Ang's Journal

My self-image is that I am a rational person. I consider myself intelligent, well-educated, & curious. When I need to make a decision, I gather information (considering the source's expertise & bias & trying to find as many opinions & lines of evidence as possible), I look to history for information on previous, similar situations, & I try to identify my blind spots (cultural cluelessness, my own biases, areas of knowledge where I have zero experience or understanding). I draw a conclusion, but then I try to remain open to changing my mind, if I am presented with more input. BY NO MEANS do I consider myself a perfectly rational decision-maker, no one is. But I think my methods have given me a fairly decent algorithm by which to discern fact from fiction, to predict effects from causes, & to navigate the world.

But now, I am living in a world where facts are... whatever someone chooses to believe, I guess. Or rather, facts are whatever are being promoted as facts in a person's particular social niche, media bubble, or information silo. If you are a progressive, blue, Democratic-leaning voter in the USA, then facts include:

• The election system in the US is not perfect, but it is generally secure & correctly reporting the will of the voters.
  
• Sexual orientation & gender identity are complicated processes, & cannot be simplified to "conform to the norms of the majority or be considered evil".
  
• Human activity is contributing to global climate change, primarily via the release of carbon dioxide & methane to the atmosphere.
  
• Etc. etc. etc. It's boring to list them all. They even made signs to put in your yard that displayed an abbreviated list of "progressive facts".

But my point is that I believe these statements to be true because I have reviewed evidence that I find credible supporting these assertions, & I have not encountered much evidence that disproves them.

But if my method is solid, & I'm actually following it, then why did I have a conversation last week with A* that went like this?

Me: Can you give me one thing to look forward to from the next Trump Administration?
A*: Improved economic conditions.
Me: How will that be achieved? Through tariffs?
A*: No, I don't really understand how the tariffs are supposed to work.
Me: How then?
A*: Through energy independence.
Me: Even though the US is already the world's top producer of oil & natural gas...?

But instead of trying to argue, I sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking through my response to this reasoning. (Side note: it took an immense amount of effort to NOT argue based on what I consider facts.) I realized that I would never support the Trump Administration's approach to "energy independence", which (without a doubt) will be to promote increased extraction of & reliance on fossil fuels. So then I asked:

Me: Do you believe that human industrial activities contribute to global climate change?
A*: I don't know.

And there you have it. A* is an intelligent person. He worked in journalism for more than three decades. He's certainly seen the arguments regarding human impacts on the atmosphere & the consequences, but he doesn't believe the data that seems so irrefutable to me. But because he doesn't believe in the connection between releasing carbon dioxide & methane & dangerous changes to the global climate, he isn't going to worry about supporting an "energy independence" policy that will increase the burning of fossil fuels.

This realization has sent me spiraling. We had a near-fight earlier this year when I asked A* if he thought Haitian immigrants were eating dogs & cats in Springfield, Ohio & he also said he didn't know. How can he not know? How does he determine what is true & what is false?

But on climate change, it hurts more. I am literally a professional environmental scientist. While the global climate is not my specific area of expertise, I am knowledgable enough to have a pretty good grasp on the data & the arguments. But apparently, my husband doesn't believe me when I say that data models have predicted for DECADES that continued release of carbon dioxide & methane into the atmosphere is going to have horrible consequences for humanity (well, for the entire planet), & that so far, real-world observations either confirm the predictions made by modeling or suggest that they were too conservative & things are actually getting worse more quickly than predicted.

So, does A* believe anything I say? Does he think my career is just some big joke? What is he thinking when I prattle away about my models of natural attenuation of dissolved-phase contaminants in groundwater? Does he want to pat me on my head & tell me to just go back to the kitchen & stop worrying my pretty head? Poor deluded little girl, thinks she knows something about how the world works! It's cute!

I don't know how to live in a world where - it's not even a world where we don't agree on facts, but a world where we don't even agree on how to determine whether something is true or false. I don't know how to talk to people. I don't know how to process any incoming information or answer any questions. There's doesn't seem to be a point to doing those things anyway, because how are you supposed to decide what you should be doing, if you don't know what's true?

