When everything starts to feel like a catastrophe...

A blogger I have followed for years is Seth Godin, and he posts some sort of item every day, 365 days a year. That volume of posts means that only some of them really connect with me, meaning I can apply his general thoughts to teaching or advising or just organizing my life. Some don't apply to me, at least that day.

But they tend to be short and it only takes a few moments to read them... and then there is that handy "delete" key.

Today's post caught my eye with this catchy "headline"/title: Catastrophization

That is not an English word, though it is related to "catastrophize," a verb meaning predicting the worst, no matter what the event or fact. Despite spell check rejecting the word, it made sense. I even had to say it (quietly) out loud to get the feel of the term. 

Here are the first two grafs of Godin's post:

Life’s a tragedy. It always surprises us, and eventually, we all die.

But tragedies don’t have to lead to catastrophes. A catastrophe is a shared emergency that overwhelms our interactions and narratives.

Social media has amplified a tendency of some people to make more of some situation or event or misstep than is deserved. "OMG! My car wouldn't start this morning and I missed the meeting" would be a fictional but possible "cry to the universe" that we have all seen in some form.

Our response might be to remind the poster that this is NOT going to change the course of the poster's life. It is hyperbole for the sake of grabbing attention and (maybe) faux sympathy. We rarely send that response, of course, opting for discretion and rightly assuming that pointing out the reality of the complaint not being that big a deal will lead to defensiveness and anger.

Godin goes on to note that "catastrophization is a sure way to grab some attention." It's part of the social media business model. And spending much time watching cable news begins to warp our sense of reality.

Here are the final three grafs of his post: 

...it’s exhausting. Catastrophe fatigue sets in, and we end up losing interest and drifting away, until the next emergency arrives.

Catastrophization ends up distracting us from the long-term systemic work we signed up to do. It’s a signal that we care about what’s happening right now, but it also keeps us from focusing on what’s going to happen soon.

The best way to care is to persist in bending the culture and our systems to improve things over time.

I would never argue that there are NO catastrophes in life, for individuals, for communities, for nations, for the world.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a catastrophe for Ukrainians, and perhaps for Russia itself, and could lead to a nuclear war that would involve the entire planet.

A health emergency might be catastrophic for a person and an entire family. 

The trick in life is to resist the urge to blow everything out of proportion, and we spend a lot of time civilizing children so that they don't continue to react to something like dropping their ice cream cone on the sidewalk as something that is worth wailing about, beyond consolation.

A student missing a deadline is not a catastrophe -- it's not even a tragedy. It's not a shared emergency and there are multiple solutions to the emergency.

An important part of learning to educate is finding strategies to distinguish between a simple problem and a true catastrophe.