word fucking high alert I've seen the word nuclear beside it I've interpreted all of this as an immediate threat and my emotional feeling is I am going to be obliterated tomorrow in a nuclear bomb

and so is every single other person that I love and that's what I feel in that moment and now I'm experiencing anxiety. None of that has actually happened. This is all an emotion but I'm overwhelmed so my criticality isn't in place. I'm being force-fed the cherry coke zero and saying yum yum these cherries. I don't have the calm to step back and recognize the marzipan. And then underneath that, another headline that says, will Russia start nuclear war? And when I clicked on that article, all it was, was people's opinions from the internet. But this information had been

presented to me to elicit an emotional response from me. And the emotional response was fear, response from me and the emotional response was fear, terror, curiosity and that's news delivered as entertainment even though when I click further into the news it's more informative but what you tend to see on news sites the first thing you see tends to be whatever elicits an emotional reaction and that can be very overwhelming. Now Baudrillard's theory about how we are presented a version of reality that's a copy of a copy of a copy in the news that relates to like the 80s and the 90s. Passive media as such you sit down and you look at your TV and you keep the TV on all the time. That's what the goal was back then. But now things have changed.

Not a lot of us are sitting in front of our TVs watching media all day. Instead what we're doing is we're clicking through news sites or seeing this news on our Facebook timeline or our Twitter timeline. So now a new set of parameters have been introduced. The algorithm of social media and what gets clicks on social media, unfortunately these rules are being applied to the information we're receiving about Ukraine and that's not shitting on any journalist I'm talking about the business of news media as we experience it so what news media is looking for is what's called high arousal emotions content which elicits high arousal emotions are what gets shared most and what earns money for media organizations via clicks so that they make

money from our data or through advertisements. The two emotions that have the highest arousal are fear and anger. Now what do I mean when I say arousal? They're most likely to arouse an action of some description and those actions tend to be a click or a share or an argument between Noel and Brendan because if an article is on Facebook for instance and there's tons of comments underneath if you want thousands of comments start hundreds of arguments then this is rewarded by the algorithm and whatever social media feed it's on so all of a sudden all of brendan's friends and all of noel's friends get recommended the same article and this is a wonderful system if you run a media organization and you want to earn money

it's a terrible system if you're trying to manage your mental health so if you're if you're finding out about ukraine through modern news media your sky news vice the telegraph the daily mail whatever the fuck the information the first piece of information you receive about ukraine has literally been designed to make you feel angry or afraid so that you click and share, because that's the business model. And you click on it and you read it and there mightn't be any disinformation, it could be fully factual, but the first thing that we see is something that elicits a strong emotional reaction of anger or fear. But when you're scrolling, that's all you see. of anger or fear but when you're scrolling that's all you see all you see is the thing that make that wants to arouse that emotion on an average hour on any social media site for me i see 10 articles and i click on one what sky news has started to do which is very fucking strange and

it's it's a new thing i've only seen them do since the invasion of Ukraine. When you click on a Sky News article now, it's not even an article anymore. They've tried to make their page look like Twitter. So what you have instead is a continual never-ending scroll of multiple small paragraphs and each paragraph has a headline that's more terrifying than the next and it never ends. It's the never-ending scroll so that I continually stay on Sky News's website and that's a new thing that I've seen them do very recently. So if I spend a huge amount of my day on these news sites I'm going to have anxiety. I am going to

have anxiety because the information that's been presented to me wants me to have anxiety and it's that simple and I don't want to have anxiety because it serves no purpose and it's not helpful. Instead what I want to do is maintain healthy concern because one keeps me calm and useful and the other keeps me overwhelmed and useless and I want to be cautious around that argument there around the around media because the issue with that argument is that if you're not careful you can find yourself on the same side as the right wing like in Russia journalists are killed under Vladimir Putin. I have the utmost respect for journalism and reporting.

