Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Another Way to Be Okay, published by Gretta Duleba on February 19, 2023 on LessWrong.

Cross-posted on lesswrong.com and integrationbyparts.substack.com.

Compare and contrast with Duncan Sabien’s essay A Way to Be Okay, written in parallel and with collaboration.

See also: Mental Health and the Alignment Problem

If you look around, there are plenty of reasons to be gravely worried. Existential risk from artificial intelligence, climate change, political upheaval, pandemics, and all kinds of systemic oppression – take your pick. Humans have been saying since the beginning of written history that the end was nigh, and maybe this time it’s true.

Today’s article is for people who are pretty freaked out. People who think something unprecedentedly awful might befall us in our natural lifetimes.

If you’re not one of those people, fantastic! Carry on, this one’s not for you. The point of this article is not to debate whether there’s doom around the corner, it’s about how to cope if you already believe in that doom. How are you supposed to be okay? How are you supposed to go on being a person, with that great dark doom cloud hanging over your head? Should you panic? Should you give up? What do you do?

I spend considerable time helping people grapple with that question. I can’t say I’ve completely solved it even for myself, much less for everyone else. I am in love with living and would prefer not to stop. I am a mother to three children, and when I look straight at my grief that their lives might be cut short, I can barely breathe for the sharp pain of it.

I have a few leads on how to be okay, despite it all. Here’s what I know.

Agency and Acceptance

If you’ve ever been to an AA meeting or seen one on TV, you’ve heard the Serenity Prayer. I’m not religious, myself, so I tend to omit the opening supplication to God, or just go with the Mother Goose version:

For every ailment under the sun

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.

Whichever flavor of doom is on your mind, it is unlikely that you personally are in a position to fix it. Even if you do happen to be a leading AI researcher or a vaccine-developing epidemiologist, you still won’t save everyone all by yourself, especially given that we’re up against multiple dooms at once. You’re going to have to figure out what you have control over and what you don’t. For the control bucket, you need to apply agency and for the can’t-control bucket you need to apply acceptance.

When it comes to these Big Bad Dooms and your personal control over them, they mostly fall into the can’t-control bucket.

People run into a lot of trouble with the can’t-control bucket:

They try to stay in control anyway and give themselves an anxiety disorder.

They get very angry and give themselves heart disease and hypertension.

They get despondent and fall into a deep depression.

We as a species are not very good at acceptance.

Acceptance looks like: seeing clearly what is going on and how limited your own role is.

Allowing yourself to feel grief about your lack of power, lack of control, how sad you feel about how the future is unfolding, how much you wanted a different future that isn’t likely to come to pass. Trusting that you are strong enough to weather that grief. Neither shirking the grief nor dwelling in it; spending time in it for a while, setting it aside to do other things, and then returning to it later. More on this in the next section.

And then, when you feel like you might be strong enough, returning to the can-control bucket and getting on with your life. More on this in the section after that.

Actually Grieve

Many people don’t realize that grieving is something you can actively participate in, that you can be conscious and intentional about how you experience the pain of loss. Wh...