Climate Doom
I am still jetlagging from a three weeks journey with my girlfriend to her home in South Korea that we returned from last week. This means I fall asleep half dead at 22.00 and wake up around 05.00 in the morning still, even four days after landing. My body has a way harder time with any changes in sleep schedule now being in its mid-thirties - I do not remember it being so draining a few years ago. But hey, I will just use the time to practice some writing and put another topic out here that has taken up so much space in my brain recently and is also getting worse as I age, but probably for other reasons than my flesh prison rotting away. I dont really think of my body as a flesh prison - I guess im still pretty healthy and fit and in general okay with it - but I love the expression and I am often times way more physically sensitive than I wish to be.
During our last days of our stay we were on Jeju, an island that lies on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula and is mostly popular for mandarin oranges, its big volcano mountain Halla-san with the highest peak of the country in the middle and for being so windy that even the local dialect apparently shortens word endings to be better understood when shouted. Also it has been the site of one of the most tragic events in Korean history: in the so called Jeju uprising several thousands of anti-fascist rebel soldiers and civilians were brutally murdered by the government right before the beginning of the Korean war - some estimates say that as much as 10% (80.000 people) of the island's population were killed in an eradication campaign that was fueled by anti-communist propaganda. The island is also home to traditionally matriarchial families that are lead by women divers, who are sadly rapidly declining in numbers. Besides other reasons the warming waters on the shores has made diving even more hard and less and less lucrative. We were lucky to witness a little celebration of a few of these diver ladies with a lot of (very touching) singing and a traditional meal mostly consisting of big ass mussels cooked in their shells over an open fire - my girlfriends mother was born on the island and invited us to this little event. If you want to learn more about Jeju culture I recommend the 1977 Korean surrealist film Io Island (이어도) which is based on the local myth of Io, an underwater home to the men that left their homes to never return. (It also has a very absurd sex scene that I don't want to spoil here, hehe).
I also just before leaving watched the documentary "LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching", that has been released for free on youtube recently (go watch it!), so I planned to buy binoculars and do some birdwatching myself in Korea, because it somehow feels to me like a more serious version of Pokemon-Go (that I never played btw, I am of course not a loser lol) with the side-effect of learning more about and actually being in nature. Birdwatching and especially using a binocular turned out to be super fun and a nice excuse for my brain to go out for walks and strolls, as I normally have troubles getting out of the house without a specific goal and doing it just for the sake of it.
But even when I had a great time finding birds and trying to identify them everywhere, I once more could not shake the intrusive thoughts that have been accompanying me all my life: climate change is coming for birds as its coming for every other living being on this planet. This is a topic I try to avoid letting control my life, like I think everyone else does, but in the last years the thoughts of impending and irrevocable loss have become extremely loud and unhealthily obsessive. This went so far as me having an emotional breakdown after a seemingly unimportant fight I had with my partner in the middle of the night in Jeju. In this fight I realized that my own frustration with this topic in general and especially the fact that I cannot shake these thoughts as well as almost everyone else seem to do it, leads to me alienating the people I care about around me. They feel judged by me talking about it and I secretly envy them for being able to not think about it and still enjoy vacations and hot summer days without being disturbed by the dreads of impending climate doom. I sometimes actually am judging them, which I really don't want to do and this deeply saddened me.
Rationally I of course know that no one is completely able to ignore climate change and its disastrous effects and most people I know are not being ignorant aboout it (which would in the end probably also just be a coping strategy) and struggle with it in their own ways. But if a lot of your every-day life thinking is overshadowed by negative thoughts of a matter where we as a human species have already failed to and have to act right now in an unprecedented way to prevent even more of a not only metaphorical hell from breaking loose, it is actually very hard to see people seemingly lightly going about enjoying their lives in moments when you secretly feel very seriously depressed about it.
I remember that all my life since I first learned about the greenhouse effect, this was something I thought about and that worried me on a regular basis. I even have a story of something like climate activism that is still hard to talk about and evokes feeling of shame and embarrasment, even though it happened to me as a six or seven year old kid. It must have been that age, because I was still living in the house I was born where my way to school was through a little forest alongside a fence guarding some kind of electrical or water facility (that was a source of great mystery and imagination to me) leading to a little path next to a field to the building where I made my first experiences with an institution that would give me great troubles later. My grandpa had a little basement in his house where his retired shoemaker tools and a little work bench where standing mostly unused (and where the air was constantly engulfed by the smoke of his cigarettes). There I crafted a little sign with an inscription to not throw away trash in the little forest, because that apparently bugged me every morning I was seeing it. I put up the sign next to the fence, proud of my achievement - just to find it completely destroyed and kicked to pieces the next day. When I approached the spot from afar where I put it up I already knew what happened and avoided looking at it by taking another way. My gut was wrenching with anger, sadness and shame.
For obvious reasons my worries about our natural environment got worse the older I got. Since about pandemic times these have culminated in something that is not very healthy and also not helpful to anyone any more, especially not myself. Since my little breakdown in Jeju and after talking to my girlfriend, some friends and my therapist I started taking this a bit more seriously as what it is: Not only a rational analysis of what is happening and what needs to be done about it, but also another iteration of obsessive intrusive thoughts my brain likes to engage with all the time. I am not entirely sure about how to deal with it yet, but I thought writing about it cannot hurt.