It's one of the cornerstones of democracy. We have to fight for journalism. We have to fund journalism. However, I think it's okay for me to have an appropriate level of concern about the attention economy that news sites operate in especially in the context of social media it's okay to be critical of that the journalists and reporters tend not to be the ones writing the headlines the headlines are written by a team of people who are need this thing to get clicks on and shares and attention

and these are the people who figure out how do we get this to trigger some high arousal emotions so that we can earn money but enough fucking high arousal emotions lads and your emotions are going to be aroused you're going to start experiencing anxiety

and terror so I've placed a boundary around my consumption of news. And this is the crew of my argument for this podcast. I'm not burying my head regarding the suffering of people in Ukraine and what's happening in Ukraine. I'm also not making that suffering about me and my mental health. I'm not making that suffering an inconvenience that makes me upset. I am sad, I'm concerned and I'm heartbroken over what's happening. I'm also alert, I'm also informed and I have empathy and I have compassion

and I can do all that without subjecting myself to overwhelming distress that serves no purpose and will cause me to be inactive or foolish with what I contribute online and I think that's a solid argument it's time now for the ocarina pause I don't know why we keep calling it an ocarina even though I don't even know what my ocarina is now. I don't know if the ocarina will ever return. I've used many different items for the ocarina pause over the past nearly two months. Last week I rubbed my feet on the carpet. You couldn't hear it so this week... What have we got?

So in order to talk about baudrillard i had to brush up on my baudrillard a little bit i had to whip out one of my one of my books from my master's degree um so i've got my baudrillard book here so let's have a hyper real uh ocarina pause while i flick through the pages of my john baudrillard book. And as I do this, you might hear an advert. Hopefully this advert isn't for a fucking arms company or something. I don't know because they're algorithmically generated. So here's the John Baudrillard book pause. Thank you. 7th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca.

On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The First Omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters

April 5th. Oh, can you hear that? That's an entire book about Jean Baudrillard. Delivered at alarming speed. Harkling towards your face. That was the Jean Baudrillard book pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast.

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monetarily or just simply a share or a review that shit works as well dog bless tiny bit of housekeeping i've got some fucking gigs all right come to my vicar street gigs in dublin in at one at the end of march and two in april all right i've had to promote these gigs in two months because of the pandemic. So please come along to these gigs. Also the three gigs in Cork. Barcelona, Madrid. That's all I can remember right now.

Look up the gigs on Google because I'm fucking terrible at promoting gigs. Awful at it. But we tend to do alright in the end. Because you're a load of sound cunts. So I've managed to do 46 minutes there. And I haven't really spoken. About. Ukraine or what's happening. And there's a reason for that.

Because what the fuck do I know. And who the fuck am I. With all due respect. I don't think I'm supposed to say with all due respect. When I'm speaking about myself. That'd be if I was saying if someone else. I don't think I'm supposed to do that that's like Chuck Berry referring to himself in the third

person, with all due respect to myself, I know fuck all, I don't really want to speak about that situation because I know what I know through reading the most reliable sources that I can read, but I'm just someone

from Limerick who'd have an opinion. And it would be disrespectful to the suffering that's happening for me to try and speak on that. And that's as well one of the points of this podcast. If I wasn't watching my emotional boundaries, lads, and I pressed record on this podcast, and I was feeling very this podcast and my and I was feeling very anxious or feeling depression if my emotional world wasn't in check and my boundaries

my emotional boundaries weren't in check then I would come on here and I would trauma dump I would offload my fears my predictions for the future which are based on my fear and I do all this and likely spread disinformation or say something that's hurtful or disrespectful to someone who's experiencing suffering I'm not going to do that because I'm working on investigating my emotions in a way that's useful and constructive. And I feel great sadness for the human beings, the people, the civilians in Ukraine that have found themselves in the middle of all this bullshit. In the same way that I feel this way about the people in Palestine. Or the ongoing situation in Yemen which we don't hear about at all.

