I've discovered I can't talk to my wife, my kids, or my friends about what it is I now know.
Surprisingly, I can talk to my 80-year-old Mom, but that's about it.
I spend an hour or two a day -- and have for about 800 days -- exploring the science, the coverage, and the dark abyss of environmental collapse.
It's the burden of knowledge.
Each and every day, I spend a couple of hours selecting, copying, pasting, and be-quipping a handful of stories for my ApocaDocs site.
I pay attention to stories on climate chaos, resource depletion, species collapse, biology breach, and infectious disease. And, yes, recovery.
I'm more aware, in a generalist's sense, of what's going on in the macro-world than almost anyone I know (apart from my project partner). Many are more expert in specifics; but few are paying such close attention to so broad a palette of potential catastrophes-in-the-making.
Did you know that they "just integrated" the "nitrogen cycle" into climate computer models? I bet not -- it's just recently been mentioned (and has not "become news" yet).
But by taking the natural demand for nutrients into account, the authors have shown that the stimulation of plant growth over the coming century may be two to three times smaller than previously predicted. Since less growth implies less CO2 absorbed by vegetation, the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are expected to increase.
Well, I knew, pretty much when it was announced.
And I've been isolated by this kind of knowledge, from my fellow humans.
How do you ask, at the water cooler, if someone's heard about such a thing? "Oh, by the way, did you hear that likely CO2 concentration levels in the out-years are probably much worse than expected?"
The problem is distillation. I have an hour or two to process this sort of thing -- to put it into my "holy shit" mental compartment, compare it to other equivalents, and assert it a putative level-of-panic.
Then I move on, to the tasks of the day, the afternoon, the evening.
But my wife/kids/friends don't get it that way. They get it in serial commas:
"Nitrogen cycle has been included, and the news is bad, and ocean acidification is worse, and the eucalyptus forests in NSW in Australia are dying, and Lake George has had a dead zone for 23 years in a row, and the Russian permafrost is collapsing, releasing methane as well as CO2. And what a beautiful day it is! Can I fry you an egg?"
We're all geeks in this community -- people who focus nearly obsessively on political, environmental, policy, scientific, and cultural trends.
How do you find ways to stay human, with "the burden of knowledge"?
That is, we each, in this community, burdened with knowledge regarding what kinds of bad spirals we're in (and of course, I think my spirals are worse than your spirals ;-) ) -- how do we avoid becoming people nobody wants at a party?
If your focus is health care: how do you not become a one-trick pony? If you attend to lobbyist corruption, how do you not end up yammering on with everyone and sundry about the thing you think is the main obstacle to change? If you are watching winger madness, how do you avoid becoming the Facebooker whose entries everyone thinks "oh, there s/he goes again"?
Most people don't want to know. They want to just fry the egg, not have the world-ending (or politics-ending) spice shaken upon it. They want to get on with the day-to-day, regardless the meta-, mega-, mondo-issues that are the real issues of the day-to-day.
It's a high hurdle, getting people to listen.
As I said, oddly, my 80-year-old mother (who is 99% of what she ever was, which is saying a lot) is all ears, perhaps because she's beyond the day-to-day. She's retired, and relaxed, and interested -- and wanting the big picture. She has time to think about stuff, and not be distracted by the next-thing-tomorrow.
Perhaps this is the key to a new demographic which we should be courting: those with time to think.