People dont seem to be able to cope with reality anymore

[lightand]

Everything has to be happy happy happy.

Not just on MN but in rl too.
Maybe it is just who I am talking to in rl at the moment.

Like @LemonRoses says, perpetual happiness about things.

I am having a rant I suppose. Unusual for me.
I need to be grateful that I still feel pretty much the same as always. Definitely a glass half full type person.

Ah, ok. I go through phases like that, especially at the start of the first lockdown. Not so much that covid will be rosy, but only watching escapist tv, not wanting to talk politics/wars/crimes/the racism report/BLM or whatever. I just don’t have the emotional energy for it right now and I’m prioritising my kids and the actual real day to day experiences of my friends. My world has absolutely shrunk in terms of what I’m interested in or care about. I’m confident that will change as life becomes more normal again. If I was your friend though I’d want to talk to you about stuff that was bothering you - I think it’s a fair conversation to have.

I don't know if the pandemic has made people terribly self-conscious of avoiding seeming to complain? I think it's hit everyone, in different ways.
I have noticed it's quite a British middle class trait also - my Dutch, Finnish & Chinese friends are far more open and willing to share the good and the bad. It's not such a big deal.

I tend to agree - the myth of perpetual happiness is very damaging and people think they have clinical problems when they are simply unhappy or a bit stressed about not being perfectly happy.

Exactly this!

Glad posters are understanding where I am coming from.

I think the last year has hit so hard that people need to push away the reality. I’m sure that this time last year, many naively thought that the pandemic would be over in a few months and then we’d get back to normal.

I think we now realise that won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Things may never be as they were and that is hard to face, so people use lighthearted programmes and conversations to ameliorate the effect that the negativity and fake news have. I can’t deal with the negativity, dementer philosophy and all that goes with it. Mental health suffers and we’re trying to stay on an even keel.

I’m pig-sick of reality right now. And I definitely don’t want to listen to the doom and gloom merchants (who are all over Mumsnet, so I’ve no idea why you think otherwise).

If I want to put my fingers in my ears while singing ‘la la la’ to blot out some Debbie Downer trying to drag me down to share their pit of misery, that’s my prerogative.

I’m not personally having this problem apart from one friend who can be a bit la la la everything is great, but even she can still engage in varied conversation. I don’t think her approach is healthy as she has an absolute meltdown if something unexpected goes wrong and deviates from her happy life plan.

It sounds incredibly frustrating though and I honestly can’t empathise with people like this. I too am a realist (probably leaning more towards pessimist) and perhaps I’m in a minority but hearing people’s problems doesn’t have a negative emotional effect on me. Maybe it would if someone was constantly moaning at me and nagging every day but discussing someone’s hardships or the crappy state of the world? That doesn’t take any kind of emotional toll on me because most of the time it’s just discussing facts. I care about the state of the world and I’d say in socially and politically engaged so I like to talk about it. I find vacuous small talk very boring and unfulfilling.

Books like 'The Highly Sensitive Person' (based on psychology research and theory) are bestsellers for a reason. Not everybody is like a PP who feels no emotional charge when discussing "facts". Personally I find so much of what passes for news these days deeply disturbing and quite affecting, because I automatically connect it to human beings suffering somewhere and also know that it seems more and more to be shaping and defining the world that the children I love are growing up in. I have no idea how anyone can simply brush it off as "facts", that is beyond me and I feel increasingly saddened and alarmed by the direction the world is going in.

But I can talk about it until the cows come home, and some of my friends are open to thinking about and discussing stuff, some aren't. I get that, looking too closely at all the alarming developments in local, national and international news can be extremely anxiety provoking. It makes me feel very anxious too, but unfortunately I can't distract myself from it for very long at all. We're living in pretty extreme times and if people can't bring themselves to talk about it then that's probably a coping mechanism and they're entitled to that in my view. If, on the other hand, they avoid talking about difficult subjects because they're partly responsible for creating some of these awful narratives that are increasingly impacting our lives, that's a very different matter. But I suspect that's not what the OP is talking about.

I know what you mean OP. The number of people who, when I say something about an upcoming news conference, tell me that they wouldn't know because they're avoiding the news now is surprising. It's almost like if they ignore the news, that means covid has gone away.