Which has resulted in thousands of casualties over the past five or six years civilian casualties and many refugees and I'm not doing a what about there I'm not pitting one group suffering against another to score internet points

one thing I do want to comment on and this isn't about events happening in Ukraine again it's about how I'm seeing it mediated through the internet so there's different groups of people online like online is nothing but a continual noise about this situation

so you have like I mentioned the people scrapping the people arguing and the people dumping their fears and anxieties onto the timeline and then you have another group of people who are portraying the situation in Ukraine as a film as a movie as a type of entertainment this appears to be a bit more present than TikTok.

And I won't say it's strange, because it's not. But some people are kind of regulating their emotions around the news by turning the situation in Ukraine into a Hollywood film. And disinformation is being shared as a result. Like you probably saw a clip during the week about a place called Snake Island where apparently there was this island and there was some Ukrainian police I think they were on the island and a Russian ship said to them surrender and they said fuck you and then they were all blown to pieces well that actually didn't happen that wasn't true the the conversation occurred but those people were

arrested instead of uh blown to pieces and the reason that this information was shared so heavily is because it conforms to a hollywood than reality. There's a former storytelling called the Monomyth. It was formulated by Joseph Campbell, also known as The Hero's Journey. And this is how all films and modern stories are written. And at the start of a lot of hero-type films, there's often a blood sacrifice of some description. Like if you think of Braveheart, at the start of Braveheart, William Wallace's wife

has her throat slit by the Brits. And it is this act of blood sacrifice and this crime that then drives our hero to complete the journey of that film. And the way that I saw people online responding to that Snake Island story,

even though it wasn't true, reminded me of that. It was like a necessary part in the mythological journey of how the film of Ukraine will unfold in the eyes of the people who aren't suffering. suffering but what you have is a weird kind of a hero narrative emerging where it's like everyone collectively is writing this hollywood script where they're filtering the information the news information about ukraine and making it follow the events of a hollywood movie where ukraine is the underdog fighting this big massive imperial power and that's true but you have people are emotionally disengaging completely with the reality of the situation by writing this film like the president Zelensky um he's got quite a lot of presence on camera because he used to be an actor, the president of Ukraine, Zelensky. He was the voice of Paddington Bear, Ukrainian Paddington Bear. And he also played a president on TV. So he played like a comedic version of the Ukrainian president. And it was a really popular TV show and then he was elected as president and you've got these really weird articles online where like people online want Jeremy Renner to

play him when the movie eventually happens and you see this whole section of the internet completely disengaging emotionally to make this thing into Star Wars or Lord of the Rings and one of the issues one of the issues with that that I think isn't helpful is first off we all know that story it's every superhero film it's Braveheart it's every Hollywood epic in which an underdog fights a larger more more evil power. And when you have a large section of the internet collectively writing a piece of fiction, even though they don't know they're doing it, but this is what's happened. When you have a large amount of the internet collectively writing a piece of fiction,

the information only gets filtered to suit that piece of fiction and then what happens is this information becomes shared so fake news gets shared because it fits the hollywood narrative of how people would like to see ukraine rather than reflecting the actual human suffering which is probably far far far more complex and complicated than the Hollywood narrative that we're seeing unfolding on social media and in certain parts of the news and to me that's burying your head in the sand that's treating the whole thing as entertainment you might think you're supporting Ukraine but there's not a lot of compassion or empathy there and it really speaks over the voices and the experiences of the people that are actually suffering by imposing this Hollywood narrative on us and it can seem in the short

short term like a good thing because when Ukraine has been presented as this epic good versus bad movie, people really get behind Ukraine and really support Ukraine while they're being invaded. But one issue is, if reality doesn't follow that cookie cutter plot of the heroic movie that we're all familiar with, it doesn't follow that, then people will become bored. Because the thing with hyper-reality is we often can't tell the difference between news and facts and entertainment. And reality and politics is far more complex than entertainment.

