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That funny feeling is back – the one many of us felt at the start of the Covid pandemic, where we had to absorb and accommodate things that once seemed unimaginable.
That funny feeling that doesn’t have a name is part dread, part horror, part captivation as you watch through your phone at whatever this is unfolding.
It’s the sensation of living through a highly dynamic time in history, being swung about by time’s paw. It’s a hang-on-to-your-hat kind of feeling, where you don’t quite know how things are going to land.
It’s waking up – sometimes at 3am – to check social media or news websites to see if nuking another country has been casually threatened on Truth Social.
It’s wondering, “How is it only April?”
It’s lying awake and thinking, “Did the president of the USA really just post on Easter Sunday, ‘Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”’
Open the Fuckin’ Strait. OK …
It’s then staying awake until dawn trying to work out if he has finally gone full crazy, or is demented, or if he’s dead serious and this is just where we are now.
It’s finding yourself agreeing with Tucker Carlson who said, “No decent person mocks other people’s religions.”
It’s waking up last week and seeing the US president promise this: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will” and wondering for a couple of hours if world war three is going to happen on a mild and blue-skied Wednesday in April.
It’s having pro-Iran AI Lego propaganda songs about the US being run by paedophiles bopping around your head all day long as you go about your day making a hundred mental calculations that revolve around the price of petrol, the expected rise in interest rates and grocery prices, and the looming spectre of a recession because Donald Trump woke up one day and decided to invade Iran.
It’s realising the so-called adults in the room are insane or powerless or just as bewildered as you are.
It’s watching in horror as Lebanon is bombed but there is so much other news happening that no one is talking about it as much as they should.
It’s knowing things you didn’t know a month ago: that a shipping lane in the Middle East – the strait of Hormuz – carries 20% of the world’s oil and up to 30% of internationally traded fertilisers.
And then, after absorbing what’s happening in this current iteration of The Crisis (what does it mean that the US is blocking the strait, while Iran is also blocking the strait?), it’s your mind wandering uneasily to the next thing that also looms urgent and existential.
The climate crisis.
A strong El Niño summer.
AI taking jobs.
The disgusting networks of power exposed in the Epstein files.
The end of US hegemony and the decline of the American empire.
That these enormous happenings are now secondary concerns that only a few months ago would have commanded their own 3am dread – their own special slot in your psyche – speaks to the accelerated and heightened nature of global events.
In the last few weeks I’ve met up with bewildered friends who say, “Can someone please turn the history machine off? I need a break from all the huge events we’re living through.”
There is, as there always is with cascading global catastrophes, the impulse to switch off, protect your mental health and just go about your life.
After all, we do not need to know every little thing; and we learned in 2016 – 10 years ago now! – that to follow every post of President Trump is to condemn yourself to near-constant derangement.
Yet something about this crisis feels different, and attention must be paid.
For a start it may be the closest we have come to world war three since the cold war.
And economically this war’s effects have been felt by billions of people around the world, including some of the poorest people of the planet, whose governments can’t afford to pay a premium to buy fuel in other markets.
There is also collective global horror and disgust about what is occurring on the ground in the Middle East. On the first day of the war, 168 people, including more than 100 children, were killed when a US missile hit a school in Minab.
In Lebanon, civilians were the main casualties after Israel bombed 100-plus sites in 10 minutes, killing hundreds.
There is continued violence in Gaza despite a ceasefire, and civilians remain starving and malnourished.
In Australia, those who are already financially stretched will struggle to absorb sharp price rises in not just fuel, but in building materials, groceries and other essential items.
And the world has become far less safe, with the fraying of US moral authority and alliance agreements.
These are things we all should be informed about.
This funny feeling – of needing to know what is going on right now, of the 3am wakings, of the impacts felt faraway here in Australia, the browser refreshing, the doomscrolling – is most reminiscent of the early days of the Covid pandemic.
But now the threat is more diffuse, Hydra-headed, and will require much more than a scientific breakthrough to control it.
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