In this mindset, the mental obliteration promised by a long, hard drinking session sounds really good. So do other forms of annihilation. I'm not there, but it's been a long time since those things seemed so tempting.

Sometimes there is a word in one language that doesn't really have a direct, word-to-word translation to another language. It's like one group of language users found a need for expressing a particular concept, made a word to express that concept, but other groups of language users never got around to that specific concept. So if you're speaking one of the languages that is missing that word, you have to borrow.

German language speakers seem to have covered a bunch of concepts that English speakers somehow missed. And today the word I need to borrow is Weltschmerz. Literally, I think it translates as "world pain", but it is used to mean: "profound depression regarding the human condition or the state of the world".

Today I have Weltschmerz. I have lost faith in humanity, both in most of the individual instances of the species & in our collective institutions. We aren't going to treat each other with decency & kindness. We aren't going to address climate change. We aren't going to prioritize healing over warfare. We aren't going to learn the lessons taught by history. We are cruel, petty, vicious, untruthful, & deeply sick. We deserve to die. We don't deserve to take our entire biosphere down with us, but we probably will. We will cause each other immeasurable misery, destroy uncountable wealth, & fight each other to our final breaths over the last tattered scraps of Eden.

At the last church service I attended, my pastor preached that we need an apocalypse. Apocalypse, he said, strips away all falsities & shows all things as they really, truly, fundamentally are. When apocalypse comes, you can't argue any more about data, or the liberal media, or gaslighting, or bias -- because those things are all swept away in an overwhelming flood of Truth, pure & undiluted. Shit gets really Real. I want that. I am so tired of doubting my own sanity because basic facts are being debated. I am so worn down with trying to convince people (including myself) that their own self-interest is not the highest good. I am so weary of trying to determine how I - a mote, a speck - can make the slightest difference with my actions.

How I am supposed to care about my retirement plan, or exercise goals, or relationships, or spiritual path, when it all seems so pointless?

I just tweeted “Still haven't made any #resolutions for 2011. This is what is wrong with my life these days - no direction.”

Overlooking the obvious calendrical typo (etcet pointed it out in approximately 45 seconds), this is the biggest problem I’ve got right now. I am underutilized at work – but not particularly worried about it (whether or not that’s wise is another post altogether). I am doing a terrible job of preparing for next month’s triathlon in Corpus Christi. I am not cooking very frequently. I am not doing much volunteer work. I’m not even reading much new material.

A lot of the year has been consumed by money worries – not without reason, I may add. I am my family’s single income earner (outside of the seasonal peach bonanza) & have been for over three years. So it is with cause that I worried about every cent during 2011. This penny-pinching mentality definitely contributed to me pulling in my horns a bit – it’s not impossible to be outgoing, charitable, artistic, well-read, &/or athletic without spending money, but it is harder.

I have also developed a terrible habit of living through hotpantsgalore. She's working towards her graduate degree... & somehow that massive goal is my goal? I take pride in her accomplishments? While it's true that I am helping her make it through grad school (see earlier, "my family's single income earner"), this does not mean that her accomplishments are mine to claim. And yet I feel that I have submerged any desires of my own beneath the generalized idea of "just keep everything together until June 2013, when we will become a two-income family again". But that's no way to live - especially not for five years (2008-2013).

I think that the problem is a lack of long-term goals. Where do I want to be in five years? Ten years? I have said repeatedly over the last few years that I threw away my crystal ball because trying to predict where my life was going was impossible. Perhaps this was a poor decision. When I stopped trying to predict, did I also stop trying to influence or even control where my own life is going? If I've abdicated that responsibility, should I be surprised that I am adrift?

OK, Im drunk. Stacy is asleep. I'm drunk & angry, I might add. In case you haven't noticed, my entries lately have been mostly accompanied by bad-mood emoticons (even if the anxious one doesn't really look very anxious, I've been plently anxious).

Something. Is. Wrong. Something big. I'm either too afraid to confront it or too stupid to identify it. FUCK.