Part of my work involves emergency response and contingency planning so I spend a lot of time thinking about reasonable worst case scenarios and what we would do in situation X, Y or Z and I talked about it on here and got comments such as 'how do I cope with life knowing that situation X could happen' which seemed very strange to me because if situation X did happen, the fact that we have thought about it in advance, done all we can to reduce the risk that situation X could happen but still have the necessary plans and equipment in place in the really small chance that it did happen is quite a good place to be in.

Quite. I have been surprised too. People and friends who I used to put the world to rights with, iyswim, can no longer cope with the same conversations.

I am like you. I want to talk through various things and various situations that may occur. I want to be ready for the what ifs in life. I find it very helpful, not unhelpful.

I feel increasingly saddened and alarmed by the direction the world is going in.

But actually, although there are challenges, the world is not in that bad a situation relative to any other time in history. A lot of things we are currently worried about reflect a new consciousness that certain things are wrong, rather than the fact these things didn't happen before. Plus of course, we are just more aware of wars in far off lands, which, in the 80's, didn't even make the UK news. People forget that news in the 80's/90's was massively domestically focused vs. now.

At the same time, I don't think news overload is that helpful. A lot of it is irrelevant a few days later and the comments sections are where hope for humanity goes to die.

I might be one of the people you are talking about.

Having been always pretty capable prior to Covid, I have had more in the last year that I can handle. DH has had to 'shield' me from some stuff going on in the family because I literally can't cope.

I need some 'stress free' months to recover. But I won't get them until at least September and maybe not then.

I have a small friendship group, and it seems to me like one or more of them is always "massively struggling" at some time or another. Their distress is real but I find myself censoring what I say just in case I somehow minimise their feelings, or make something all about me. Most of my messages seem to be dumbed down to say banal things.

@lightand

Glad posters are understanding where I am coming from.

I understand. I met a good friend for the first time and they had consciously adopted a 'look on the bright side' angle, they were quite different.

However I see people who have to be positive all the time as protecting themselves, for whatever reason they can't cope with negative and I respect that. I just don't talk to them much about real life and leave them be, stay on their topics. Luckily I have other friends I can talk to about the whole of my life!

I learnt the phrase 'toxic positivity' on another thread and think it applies quite a bit to currently.

I think we will go through a period of national and individual fallout after such a stressful year. You have to identify the right people to chat to and leave the others be.

There is positive, negative and realist.

Realism seems no longer ok, hence my thread title.

In my experience though, the excessively negative people always think they’re ‘just being realistic’.

My dad phoned me up to talk about covid a few weeks into the first lockdown and managed to go from “at least the mortality rate is not any higher” to “of course, the next pandemic will be worse.” Did not understand why I didn’t want to chat about pandemic bird flu with him. We’ve been having versions of the same conversation ever since.

He was just being realistic! He likes to talk through all the possibilities! But I was up to my ears in work stress and home stress and other family stress, and I did not have any space left for a chat through someone else’s feelings and fears about pandemic bird flu as well, thanks Dad.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who are mentally living on a knife-edge at the moment and can’t bear to think about anything negative at all. But if your friends no longer want to ‘put the world to rights’ with you, maybe it’s not that they can’t handle reality, maybe it’s more specifically that they can’t handle having that sort of conversation with you right now.

I think choosing what to watch on the news or wanting to have slightly more upbeat conversations is sensible emotional management, it is for me anyway.

I don't find my friends who want to have 'realistic' conversations are realistic at all from my perspective- they want to dwell on the risks of vaccines, worry about variants which will evade vaccines and worry the rest of the world doesn't have a vaccine. I'm not really in the mental place now where I want to have endless conversations about these risks (my own risk is low now, one vaccine had) and after a long year of lockdown, it's not mentally helpful for me. Also, I'm a big believer in not worrying about the future which may or may not happen- I tend to read the science right now in a relatively positive way and that jars with their ability to find negatives in what seems to me a relatively positive (or at least heading that way) scenario.

So, I may be like your friends. Luckily there are plenty of places like mumsnet where 'realistic' discussion about scenarios can be had, but everyone else is just trying to get by mentally and physically. I just change the subject if they start going 'oooooh, but these other variants, what if they mutate and we never escape covid'. Even if this were true, I'd rather enjoy the day today, the sunshine, the freedom we do have than discuss realistic scenarios all the time!

