32 ms·

Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. It really feels like a mental hangover, not knowing what actions to tak

Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. It really feels like a mental hangover, not knowing what actions to take to make things better for us a society?

alexf95 6y ago
Yes somewhat this is also true for me. However I think this "HyperNormalisation" has to happen in some way, because if people would constantly worry about how bad and corrupt the world/systems are it wouldnt help anyone going forward because not everyone has the chance to make a change.
hkt 6y ago
They actually leave me quite hopeful because they reinforce my view of the world and are popular. What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  I don’t see grounds for optimism. People believed in a bright future that would come when the generation of May '68 got more involved in voting, and were able for stand for election themselves. Yet what happened was those idealistic young people became less radical in the interim, and many signed up to a vogue of mercenary privatization and bourgeois urban development that was virtually the opposite of their earlier views.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I've never seen any of them. I've never heard of this guy before. But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing. He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better. It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.
- cloudfifty 6y ago
  > He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. That might be because giving a diagnosis can be made to be perceived as somewhat objective, while suggesting a solution would get into politics really quick and thus risk reflexive dismissal of even the diagnosis itself.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    "Bring solutions, not complaints" was something a manager at my corporate job used to say. He wasn't my manager and I didn't interact much with him and I no longer remember his name. But that rubric made an impression on me and it's something I took to heart as a useful rubric and it is surprisingly useful and solid as a guideline for both how to be effective and how to minimize social drama in the process of trying to interact with the world. Of course it's fine that some people focus on simply trying to describe the problem as objectively as they know how. That's not a useless thing to do. But given that I don't know this man's work and the word antidote is in the title, I don't think my hope for solutions instead of complaints was unreasonable either. Because my impression was so negative and I don't know him or his work, I had decided I wasn't going to leave a top level comment because I didn't want to be here to just shoot him down. That seems like not great behavior. My comment was a reply to someone asking a question about how his work makes other people feel. I felt it not unreasonable to chime in to say "It's not just you. Finding his stuff negative does not seem to me like you just being neurotic and negative baselessly." Of course, different strokes for different folks and me agreeing that it seems negative isn't rebuttal to people who find something positive in it. Feelings aren't facts and how people react emotionally to a thing will have a lot to do with personal background, etc. I'm guessing his work wouldn't be my cup of tea and: So what? Who cares? No one is required to feel the same way I do about a body of artistic work. There's always some degree of interpretation involved when it comes to art.
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      > "Bring solutions, not complaints" was something a manager at my corporate job used to say. I have heard this before, but IMO, this is terrible advice. Identifying problems is a valuable trait, and the advice above tends to squash people's willingness to highlight a problem that they know is there, but aren't equipped to solve. People like solutions to be brought because it requires less cognition, not because it's a good strategy.
pizza 6y ago
There are no quick solutions. But it sure does feel good to get rocked by the brunt of what he says, in my opinion. And I think some of Can't Get You Out Of My Head gets at what should come next. Then again, he's a journalist, not a leader.
jampekka 6y ago
That fear and hopelesness is more or less exactly what drives the hypernormalization. For me these documentaries present a small hope that we may actually get out of this mess. First step to taking action should be trying to understand the problems. We don't know what actions will make things better for sure, and probably never will. That's no reason not to take action, but perhaps a reason to not to expect nice and simple solutions.
spiralx 6y ago
> Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. To an extent, yes. But on the other hand it's interesting to see how particular events have such dramatic long-term effects, because it implies that in the future very different outcomes are possible even without massive world-scale changes.

alexf95 6y ago

Yes somewhat this is also true for me. However I think this "HyperNormalisation" has to happen in some way, because if people would constantly worry about how bad and corrupt the world/systems are it wouldnt help anyone going forward because not everyone has the chance to make a change.

