This Is Your Brain On Chaos

image by Layers on Pixabay Last year I wrote about how chronic precarity seems to affect us mentally, and concluded: Now, thanks largely to our own unintended blunders, 8.1 billion of us are seemingly both at the mercy of chance and at the mercy of others with whom we must share limited and diminishing resources. Not surprising, then, that we’re increasingly angry, distrustful, fearful, anxious, blameful, exclusionary, self-inuring, feeling helpless and hopeless, mentally struggling, and increasingly inclined to hoard what we have. In an age of precarity, that’s how we’re conditioned to feel, and what we’re conditioned to do. In my series on signs of collapse, I’ve also highlighted how accelerating chaos, and (in the west at least) early stages of civilizational collapse are making us reactive, distrustful, angry, inured to others’ suffering, intolerant, and incapable of attentive listening. That series has also noted that ‘leaders’ in chaotic times increasingly tend to ignore the law…