Thank you for this important article Jack. I have learned pattern recognition from your posts. Stepping back & limiting my news intake has helped me to maintain calmness & clarity while reducing the emotional exhaustion. 🩷
Lori...this is wonderful to hear...and honestly, it's the WHOLE article in miniature.
Pattern recognition PLUS disciplined intake plus stepping back is exactly the toolkit...and you've put it into practice...in a way that's clearly working.
Calmness and clarity are NOT small things to hold onto right now; they're what let you stay engaged WITHOUT burning out.
Thank you for reading....and...for being one of the steady ones.
I hit the overload about 2 months ago and realized i was in a downward spiral of fight or flight and i was looking for places outside the USA to live this out. Then it hit me...this is what he wants, this is what Project 2025 is about. So i set new boundaries for myself of only reading the distraction junk 2 days a week. 2 days a week i read real news from around the world to get a better perspective on what is really happening here. The other 3 days of the week is no news days. My fight or flight mode has disappeared, i see the patters of what he is trying to do and i know the truth from the lies.
Let me tell you though, before i set the boundaries i was in the spiral you talked about.
All the years of psychological office visits has finaly paid off. Thank you Jack for putting it out there straight.
Connie...this is great...you essentially built the whole framework on your own...before I ever wrote it down.
The two-days-junk...two-days-real-perspective...three-days-quiet structure is genuinely smart; it keeps you informed WITHOUT keeping you activated.
And...recognizing that the spiral itself was the point...that exhausted...fled...checked-out citizens are the goal...is EXACTLY the orientation the piece is about.
What strikes me most... is that you caught yourself mid-spiral...and changed COURSE.
That's not small. A lot of people NEVER get that far.
The therapy work clearly gave you the self-awareness to spot it...and...you did the hard part yourself.
Thank you for sharing this so openly...it'll help others who recognize themselves in it.
The piece identifies something that most political analysis misses entirely: the crisis is not simply what is being done, but what sustained exposure to it does to the population being governed. Jack is correct. Historians have a name for the condition he is describing — the exhaustion of civic agency — and it has appeared before, in Weimar, in late Republican Rome, in every society where the velocity of institutional breakdown outpaced the population’s capacity to orient itself. What Jack calls cognitive overload, Hannah Arendt called the precondition for totalitarianism: not the dramatic seizure of power, but the prior exhaustion of the public’s will to resist it. The people who adapted best in those periods shared one trait Jack names precisely — they refused to let the baseline shift. They held the earlier reality in memory and kept measuring against it. Note which regimes understood this first: the ones that have historically sought to accelerate confusion did so because an exhausted population is a manageable population.
Note also what normalization does. The rapid cycling of shock — one crisis replacing another before the last has been processed — is not random. It is a mechanism. Each wave of instability that passes without sustained response teaches the nervous system that instability is simply the weather. It is not the weather. It is a condition being actively produced. The moment a population begins treating constitutional crisis, institutional corruption, and democratic erosion as background noise — as the ordinary texture of daily life — the work of dismantling democracy is largely already done. No tanks required. Only exhaustion, and the slow accommodation of the unacceptable.
The body is not separate from that calculation. Sleep, physical movement, deliberate disconnection from algorithmic stimulation — these are not self-care. They are the maintenance of the instrument of resistance. A nervous system in permanent activation cannot think historically. It can only react. And systems that thrive on reaction know this. The act of protecting your own clarity — your sleep, your body, your information boundaries — is therefore not retreat. It is the precondition for everything else. That act of measurement, sustained deliberately against the pressure to normalize, is not comfort. It is resistance. The people reading this piece should understand that clearly.
Virginia...these are two of the best anchors there are...and I'd happily have put them in the article.
The first one especially...reading history and serious work on authoritarianism doesn't just inform you...it INOCULATES you.
Once you can recognize the PATTERN....gaslighting loses most of its power...because you're no longer relying on your gut...to tell you whether something is off; you have a framework.
You're right that the confusion is the worst part...and knowledge....is what dissolves it.
And...the second is the piece a lot of people miss: ORIENTATION isn't only an individual project. Doing it alongside others...who've climbed the same learning curve...keeps you steady when your OWN resolve wavers...and it scales.
Thank you for laying these out so clearly; it's genuinely useful for others reading the comments.
Thank you, Jack.. Important topic. I have thoughts on this but I’m going to hold onto most of them until I read the paid piece.