So I'd hate to see people losing enthusiasm or losing support for Ukraine because reality doesn't unfold the way they think the movie will. It's a bit disrespectful and it ignores the suffering and the voices

of the people of Ukraine who are being fucking displaced. And I saw it happen. I saw that happen with Syria like I never I remember seeing a comment under an article about an ISIS execution

so when ISIS were taking people prisoner and executing them online I literally saw so the ISIS had executed someone and it was like their 7th execution in a row and someone wrote underneath

this is getting boring now will they do something different and I genuinely think this person hadn't critically thought about what was happening he didn't see human suffering human lives this was a movie this was a movie. This was a movie.

Because we turned ISIS into a supervillain story. So that's also something around Ukraine that I've been very mindful of for myself. I won't allow myself to get dragged into following the Hollywood narrative of what's happening. Because that's tempting. Because what that does is that alleviates anxiety. If I'm feeling overwhelmed and anxious about what's happening, if I can just slot myself into the plot points of a film, because I can predict the outcome of that film, you see.

I know how that film ends that film ends with the underdog winning I know how that film ends so I can see the temptation for people to get involved in that narrative because you don't have to feel anxiety because you've seen this film before but it's not a film it's reality so I can't exercise compassion or usefulness if I'm engaging that way. And I keep using the term useful. What do I mean by useful? Well, if I'm, if I'm not, if I'm experiencing high anxiety, I'm not going to be thinking critically. If I'm experiencing depression, I'm not going to be thinking critically. I'm going to feel helpless.

But if I maintain my emotional boundaries and my emotional health around this and instead I'm upset, I'm sad, I'm concerned, then I can use that emotional state to inform actions. Whereas if I'm overwhelmed, I won't act. So support legitimate humanitarian efforts that are helping Ukrainian refugees. You can donate money. If you're in Dublin this Friday night, in the Button Factory, there's a gig on to support the Ukrainian Red Cross and the Scoop Foundation. scoop foundation they're small organizations looking for donations of things like clothes school bags things that will help refugees on the ground you can join one of the many protests that

are happening to show people power to show visibility you can write to your td if your cam and your emotional boundaries are in check you can properly research an organization that's helping the people in Ukraine because unfortunately with any crisis you get scammers so you need to have the your criticality about you to make sure if I donate money to this organization if I give clothes to this organization or school bags or tinned, is this actually going to be used, to help people, maybe you don't want your money, going towards military aid,

so you need to make sure, if I give money, to this organisation, are they actually going to, help human beings, refugees, because I'm not into the idea, of funding weapons,

which you're entitled, to not be into, these are all actionable things that we can do when we mind ourselves. When we mind ourselves and we mind our emotional boundaries then we become useful people. When we become overwhelmed we don't become useful, we become hopeless. So I'm just going to finish off with a few small words again on emotional literacy I want to explain the difference between concern and anxiety and sadness and depression so if I spend my entire day doom scrolling through the news and allowing myself to be emotionally impacted by headlines that are designed to make me fearful.

Then I'm going to start experiencing anxiety. And I don't really want to experience anxiety. Now what is anxiety? When I'm experiencing anxiety, I don't feel in control. My palms are sweaty. I've got kind of a hot feeling in my head. My heart is thumping. My thoughts are very rigid.

They're quite extreme. I'm not allowing any information into my brain that contradicts the feeling of anxiety that I have. I'm completely overestimating the threat. That means I see an article on Sky News that mentions a nuclear warhead and immediately I believe that I'm going to be obliterated and everyone that I love would be obliterated tomorrow and I experience this as a lived reality I'm terrified I underestimate my own ability to cope in this situation and I withdraw. I withdraw from other people. I start to view everything around me as completely threatening and terrifying.