hkt 6y ago

They actually leave me quite hopeful because they reinforce my view of the world and are popular. What I'm reasonably convinced of is that when millennials and younger cohorts start to tip the electoral scales in 15 years time, there will be an outbreak of harmony and consensus on an awful lot of things, and people like Curtis will have shaped really quite a lot of that.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
I don’t see grounds for optimism. People believed in a bright future that would come when the generation of May '68 got more involved in voting, and were able for stand for election themselves. Yet what happened was those idealistic young people became less radical in the interim, and many signed up to a vogue of mercenary privatization and bourgeois urban development that was virtually the opposite of their earlier views.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I've never seen any of them. I've never heard of this guy before. But I ended up skimming most of the article because the tone and direction of the piece in no way match what I expected from the title. I can well imagine his documentaries are probably pretty depressing. He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. He seems to describe where we are and how we got here but he seems to have absolutely nothing to say about how to go from where we are to something better. It's not my cup of tea at all. I was hoping for something meaty and meaningful to add to my existing set of ideas and tools and ended up being all "Yikes! I don't think it would be good for my mental health to drink too deeply of this stuff." So I skimmed, hoping I was wrong, hoping it would get better and grab me later. Hoping I would trip across something that would hook me and tell me to start over, that it will be worth the slow start. I never ran into that.

cloudfifty 6y ago
> He seems to have only complaints, not solutions. That might be because giving a diagnosis can be made to be perceived as somewhat objective, while suggesting a solution would get into politics really quick and thus risk reflexive dismissal of even the diagnosis itself.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  "Bring solutions, not complaints" was something a manager at my corporate job used to say. He wasn't my manager and I didn't interact much with him and I no longer remember his name. But that rubric made an impression on me and it's something I took to heart as a useful rubric and it is surprisingly useful and solid as a guideline for both how to be effective and how to minimize social drama in the process of trying to interact with the world. Of course it's fine that some people focus on simply trying to describe the problem as objectively as they know how. That's not a useless thing to do. But given that I don't know this man's work and the word antidote is in the title, I don't think my hope for solutions instead of complaints was unreasonable either. Because my impression was so negative and I don't know him or his work, I had decided I wasn't going to leave a top level comment because I didn't want to be here to just shoot him down. That seems like not great behavior. My comment was a reply to someone asking a question about how his work makes other people feel. I felt it not unreasonable to chime in to say "It's not just you. Finding his stuff negative does not seem to me like you just being neurotic and negative baselessly." Of course, different strokes for different folks and me agreeing that it seems negative isn't rebuttal to people who find something positive in it. Feelings aren't facts and how people react emotionally to a thing will have a lot to do with personal background, etc. I'm guessing his work wouldn't be my cup of tea and: So what? Who cares? No one is required to feel the same way I do about a body of artistic work. There's always some degree of interpretation involved when it comes to art.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    > "Bring solutions, not complaints" was something a manager at my corporate job used to say. I have heard this before, but IMO, this is terrible advice. Identifying problems is a valuable trait, and the advice above tends to squash people's willingness to highlight a problem that they know is there, but aren't equipped to solve. People like solutions to be brought because it requires less cognition, not because it's a good strategy.

pizza 6y ago

There are no quick solutions. But it sure does feel good to get rocked by the brunt of what he says, in my opinion. And I think some of Can't Get You Out Of My Head gets at what should come next. Then again, he's a journalist, not a leader.

jampekka 6y ago

That fear and hopelesness is more or less exactly what drives the hypernormalization. For me these documentaries present a small hope that we may actually get out of this mess. First step to taking action should be trying to understand the problems. We don't know what actions will make things better for sure, and probably never will. That's no reason not to take action, but perhaps a reason to not to expect nice and simple solutions.

spiralx 6y ago

> Does anybody else get this feeling of fear and hopelessness watching his documentaries. To an extent, yes. But on the other hand it's interesting to see how particular events have such dramatic long-term effects, because it implies that in the future very different outcomes are possible even without massive world-scale changes.