The official topic last week was Existential Risk (that set of things that could kill all humanity: environmental degradation, new & exciting diseases, unfriendly artificial intelligence, nanotechnology "grey goo", &etc.), but our actual discussion was kind of all over the place.
How I've come to see the psychological toll of thinking about existential risk is this: we both have an inflated sense of our own responsibility for doing something, and a strong sense that we lack any agency whatsoever, because the problem is so huge and daunting. It's the type of problem people can only solve in large groups, where all the individuals are pulling in the same direction towards the goal. We feel the fear driving us to get everyone on board, but it's hard to convince people to care about something highly abstract and far-feeling. Environmentalism is an exception to this, because we can see, more or less directly, the effects of environmental degradation, and because we have easy-to-process metaphors (everyone understands and dirty house or a dirty street, and can scale that up in their minds to a dirty world).
I humbly suggest: in order to be an effective agent of change on such a big problem, you first have to learn how to live with the problem in a healthy, more-or-less self-interested way. And the way to do this, counter-intuitively, is to work on all the little problems in your life.
The reason this works is because fixing little problems gives us back our sense of agency in our lives. And it's subjectively true: completing a task that we've procrastinated on for too long feels very energizing.
Do enough of this, and the big, scary problem is still a big, scary problem, but now we are approaching it from a frame of being an active participant - this is called "being in a higher energy set".
The idea of an energy set is from Athol Kay's new book, The Mindful Attraction Plan. He doesn't address existential risk specifically, but gives a lot of very practical advice to approaching Big Life Problems like unemployment, bad relationships, &etc.
A quote from the book:
"The universe, or at the very least our planet, is a giant energy set. You may be simply one tiny speck in a sea of humanity, but your best actions can reverberate out into the lives of others. What you send out comes back eventually. While I don't believe in prayers magically supplying you with things you need, I do have a low-key faith in the universe being one giant reflective field of intention."
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