This could be a crazy week. Here’s one way to stay sane

It was, as your granny might have said, a funny old week. A funny old decade-or-so, perhaps. There was the usual life business to fret about – work and financial stress, concern for the friend who might not be doing too well. There was war in Ukraine and the Middle East, levels of systemic sexual violence and murder in Sudan that barely made the headlines because there’s so much global and media focus on the first two issues. We’re all generally overwhelmed and have limited attention spans.
Then there was the Taliban, armed with the vast resources and inflated confidence left behind by the US when they skedaddled out of Afghanistan in 2021, who have declared that women may no longer be audible to one another, rendering their voicelessness a formal edict.
One wonders at what point, legally and culturally speaking, a person can simply be “unpersoned”. Rendered formally inhuman. If anyone can answer that question for us, it’s the lads in the Taliban. They’ve cleverly observed that it’s quite difficult to foment, dissent, or even to lament when you’re not allowed to speak.
So there’s all that to mull over on the commute to work. Plus there’s that eye test you’ve been putting off because you’re afraid you might need reading glasses (as if never doing the test puts off the reality of close-up objects blurring suspiciously), and the fact that you absolutely do need to call your mother back. It’s been days and it’ll be a whole thing if you don’t just ring her back. Plus there’s the small matter of the US presidential election rendering most public and even casual conversations sort of berserk, extreme and vastly uncharitable at the moment.
As someone who has benefited from philosophy in countless practical and material ways, I’m wary of people who wheel it out as a limp coping mechanism in moments such as these, like a slightly lopsided, melted cake at the birthday party of a toddler mid-meltdown. Philosophy isn’t an injection of antivenom when you see a headline – as I did last week – reading A Vote For Trump Is a Vote For School Shootings and Measles and feel kind of like you’ve been poisoned because, arguably, you have a bit.
Philosophy cannot make other people more reasonable, saner, or less emotionally overwhelmed. It isn’t there to make the world more comfortable for us. It can, however, help all of us as individuals to be more reasonable, saner, and less emotionally overwhelmed. It can help us to contextualise external senselessness and maintain decent order in the only domain where we actually have any control – within the bounds of our own mind.
So while Derek from accounts is terrorising everyone on the Tuesday morning Zoom call with his conspiracy theory that Kamala Harris is actually a surgically altered Jeffrey Epstein, who is not in fact dead, we can resist the madness. We can remain sane by expecting calm, goodwill and open-mindedness from ourselves even when we can’t see much of it around us. We can refuse to submit to the wave of ill will.
The best way to stay sane this week is, as Marcus Aurelius recommended in his Meditations, to extend more generosity to other people’s crazy than we do to our own. Instead of resenting other people for not reflecting the values we think they should, we can shift the focus inward. When we do this, it often becomes clear that we aren’t actually meeting the standard we’ve been holding other people to anyway. This is uncomfortable, but valuable information.
In 1939, the philosopher Susan Stebbing looked around – at the political situation in Europe, at the dearth of compassion, cohesion, honest politicians and good ideas – and wrote an excellent short book called Thinking to Some Purpose. It was republished in 2022 and is very much worth reading as a practical guide to critical thinking this week if the lack of it is making you cantankerous. “I am convinced of the urgent need for a democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognised ignorance,” Stebbing writes in the preface.
We can’t change other people but we can call ourselves to task, and that can be a surprising comfort in a world that feels overwhelming.