Honestly, of course I’m exhausted but I don’t feel like I’m really panicking that much and it’s not because what’s happening isn’t serious. It is and I know that. I just do what I’m able to and let it go. I’ve limited the doomscrolling because it’s unhealthy and it’s pointless. I’ve stopped arguing with people who are lost but think they’re 100% right. I started that last night on Threads and then realized what I was doing and walked away.
My focus is still the midterms and anything I can do to influence the outcome. I still make calls and send emails to my elected officials on important issues but there’s not a lot more I can do. I’m trying to influence people I know that didn’t vote in 2024 that they need to vote in November. Hard to tell how much progress I’m making, if any, and that’s frustrating and concerning but I’ll keep trying. It’s so very important.
Susan...this is the article lived out...and you're describing exactly the state it argues is worth protecting.
Exhausted...but not panicking....clear-eyed about how serious things are...WITHOUT being captured by that seriousness....doing what you CAN....and....genuinely letting go of the rest.
That's orientation.
It's harder than it sounds...and...you make it sound almost routine.
The moment on Threads where you caught yourself mid-argument...and walked away... that's the discipline in action.
Lost-but-certain people...are a bottomless well; stepping back isn't surrender... it's conserving energy for where it actually MOVES something.
And...the midterm focus is the right place to put that energy.
On the non-2024 voters: progress there is almost impossible to measure in real time... which is maddening...but...turnout work rarely shows its results until the DAY itself.
Keep at it...the fact that you can't see the needle move....doesn't mean it isn't.
Thank you for reading...and...for doing the unglamorous work!
Appreciate it, Jack. Notice how I said I had thoughts on the subject but was going to hold them until I read the paid piece.. then kept right on typing? Yeah, this is what gets me into trouble. Can’t keep my mouth shut.
This is probably why I argue with clueless people who are never going to change their minds. Could also just be stubbornness or maybe frustration and it’s much worse in person. I’m working on it.
The way I orient myself with the Iran war is to focus on Iran’s words and actions, not America’s. Everything that comes out of the White House is pure bullshit. When something comes out of Iran, that’s when I really pay attention.
Todd...that's a sound instinct...and...it lines up with what I wrote on the Iran framework... when one side's announcement is doing the marketing...the other side's words and actions are the better tell.
Iran's foreign ministry...describing it as a memorandum of understanding with broader talks still ahead....told you MORE about where things ACTUALLY stood than the "largely negotiated" language did.
You've got the core of it right; just keep a little of that same skepticism pointed everywhere. Thanks for reading!
Good advice Jack, and I use your technique's often. For a while I thought I was loosing my memory because of my bouts with COVID and old age setting in. But I realized it truly is trump derangement syndrome, the a for mentioned doesn't help either. Thanks for keeping us headed in the right mind and direction tonight, and will reStack ASAP 💯 👍 🤓
Karen...glad the techniques are working for you...and thank you for the restack, that genuinely helps.
I'd gently reframe one thing, though: what you're describing isn't a syndrome or a sign you're losing anything.
The article's whole point is that the foggy...can't-quite-track-it feeling is a normal nervous system responding to an abnormal information environment.
It's the conditions...NOT you. That distinction matters...because believing it's a personal failing makes the fog heavier...and you clearly haven't lost a STEP...given how sharply you're reading and engaging here.
Be a little kind to yourself on the memory worry; COVID recovery and ordinary life are plenty to juggle without adding self-blame.
Thank you, Jack. Lately I've cut off almost all the emails except yours. Went back to exercising. Tiny baby steps for the deconditioned old folks. And yes, sleep. As best as I can. Meditate. Meaning go into alpha-theta and stay there for a while. Not a panacea, never a panacea. But a good step.
Great teaching moment and so very necessary for us all! This kind of analysis punches through the surface level events and is so helpful in setting a place for the needed shift in perspective and personal habits for cognitive flexibility and a psycho-physicological keel to help stay the course. Thank you so much!
Great Article. I remember my mother telling me that the only way to continue to live fully is to put one foot in front of the other and engage with others like this community.
Grateful to your thorough explaining, I subscribed. Seeing you said again that we subscribers get a deeper conversations, I am looking for ward to it in fact LOOKING FOR WHERE TO FIND TODAYS DEEPER DIVE. ER WHERE EXACTLY IS IT??
