What Happens When You Stop Doomscrolling
A note on mental health.
Right now, I’m thinking about the last time I tried to have a serious conversation about any of the things with one of my best friends.
About that friend:
Like me, she’s a professor (or a former professor). We’ve known each other for going on twenty years. We’ve been friends since grad school. We had classes together. We went to conferences together. We even read each other’s dissertations, the academic version of an unbreakable blood pact.
We traveled to see each other. Our kids played together. She held my daughter when she was a baby. For most of that time, we could talk about anything. We could talk shop. We could trade academic gossip. We could trash talk our bosses. But as I learned, there’s one thing we couldn’t discuss:
Climate change.
Last year, we were talking about why I was quitting my job and moving. To everyone I knew, it sounded like a sudden decision. They wanted to know why I was leaving academia. They wanted to know why I was relocating to a specific place in the country,…