I might use alcohol to numb my feelings of anxiety. I'll go onto social media and in order to control my anxiety I'll start typing all of the terrible things that I'm afraid of into social media and in order to control my anxiety I'll start typing all of the terrible things that I'm afraid of into social media and frightening a lot of other people. I'm going to frantically share distressing videos from Ukraine all over my timeline because this is the only thing that helps me to control my emotions. I'm going to upset a lot of people, share videos, I'm going to be so anxious that I'm not going to know if the video is real or not, where it's from, whether it's reliable, I'm not going to check the source that it comes from, I'm not going to check the account that posted it, I'm going to donate money to an organisation I

haven't checked out, I just see someone trying to help Ukraine and I give him 100 quid and I don't know where it's going, I haven't thought about about it I'm just pressing that to alleviate my anxiety I could have given the money to a scammer I don't know I'm gonna seek and need continual reassurance I'm gonna keep needing reassurance to alleviate my anxiety and the easiest way for me to do that is to scroll and scroll and scroll through news sites and through social media I'm to keep seeing more and more distressing news in the hope that I might see one piece of good news. I'm going to start getting anxiety attacks until eventually I completely withdraw. I don't want to know about what's happening on the news. I'm just a quivering mess and I don't want to help. I don't want to try.

My outlook becomes quite kind of selfish. Now what happens instead of being anxious? I'm concerned. So it's the same triggering event. I'm frightened about the situation in Ukraine. I'm frightened for the people in Ukraine. But I'm now concerned about them so it's still unpleasant still the same thing is happening but when you experience concern my thoughts aren't rigid there's a bit

of flexibility to them I view the threat in in a realistic way I'm not filtering all information in a way that confirms my personal anxieties. I have a sense of awareness and empathy about my concern and also the concerns of people around me. So I'm not going to go onto the internet and overshare my fears because I'm thinking maybe I should just be quiet here. Maybe people don't need to hear today that I'm personally terrified. Maybe I can sit with this one myself and work through it and not infect other people with my discomfort because everyone's having a tough time right now. Because I'm concerned and not flooded with anxiety. I feel a sense of agency around the thing that's threatening me. I understand that the situation is outside of my control.

I can't control what's happening in Ukraine. But I will calmly identify what things are inside of my control. I can join a protest. I can write to my TD. I can donate a protest, I can write to my TD, I can donate to organisations, I can have the clarity of mind to properly research these organisations so I know that if I do donate to them I'm literally helping. Because I'm concerned and not flooded with anxiety I understand my emotional boundaries around where I'm getting my information from. So because I've got a healthy level of concern,

I can tell when my social media feed is fucking with my head and I can have the agency to walk away from it. When I see a news headline that scares the absolute living fuck out of me, I can step back and look at it critically and say to myself, that's really frightening.

But is it the truth? Is it the truth or is it a prediction that's designed to make me afraid? So that there is the difference between anxiety and concern. And importantly, when you're concerned, you have the capacity to empathize. You have the emotional space to put yourself in another person's shoes. You can be compassionate to other people, you can think about other people's needs because you're not viewing everything from the lens of threat and danger. And then very quickly the difference between depression and sadness. So with depression I see some upsetting news, some news that makes me feel very very upset. Human suffering, other

humans being in pain and me not being able to immediately alleviate their pain. So I start to experience a sense of depression. My thoughts and my emotions are quite rigid, they're inflexible. Everything is terrible, everything is awful awful I start to view my world around me as only negative everything from the way that my cornflakes taste to the odd look that my cat gives me in the morning is filtered through a lens of contempt for myself low self-esteem telling myself that I'm a bad person, I'm a shitty person, that I don't deserve, I don't, how can I, how do I deserve to have the ability to go for a run in the morning and enjoy a blue sky when people are suffering halfway across the world? I'm such a

piece of shit. I view everything as hopeless and pointless. I don't write to my TD because I don't see a point in doing it. I don't donate to any humanitarian aid because I don't see a point in doing it. I don't want to join a protest because I'm not looking after myself right now. I'm not eating properly.

