I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here. Between 2020 and

I'd agree with you in the general sense that people need to unplug from the news, however, unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem here. Between 2020 and 2022 in many countries we were prevented by law from engaging in everyday activities. Even for those of us who decided to take calculated risks, life as a whole became incredibly difficult and stressful because simply talking about anything at all became a political battleground. Coronavirus became _everything_, we were following arrows around on the floor for christ's sake. Some countries are still engaged in such practices, e.g. I'd love to visit China but it's not effectively possible; the China of pre-2020 doesn't exist. At the moment it feels as if I missed out on visiting it, potentially forever. I lost my job during lockdown, twice, and at the moment those workplaces no longer exist. What I consider to be my career no longer exists. It may come back, but at this point I can't rely on it. These events have been traumatic for me. I've lost a huge amount of trust in people, to the extent that making any kind of medium to long term plan seems pointless because society could simply decide to completely up-end the existing structures again. I can plan for "there may be an infectious disease". I can plan for losing a family member. I can't plan for losing my partner, and I can't plan for "anything you want to do might suddenly become illegal with zero notice; the career you train for might disappear overnight; society may arbitrarily turn against you". I've not been back to work since. Aside from a few events (like meeting my current partner), my life still feels as if I'm in a bad dream and I'm waiting to wake up in 2019. > expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist I feel a lot of affinity with this, actually. The future I trained for and built my life around disappeared.