How to Survive the Next Week

If you're not feeling anxious, you're probably not paying attention. Stay til the end for a mystical dishwashing experience.

1.

I try not to preach to the choir. Even if I’m writing for a presumptively progressive audience, I try to engage with multiple perspectives and possibilities, both because this is the kind of writing I like to read, and because I hold out the hope of dialogue with a broader audience, which often comes to pass.

But not this week.  This week’s newsletter is for Harris supporters only.  If you’re undecided or favor Donald Trump, here are some things to read instead.  If you’re not voting because of Harris’s various shortcomings, here’s something for you to consider. 

But if you’re like me, you’re nervous as hell because of the razor-thin margins in election polling. You may not be sleeping well — my partner and I aren’t.  You may also be shaking your head that the election is this close in the first place, as I’ve done here, here, and here.  You may be experiencing anger, sadness, anxiety, despair, fatalism, or any number of other emotions. 

In which case, this newsletter is for you.

2.

I’m going to keep the sections short this time.  When your nerves are jangled, listicles are good.  

The first point is that there may be no real remedy for freaking out.  In my twenty-ish years of teaching meditation, spirituality, and various forms of wisdom, I’ve come to learn this: I am congenitally incapable of pretending everything will be OK, and I cannot abide any “spiritual teacher” who says it will be.  It often will not be okay.  The cancer metastasizes.  The war happens.  The villains prevail.  These things happen.  In what sense is it helpful to pretend otherwise?

First insight, then: it’s quite alright to be anxious as hell. It is justified, it is not an illusion, and things have gone very badly in the past. So whatever you do, please don’t scold yourself for not being enlightened, balanced, wise, mindful, rich, or calm enough to not lose your cool. I’ve met dozens of spiritual teachers in my time, and the ones who pretend to be awesome all the time are faking it… to you or themselves or both.

3.

That being said, Harris is still ahead (by a whisker), the NYC rally of grievance and hate is a serious setback for the Trump campaign, and there are plenty of reasons to mistrust the polls this year in any case, as there’s evidence that they’re being gamed more by the right than by the left.

Second insight, then: we don’t know.  We don’t know what will happen next week, and we don’t know what a second Trump administration will bring.  (I made some guesses about that last week, in gruesome detail.) After all, when I was a kid in the 1980s, it seemed like nuclear war was going to break out and we were all going to die.  Fortunately, it didn’t. 

Then again, after I got back from Burning Man in September of 2001, everything seemed awesome, until it suddenly wasn’t. 

This unknowing may not help.  Countless studies have shown that human beings are better able to tolerate a known threat than an unknown one. If Harris were down by ten points, we could prepare ourselves for the inevitable. Instead, we’re suspended in a limbo of hope and dread, fighting fatalism but protecting ourselves from hoping too much, lest our hopes be dashed again. I still remember Hillary Clinton’s victory party in 2016, which I attended at the Javits Center in Manhattan, and the John Kerry victory party I attended in Tampa in 2004. I’m not going to any more victory parties.

But if we accept this disorienting sense of not-knowing as a baseline, we can stop wishing that it weren’t the baseline, and that makes the amorphous more bearable. Because as John Couger Mellancamp did not exactly say, when we fight reality, reality always wins.

4.

I can also offer the following guided meditation that I did on

The Mind Bod Adventure Pod

, Jeff Warren and Tasha Schumann’s podcast. It works for me because it brings in the tensions of the world, rather than trying to escape them somehow, and I actually find that more relaxing. Try it here:

How to Relate to the News with Jay Michaelson

5.

But what if you really do want the tension to go away?  That is also fine.

Here’s one way: a technique called “box breathing” that I taught on

Dan Harris

’s podcast during Covid. You can follow along with us on YouTube here.

Another option: studies show that doing something efficacious, even if it’s not related to the source of anxiety, helps.  So, obviously, you can donate that last bit of money, or help get-out-the-vote efforts wherever you are.  Do the thing. 

Failing that, do something else.  A year ago, I quoted an article The Onion ran after 9/11, entitled “Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake.”  It read, in part:

Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday.  ‘I had to do something to force myself away from the TV,’ said Pearson, 33, carefully laying rows of strawberry slices on the white-fudge-frosting-covered cake. ‘All of those people. Those poor people. I don't know what else to do.’

Do this. Bake your 9/11 cake.  Clean out the basement.  Have friends over for sushi.  Gently force yourself to do something other than obsess or ruminate. 

I made this.

6.

As you try any of these things, have some compassion for yourself.  From 2017-2020, Trump’s reign of error and terror was a period of dread punctuated by horror.  Then came Covid, the worst disruption in civic life that most of us have ever experienced – made worse by Trump, of course.  Our country’s reckoning with systemic racism in 2020 was welcome and necessary in some ways, excruciating in others.  The climate disasters of the last two years have made the existential threat of global warming more real than ever, even in the last two months.  The war in Israel/Palestine and throughout the Middle East drags on.  Palestinians are being forced out of their temporary homes by continued Israeli military action in Gaza, and Israelis are huddling in shelters every day because of missiles from Iran and its proxies.

Another way to look at it is through the Buddhist lens of non-self: the conditions for anxiety and other hard emotions are present.  It’s just cause and effect.  Put a human through the conditions of the last five years, and if they’re paying attention, they’re going to be worn out and fried.

Conveniently, no one who isn’t paying attention is likely to have read this far.  So that means that you, reader, are entitled to some break time.  Don’t feel guilty about it.  Do whatever.  Binge something, or better yet, go outside and get some fresh air.  Generate some endorphins.  Again, if you’ve read this far, that means you’re not spending all your time gaming or shopping or browsing celebrity gossip.  So do some of what brings you joy.