I've let my personal hygiene go to shit. I don't want to leave the house. I don't want to be around other people. What's the point in protesting anyway? Depression can live alongside anger quite easily. So I start getting into furious arguments with a man called Noel from Galway. And I start furiously disagreeing with Noel's opinions about world events. And then I start sharing terrifying articles to Noel and then I start calling Noel a big stupid Galway cunt who doesn't know anything about Ukraine. I'm gonna

come up to Galway and I'm gonna smash a bottle off your head in a car park Noel and then I get kicked off Facebook and I've spent nine hours of my day continually checking my phone to see if Noel has replied in a big long arguing comments thread with a person I've never met before who I'm utterly furious about and all of my anger and sadness is being directed at a stranger called Noel from Galway. None of the argument has actually been about compassion or empathy for the people who I purport to be speaking up for and it's just Noel has become a an archetype for every person who's ever hurt me in my life and I feel terrible for wasting my entire day arguing with Noel. Now I'm depressed, now I feel self-loathing again

but what about sadness? The same event has happened. It is sad that a terrible thing is happening in the world. It is sad that people are suffering. I feel upset by this. I feel sad by this. My attitudes towards my sadness are flexible and rational. So even though I'm sad, I still have a responsibility to make space in my day for self-care. I'm very sad today. I don't feel like going out for this run. How can I go for a run when these terrible things are happening in the world? Well, I kind of, there's no point. Like if I stay at home and don't go out for a run, I'm just going to feel like shit. That doesn't help anyone. That doesn't stop what's

happening. So I'm going to go out for my run in the name of self-care. And I'm going to use the space in the run to escape my sadness for a bit. Because that's okay. I'm allowed to do that. I'm entitled to that. When I get home, I still feel sad. But I make myself a nice lunch. And I have a shower with some nice shower gel that smells nice.

And I start doing nice things for myself. And I'm still sad but I'm engaging in self-care. I'm also recognizing boundaries about what makes me more sad. I log on to Facebook and I see Noel, a fella called Noel and a fella called Declan fighting about Ukraine. Some of the things that they say I disagree with and I'd really like to get involved in their fight but because I'm sad and not depressed I understand maybe you should step away from Noel and Brendan

this isn't helping at all and it's actually making you more sad so I get the fuck away from Facebook and I don't go on to it so I start to ask myself what can I do to help with this sadness so I write to my TD what can I do to help with this sadness so I write to my TD I see about joining a protest I look at humanitarian organisations that I can donate to because I'm not overwhelmed with the hopeless feeling of depression I'm able to critically review the organisations that I'm donating to

to make sure that they're legit so that there,'s a an incredibly brief overview of emotional literacy there understanding that the situation the triggering event doesn't change but the emotions that we feel about the situation that's something we do actually have a degree of control over for most us, the severity of our internal emotional discomfort isn't caused necessarily by what's happening, but our attitude towards what's happening. And by enacting self-compassion, emotional awareness, keeping an eye on our behaviors and our patterns of behaviors, By bringing these things into our awareness.

We can have control over that. So that's what I've been doing. That's what I've been doing. A lot of that is heavily borrowed from CBT. Emotional intelligence. Critical fucking theory. That's what I've been doing. And that's what's been working for me

because it's been a tough old week and I hope that was helpful for you. I have a special podcast for you next week. I'm going to sign off now. I have a special podcast for you next week which is part of a thing called Creative Brain Week which is all about the brain and creativity and it's being run by Professor Ian Robertson,

who I had on this podcast a couple of months back. But I'm going to be speaking to a neuroscientist called Anna Abraham, who's an expert in the human brain and creativity. So that's what I'm going to have for you next week. And Creative Brain Week is in Dublin from March 12th to the 16th. And go to their website creativebrainweek.com because there's lots of events that are happening around Dublin

from March 12th to the 16th that are really, really class if you're interested in neuroscience and creativity. So I'll chat to you next week. Also, regarding Twitch I'm not going to be on Twitch for the next two weeks because I'm going to be away I'm going to be away working

and I won't be around my studio so I can't do Twitch for the next two weeks so apologies if you tune in every Thursday night on Twitch give it two weeks and I'll be back dog bless two weeks and I'll be back. God bless.

Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.