Nobody is being happy happy thank god else I'd be worried about them.
I'm finding with friends that yes, we are all struggling but 90% of us are still able to be there for each other.
We'll phone or Skype, both have a rant/grumble section but there will always be a lighter section when we joke & laugh about things past & future plans.
We also try to send silly things - texts with funny photos, etc to lift spirits.
On Facebook/Instagram I've noticed that people will put jokes, rather than 'my life is wonderful' posts. Sort of 'we know things are a bit shit so here's something to make you smile'.
I do have 10% emotional vampires who I have deliberately drifted away from as I just can't cope anymore & it's become obvious that they're not interested in reciprocating.

TV - can only watch comedies, or happy travel programmes or something similar.

This reminds me of one day about ten years ago when DH was having a very bad day indeed and just wanted to watch something nice and comforting. I suggested Bake Off - what could be more comforting? But no, "someone gets sent home and that's too sad". Fortunately that was a one-off

Buy in response to your OP, I'm as resilient as they come but I too spent a lot of time avoiding the news last year. I couldn't do anything about what was happening and the news was so dire and quite frightening. I had to readjust my life so it didn't revolve around Covid - life was still happening and I needed to find the positives. I wouldn't avoid the conversation but I certainly wouldn't bring it up.

I think there are two different strands here.
One is people who are just worn down by the past year and don't want to think about reality right now.

But there is also a philosophy of positivity and 'law of attraction' that has taken reasonable ideas of posotive thinking and goal visualisation into something much worse. Here you get told that you have to think positively because then you will attract happiness, wealthier into your life. If you think negatively then you attract negativity into your life (And it will be your fault for thinking negatively). That line of thinking does seem to ignore the reality that shut stuff happens and it's ok not to be positive all the time. It comes up a lot on the threads about MLMs because their adherents push positive thinking a lot. There is a regular poster on those threads who is a psychologist (I think) and she has posted a lot about how dangerous this style of positive thinking can be. And it absolutely is denying/hiding from reality.

Agree. People seem to live in a world of their own nowadays, it's only through adversity we grow as people, and see what we are capable of, and how we manage it. No one has a right to unbridled happiness, all life is pretty much is a series of events, most not co-ordinated in any way, and we have to get on and deal with them. No one wants grief and trouble in life, and we want to be happy, so much however we have no control over. People now don't cope as well as previous generations, the stoicism is just not bred in now. Everything is someone's fault, always somebody else to blame now in the eyes of many.

I’m actively managing my mental health and have been for a good while now. For me that means hiding certain boards on here and limiting my news consumption - I read the news every day from several sources but I don’t watch the news, ever. And I don’t allow myself to doom scroll - well, I try not to anyway.

If I start talking about the situation too much I feel utterly hopeless tbh, so I tend to limit those conversations to a few people - mostly mum and DH, as I know we won’t get sucked into a doom spiral but will listen to and support one another (it’s not all task from me, I do my share of buoying up as well). I tend to try and divert conversations with others away from doom-laden topics. I suppose someone who doesn’t know me could perceive me as a ‘happy happy happy’ type - I’m just doing what I need to in order to stay above the water 🤷‍♀️

I was listening to a podcast last week in which the person being interviewed said he thought that almost everyone was going to have a degree of trauma for a while after this year - I agree with that. We’ve all been affected to a greater or lesser extent. We can’t expect that everyone will just shake it off in an instant and go on as normal. We are going to need to look after ourselves and one another to get through.

I find negativity draining. I like to be happy, so do my friends and we always see the good things in life. It's not that I can't cope with it, I just don't enjoy talking about miserable things. I don't want to sit around having conversations about Brexit and Covid mutations.

Reality? No thanks. It's fucking miserable.

Many of my problems as an adult are due to growing up feeling that I always had to be ok/happy and if I wasn’t ok then I needed to pretend that I was ok. It meant I grew up not recognising that it’s ok to feel low or recognise that things are crap sometimes. The articles I’ve read about toxic positivity ring very true for me. It’s very hard to get the balance between acknowledging things being hard and not moaning all the time.