7.

Does it help to know that Trump supporters are also anxious (or so they’ve said on TV)? Maybe. It’s hard to resist arguing that they’re anxious because of myths — lies about immigrant crime or trans kids, for example.  But maybe it’s still comforting to know that these people who want to take away my rights are also suffering.  Maybe it’s just schadenfreude. 

I find the Trump enigma itself provides a certain kind of comfort. On one level, the phenomenon is infuriating. How can people trust someone who talks and looks like this? One look at him – the hair, the makeup – and you know he’s a con artist.  This is what all con artists look like, and only con artists look like this.  I guess it’s easier if you can’t trust a non-white, non-male; then, by comparison, Trump looks trustworthy.

On another level, though, the enigma is a perverse source of comfort. Among all the lies, there is a truth he tells, which is emotional and not factual: ‘You are being screwed and I feel your pain and rage.’  The core emotional truth that their country is changing in ways they don’t like.  And Trump, in his brutality and messiness, expresses that pain in a way that people with actual empathy and actual plans don’t.  Amazing his power.  No other Republican can do what he does; he is a charismatic leader, a cult of personality, a true demagogue. If nothing else, he is a unique figure.

8.

Alright, some of the meatier stuff now.

What is human life? Great pain and great love. We are born with desires, and those desires cannot be met: we cannot hold onto what we want and push away what we do not want. We are born with instincts, some toward compassion and others toward domination, and often the latter win out.  And yet, we are also capable of love, art, passion, beauty, lovingkindness, justice, progress, science. 

What more can one expect from humanity?  This is who we are.  Is love stronger than death? We don’t yet know. Every religious and philosophical tradition teaches that human nature is radically imperfect, even deeply flawed.  We are apes with big brains, but still apes, shaped by millions of years of evolution.  So, yes, the election is this close.  The dominant group’s status is being threatened, and they know it.  Some are able to adapt to the new reality; some even love and embrace it. But others aren’t. All it takes is a demagogue to tap into those primal fears and exacerbate them.  And that is what Trump does.

We need to scale back our expectations of this species.  I don’t believe humans are evil or awful; I don’t believe in original sin.  But I do “believe” in biology.  We have many different capacities.  This election is not some strange anomaly in the history of the species.

9.

And on a grand scale of things, who knows.  It seems certain to me that a Trump victory will lead to decades, at least, of environmental tragedy, not to mention many years of increased xenophobia and violence.  Our children will look back at us with rage – as many in Gen Z already do.  But what about in a hundred years?  What about in a thousand? 

Obviously I don’t mean this is an “accelerationist” way, i.e., that a Trump victory would be good because it strengthens deeper efforts toward human progress.  Incrementalism and radicalism are one of the fundamental Both/Ands of my life.  I devote half my time to the immediate urgencies of politics, journalism and law, and the other half to helping, in whatever small way I can, help the human animal evolve the better angels of our nature with tools like spirituality, psychedelics, and meditation.  We need to both vote in elections and pursue deeper forms of change.

I’m just saying, if the immediate moment has taken up all of your consciousness, you can try a somewhat longer view to balance it out.  (Thanks to Chris DiMeglio for sharing with me how he does this.)

10.

Finally, here’s what actually landed for me earlier this week.

Thursday night, I had just gotten home from celebrating Simchat Torah, the last of the long month of Jewish holidays.  It was lovely, if ambivalent: we danced with the Torah in the streets, and also prayed for everyone, on all sides, impacted by the war in the Middle East. We knew that Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese were huddled in fear of bombardment at the very moment we were celebrating the cyclicality of sacred time. My daughter had a lovely time.

After we got home, my husband started putting my daughter to bed, and I worked on the dishes, listening to the new ambient drone release from Chihei Hatakayama, who I love.

Washing the dishes became quite peaceful.  The physical sensations of the soap and the water, the sounds of clinking and splashing.  There was an experience of quiet release, almost of grace.

The world didn’t go away.  The sadness was also still present. The bad guys win sometimes.  Maybe they won’t this time, but they’ll win other times anyway.  This is how it is. Yet there was also this experience, these sounds, this consciousness, interwoven with it. Great pain and great love.

Ultimately the dharmic and stoic view is that what’s up to me is only what is here inside this consciousness (even if not “me” or “mine”). Nothing else is fundamentally reliable, even those we love, let alone the affairs of kings and princes. There is a capacity of mind that is not tossed by the waves of garbage and violence. Of course it too can be destroyed, if the body is destroyed. But while it endures, it contains a space of freedom.

And in the meantime, here’s the rug, the sofa, the fireplace.  Simple things, quiet, non-pretentious, pointing to the resting of the mind, the temporary setting down of the burden.

---

Well, it’s crunch time. I wrote about the NYC Trump rally here, if you’d like to switch back to anxiety. Though, as everyone knows now, it’s always good news for Democrats when Republicans say the quiet parts out loud.

One of the under-told stories of this election is how health is on the ballot, with RFK Jr. and his gang of anti-science conspiracy mongers set to take over the FDA, and possibly the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services as a whole, if Trump wins.

Jules Evans

did a great piece on how the Kremlin targets the wellness world (which now includes, astonishingly, that poseur of profundity, Jordan Peterson) with BS. Conspirituality is on the story as well. If you’d like, you know, a break from the other election news.

Finally, we’re running an “Election Anxiety Special” here at Both/And. Buy a paid subscription before Election Day and save 30% off the annual rate. The spelled-out link to cut, paste, and post is https://jaymichaelson.substack.com/election .

Let us know how you’re doing in the comments.