Here is the absolute BEST tip I can share: *TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS.* For news apps, for social media, for email, anything that you can do without. I absolutely crushed my hours-a-day Reddit habit this way. I just... forgot to use it. No more notifications creating constant FOMO.
I use Instagram but I use it very sparingly and probably wouldn't at all if I turned off those notifications. I turned them off for Facebook a long time ago but I had already stopped using it. I was never on Twitter/X to begin with. I deleted TikTok. I deleted Threads before I ever really got involved there.
I still have a terrible Substack habit but it's entirely curated by me for me. I follow so many different interests besides politics. At any given time, I'm reading and learning about and supporting all kinds of writing and I absolutely love it. Politics is only a part of that and I have heavily curated who I trust, like Jack. I've even left some writers behind when I've realized I don't agree with them often or trust them on certain issues.
I am following a brilliant librarian (Hana Lee Goldin) and a couple of AI experts (Sam Illingworth and Farida Khalaf) who are teaching me about AI, media literacy and discernment my critical thinking skills are sharper than ever. (I don't use chatbots either.) I don't doom scroll. I'm a part of communities I want to belong to, where my voice matters but mostly where I can learn a lot and not just spoonfeed myself a constant stream of outrage slop all day. The more patterns I recognize, the calmer and more grounded I feel, just like Jack says.
*Turn off your notifications and find out how much of the crap you can suddenly live without.* Best tip I've ever gotten.
Thanks for this perspective, Jack. I am usually a calm person but have overdone the news sometimes and gotten sucked into the apocalyptic thinking now and then, but it feels so uncomfortable and unnatural that I’m learning to recognize it earlier and sort the input to make sense of where things stand and what my decision points need to be within my capabilities to possibly make an impact. I look forward to the paid article!
Thank you for this important article Jack. I have learned pattern recognition from your posts. Stepping back & limiting my news intake has helped me to maintain calmness & clarity while reducing the emotional exhaustion. 🩷
Lori...this is wonderful to hear...and honestly, it's the WHOLE article in miniature.
Pattern recognition PLUS disciplined intake plus stepping back is exactly the toolkit...and you've put it into practice...in a way that's clearly working.
Calmness and clarity are NOT small things to hold onto right now; they're what let you stay engaged WITHOUT burning out.
Thank you for reading....and...for being one of the steady ones.
#HoldFast
-Jack
I hit the overload about 2 months ago and realized i was in a downward spiral of fight or flight and i was looking for places outside the USA to live this out. Then it hit me...this is what he wants, this is what Project 2025 is about. So i set new boundaries for myself of only reading the distraction junk 2 days a week. 2 days a week i read real news from around the world to get a better perspective on what is really happening here. The other 3 days of the week is no news days. My fight or flight mode has disappeared, i see the patters of what he is trying to do and i know the truth from the lies.
Let me tell you though, before i set the boundaries i was in the spiral you talked about.
All the years of psychological office visits has finaly paid off. Thank you Jack for putting it out there straight.
Connie...this is great...you essentially built the whole framework on your own...before I ever wrote it down.
The two-days-junk...two-days-real-perspective...three-days-quiet structure is genuinely smart; it keeps you informed WITHOUT keeping you activated.
And...recognizing that the spiral itself was the point...that exhausted...fled...checked-out citizens are the goal...is EXACTLY the orientation the piece is about.
What strikes me most... is that you caught yourself mid-spiral...and changed COURSE.
That's not small. A lot of people NEVER get that far.
The therapy work clearly gave you the self-awareness to spot it...and...you did the hard part yourself.
Thank you for sharing this so openly...it'll help others who recognize themselves in it.
#HoldFast
-Jack
Jack is correct.
The piece identifies something that most political analysis misses entirely: the crisis is not simply what is being done, but what sustained exposure to it does to the population being governed. Jack is correct. Historians have a name for the condition he is describing — the exhaustion of civic agency — and it has appeared before, in Weimar, in late Republican Rome, in every society where the velocity of institutional breakdown outpaced the population’s capacity to orient itself. What Jack calls cognitive overload, Hannah Arendt called the precondition for totalitarianism: not the dramatic seizure of power, but the prior exhaustion of the public’s will to resist it. The people who adapted best in those periods shared one trait Jack names precisely — they refused to let the baseline shift. They held the earlier reality in memory and kept measuring against it. Note which regimes understood this first: the ones that have historically sought to accelerate confusion did so because an exhausted population is a manageable population.
