Beware the crisis crisis

Tim Dawson has a piece in the Critic on our corrosive crisis culture, something we all understand and probably deplore, yet it still dominates the public arena.

Beware the crisis crisis
Constant catastrophism is destroying our brains

We live in a crisis culture. Everything, we are told, is in crisis. Climate crisis. Covid crisis. NHS crisis. Economic crisis, obesity crisis, housing crisis. Education crisis. Energy crisis, population crisis. Cost of living crisis. Prison crisis. Migration crisis. Constitutional crisis. No wonder there’s a mental health crisis. The alcohol crisis is just people trying to stay sane.

It is worth reading the whole thing even though it is a familiar issue, because as Dawson says - 

Journalists and politicians might be initiators of this madness, but they are victims of it, too. They, along with the rest of us, sit like spectators in Roman amphitheatres, guzzling booze and baying for blood — caught in a world which encourages anger and catastrophisation to keep the wheels of its consciousness spinning.

Is it addictive? For some people it certainly seems to be.

It is, all of it, seriously bad for us. I speak from personal experience. I, like so many others, have found myself glued to Twitter, scrolling endlessly through the frenetic psycho-gunk, unable to resist saying something inflammatory. Back when I used to drink like a sailor, or a Tory SpAd, the urge to engage became almost uncontrollable. These days I try to ignore the platform, but it still pulls me back. I log in, like a desperate addict seeking one last fix, and soon find myself sucked into its vortex of self-generated crisis and despair.