The era of watching on in horror
By Dave Milner
December 21, 2023
A few weeks back, in an attempt to locate a source of stress and exhaustion rising in me like a metaphor I can’t be fucked conjuring up, my therapist asked me a handful of on-point questions.
“What have you been focussing on at work this year?”
Well, recently it’s mostly been: genocide, terrorism, kidnapping, ethnic cleansing, war, racism, systemic racism in settler colonies, sexual assault, billionaires subverting democracy, the climate crisis, the horrors of social media, the horrors of traditional media, Rupert Murdoch, the politicians I don’t like, that discombobulating time Pauline Hanson called me a racist on Twitter, and thousands upon thousand of murdered children.
“I see,” she said, clearly seeing. “And what measures do you have in place at work to deal with all that?”
I explained there was a sense of jocular toxic masculinity and a relatively lax drugs-at-work policy.
“You need to take a month off.”
I can see that, I said, also clearly seeing that.
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