Note also what normalization does. The rapid cycling of shock — one crisis replacing another before the last has been processed — is not random. It is a mechanism. Each wave of instability that passes without sustained response teaches the nervous system that instability is simply the weather. It is not the weather. It is a condition being actively produced. The moment a population begins treating constitutional crisis, institutional corruption, and democratic erosion as background noise — as the ordinary texture of daily life — the work of dismantling democracy is largely already done. No tanks required. Only exhaustion, and the slow accommodation of the unacceptable.
The body is not separate from that calculation. Sleep, physical movement, deliberate disconnection from algorithmic stimulation — these are not self-care. They are the maintenance of the instrument of resistance. A nervous system in permanent activation cannot think historically. It can only react. And systems that thrive on reaction know this. The act of protecting your own clarity — your sleep, your body, your information boundaries — is therefore not retreat. It is the precondition for everything else. That act of measurement, sustained deliberately against the pressure to normalize, is not comfort. It is resistance. The people reading this piece should understand that clearly.
#HOLDFAST
Got It 👍🤓
Two things help me stay oriented-
1. understanding what is happening, by reading good sources including books on authoritarianism, and history
(this knowledge makes it impossible to be gaslit, which is the most confusing feeling of all)
2. Finding and taking action with other people who have scaled the learning curve, and no longer doubt the truth of what is happening
Virginia...these are two of the best anchors there are...and I'd happily have put them in the article.
The first one especially...reading history and serious work on authoritarianism doesn't just inform you...it INOCULATES you.
Once you can recognize the PATTERN....gaslighting loses most of its power...because you're no longer relying on your gut...to tell you whether something is off; you have a framework.
You're right that the confusion is the worst part...and knowledge....is what dissolves it.
And...the second is the piece a lot of people miss: ORIENTATION isn't only an individual project. Doing it alongside others...who've climbed the same learning curve...keeps you steady when your OWN resolve wavers...and it scales.
Thank you for laying these out so clearly; it's genuinely useful for others reading the comments.
#HoldFast
-Jack
Thank you, Jack.. Important topic. I have thoughts on this but I’m going to hold onto most of them until I read the paid piece.
Honestly, of course I’m exhausted but I don’t feel like I’m really panicking that much and it’s not because what’s happening isn’t serious. It is and I know that. I just do what I’m able to and let it go. I’ve limited the doomscrolling because it’s unhealthy and it’s pointless. I’ve stopped arguing with people who are lost but think they’re 100% right. I started that last night on Threads and then realized what I was doing and walked away.
My focus is still the midterms and anything I can do to influence the outcome. I still make calls and send emails to my elected officials on important issues but there’s not a lot more I can do. I’m trying to influence people I know that didn’t vote in 2024 that they need to vote in November. Hard to tell how much progress I’m making, if any, and that’s frustrating and concerning but I’ll keep trying. It’s so very important.
#Holdfast
~Susan
Susan...this is the article lived out...and you're describing exactly the state it argues is worth protecting.
Exhausted...but not panicking....clear-eyed about how serious things are...WITHOUT being captured by that seriousness....doing what you CAN....and....genuinely letting go of the rest.
That's orientation.
It's harder than it sounds...and...you make it sound almost routine.
The moment on Threads where you caught yourself mid-argument...and walked away... that's the discipline in action.
Lost-but-certain people...are a bottomless well; stepping back isn't surrender... it's conserving energy for where it actually MOVES something.
And...the midterm focus is the right place to put that energy.
On the non-2024 voters: progress there is almost impossible to measure in real time... which is maddening...but...turnout work rarely shows its results until the DAY itself.
Keep at it...the fact that you can't see the needle move....doesn't mean it isn't.
Thank you for reading...and...for doing the unglamorous work!
#HoldFast
-Jack
Appreciate it, Jack. Notice how I said I had thoughts on the subject but was going to hold them until I read the paid piece.. then kept right on typing? Yeah, this is what gets me into trouble. Can’t keep my mouth shut.
This is probably why I argue with clueless people who are never going to change their minds. Could also just be stubbornness or maybe frustration and it’s much worse in person. I’m working on it.
~Susan
The way I orient myself with the Iran war is to focus on Iran’s words and actions, not America’s. Everything that comes out of the White House is pure bullshit. When something comes out of Iran, that’s when I really pay attention.
