Psychology interests me. In the face of concerns about the future, what is the "right" mental state, and how does that affect our daily life ?

Recently I was forwarded some interesting email written by a veteran thinker/activist type. No names, and I'll only quote a small fragment but I thought it was really interesting:

Responding to this email is re-opening a lot of long-healed wounds. So, I'm not going to type a thousand words describing why I am not brimming with hope for an enlightened future. Right now, my brain is filled with a blackness that I spent six years living with. In this last year, I've quit thinking about this shit, I've been blackness-free, and I seem to have become wiser and more serene.

This guy, in my opinion, is smart. You can't let thinking about this stuff wreck your life, which is all you have.

To me the right orientation is to approach everything with some humor reserve. It might seem contradictory, if we are really worried about mega-death dieoff, how can there be anything funny ?

But where people are concerned there's always potential for humor.

As an example of how to combine both aspects, we can look to the fantastic book by Peter George Dr. Strangelove. This book is/was making EXTREMELY serious points, as much so as anything on "www.dieoff.org". Yet it is also hilarious. That to me is the perfect balanced masterpiece of thinking about the unthinkable.

So in my own humble way, I try to keep that spirit in mind.

-Scott

-- Scott (lynx5_5@hotmail.com), April 02, 2000

Answers

Every time I go out in (cyber)public, trying to air the message, I seem to get ambushed by some non-thinking idiot, like this one who disrupted what began as a really interesting thread Too many idiots, not enough comets

I recognise your respondent's black mood as one that overcomes me soon after seeing red, as I did in the thread above.

Every time I seem to have "had enough" something like Running on Empty or my [climate-d] forum comes along to pump me up. I guess, one of these days, I'll learn ::sigh::

Hallyx

-- (Hallyx@aol.com), April 06, 2000.