Todd...that's a sound instinct...and...it lines up with what I wrote on the Iran framework... when one side's announcement is doing the marketing...the other side's words and actions are the better tell.
Iran's foreign ministry...describing it as a memorandum of understanding with broader talks still ahead....told you MORE about where things ACTUALLY stood than the "largely negotiated" language did.
You've got the core of it right; just keep a little of that same skepticism pointed everywhere. Thanks for reading!
#HoldFast
-Jack
Good advice Jack, and I use your technique's often. For a while I thought I was loosing my memory because of my bouts with COVID and old age setting in. But I realized it truly is trump derangement syndrome, the a for mentioned doesn't help either. Thanks for keeping us headed in the right mind and direction tonight, and will reStack ASAP 💯 👍 🤓
Karen...glad the techniques are working for you...and thank you for the restack, that genuinely helps.
I'd gently reframe one thing, though: what you're describing isn't a syndrome or a sign you're losing anything.
The article's whole point is that the foggy...can't-quite-track-it feeling is a normal nervous system responding to an abnormal information environment.
It's the conditions...NOT you. That distinction matters...because believing it's a personal failing makes the fog heavier...and you clearly haven't lost a STEP...given how sharply you're reading and engaging here.
Be a little kind to yourself on the memory worry; COVID recovery and ordinary life are plenty to juggle without adding self-blame.
Thanks for reading.
#HoldFast
-Jack
Thank you, Jack. Lately I've cut off almost all the emails except yours. Went back to exercising. Tiny baby steps for the deconditioned old folks. And yes, sleep. As best as I can. Meditate. Meaning go into alpha-theta and stay there for a while. Not a panacea, never a panacea. But a good step.
Great teaching moment and so very necessary for us all! This kind of analysis punches through the surface level events and is so helpful in setting a place for the needed shift in perspective and personal habits for cognitive flexibility and a psycho-physicological keel to help stay the course. Thank you so much!
s/b: psycho-physiological!
Great Article. I remember my mother telling me that the only way to continue to live fully is to put one foot in front of the other and engage with others like this community.
I’ve had to step back recently, so I hear you, Jack. Thank you for your calming articles.
Look forward to the paid piece Jack.
#HOLDFAST
Teri
Grateful to your thorough explaining, I subscribed. Seeing you said again that we subscribers get a deeper conversations, I am looking for ward to it in fact LOOKING FOR WHERE TO FIND TODAYS DEEPER DIVE. ER WHERE EXACTLY IS IT??
I was wondering the same.
Here is the absolute BEST tip I can share: *TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS.* For news apps, for social media, for email, anything that you can do without. I absolutely crushed my hours-a-day Reddit habit this way. I just... forgot to use it. No more notifications creating constant FOMO.
I use Instagram but I use it very sparingly and probably wouldn't at all if I turned off those notifications. I turned them off for Facebook a long time ago but I had already stopped using it. I was never on Twitter/X to begin with. I deleted TikTok. I deleted Threads before I ever really got involved there.
I still have a terrible Substack habit but it's entirely curated by me for me. I follow so many different interests besides politics. At any given time, I'm reading and learning about and supporting all kinds of writing and I absolutely love it. Politics is only a part of that and I have heavily curated who I trust, like Jack. I've even left some writers behind when I've realized I don't agree with them often or trust them on certain issues.
I am following a brilliant librarian (Hana Lee Goldin) and a couple of AI experts (Sam Illingworth and Farida Khalaf) who are teaching me about AI, media literacy and discernment my critical thinking skills are sharper than ever. (I don't use chatbots either.) I don't doom scroll. I'm a part of communities I want to belong to, where my voice matters but mostly where I can learn a lot and not just spoonfeed myself a constant stream of outrage slop all day. The more patterns I recognize, the calmer and more grounded I feel, just like Jack says.
*Turn off your notifications and find out how much of the crap you can suddenly live without.* Best tip I've ever gotten.
Thanks for this perspective, Jack. I am usually a calm person but have overdone the news sometimes and gotten sucked into the apocalyptic thinking now and then, but it feels so uncomfortable and unnatural that I’m learning to recognize it earlier and sort the input to make sense of where things stand and what my decision points need to be within my capabilities to possibly make an impact. I look forward to the paid article!
Very much looking forward to the next part. Much gratitude.