How To Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag
Many of us are suffering from a kind of social atrophy.
“I don’t know how to do anything about the things I’m most upset about,” a friend told me recently. This is a common sentiment. For example, a person who is deeply alarmed about the fact that techno-fascists are looting the federal government may or may not be able to attend a protest, and then what? Creating a one-page flyer to distribute in one’s community, joining an organization, or starting a new political project can be intimidating, and many people feel disconnected and unsure where to begin. There are many resources and toolkits that can provide guidance, but many people still feel stuck. Which strategy should they pursue? What group should they join? Sometimes, amid our overwhelm, every option feels simultaneously like too much and not enough. Do I really have the time or energy for this? Will it mean anything? If this won’t stop Elon Musk or his lackeys, what’s the point?
When we are agitated, we are conditioned to seek immediate relief. But there are no quick fixes for the political calamities we are currently facing. We didn’t get here overnight, and there is no singular tactic, protest, or means of expression that will result in a quick turnaround. We don’t have the organized leverage we need to effect a sudden reversal. This leaves us with a long, messy road to navigate in concert with people we do not know, who many of us don’t know how to talk to, let alone build power with. Disrupting our routines and investing our capacities in collective efforts to create more safety and justice is not always immediately satisfying, and could result in disappointment, social rejection, repression, or the feeling that we’ve simply wasted our time.
Becoming more politically engaged involves risk-taking, and it also involves social skills that might be rusty, or even wholly undeveloped.
Instead of taking risks and strengthening social skills, many people feel trapped in a cycle of impact and reaction. They experience the blows of the daily news cycle, and feel heartsick, but are not taking action. One of my friends recently told me that she feels “more like a punching bag than a boxer.” I am concerned about these feelings, because the loss of agency my friend is describing can negatively reshape us.
Moments of trauma that lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) often involve a breakdown in our sense of agency—situations where we feel trapped, powerless, and unable to act in our own defense. These disruptions to our sense of control, where we feel disconnected from our own bodies and unable to assert ourselves meaningfully, can lead to peritraumatic dissociation—a set of reactions that includes numbness, depersonalization, and derealization. Peritraumatic dissociation is a strong predictor of PTSD. In CPTSD, where prolonged and repeated traumas lead to chronic dysregulation and other lasting effects, recurring experiences of trauma can create the sense that abuse and suffering are inescapable. This can result in learned helplessness, where a person may come to accept abuse as inevitable or withdraw from relationships altogether, believing that all connections will eventually become harmful.
Scientists have been exploring the role of agency in PTSD treatment, with some believing that restoring a person’s sense of agency can aid recovery. In some cases, being able to act with agency during a crisis may even help prevent peritraumatic dissociation.
Of course, not all traumatic circumstances allow us to act with agency. Sometimes, harm happens to us, and taking control of our bodies or actions simply isn’t possible. But in other cases, it only feels that way.
The more often we have experienced true helplessness, the more likely we are to feel powerless in situations where action is possible. And the more we freeze or flail in response to threats, the more deeply ingrained those responses become.
I am not saying that everyone who feels stuck right now has PTSD or CPTSD, but I believe that many of us are struggling with the effects of trauma and our inability to process it. As a society, we have been battered by losses, including atrocities we have been unable to halt or prevent. These experiences have a deep psychological impact. Sometimes, we might react by trying to exact control wherever we can—whether or not those actions are meaningful or helpful—and other times, we might settle into a sense of helplessness, and do nothing.
In her recent piece, “Becoming a High Agency Person,” Elise Granata writes, “Agency is about our capacity to act, to desire something and move towards it, to experience our own power having tangible effect in the world. It is kind of just Free Will?”
Acting with agency can help us break cycles of injury and reaction (including dissociation) that do not serve us. One of the reasons this is so difficult when addressing political matters is that we’re not just talking about “self-work.” To take action in defense of ourselves and others politically, we need to engage with other people.
A quick glance at most social media feeds makes it clear that many people are unwilling to collaborate with anyone whose views, political history, or emotional responses don’t perfectly align with their own. This, too, is a kind of helplessness: the idea that we can’t work with others because they are fundamentally flawed, and will only disappoint us. The reality that we, too, are flawed and have doubtlessly disappointed others with our politics, is dismissed here, in favor of separation, isolation and siloing.
This tendency impedes relationship-building and collective efforts to reclaim our agency and create more justice in the world.
Scrolling Through It
I was recently invited to join a book club meetup where activists were discussing Let This Radicalize You—a text about organizing in catastrophic times that I co-authored with Mariame Kaba. During the discussion, I talked about how and why the book was written, and took questions from participants. The first question I was asked was a deeply important one: “Every moment that brings in new waves of activists has unique challenges. What unique stumbling blocks do you think newly activated people are facing today?”
I really appreciated this question.
It’s never been easy to start something new. We are conditioned to engage with society on society’s terms, which means accepting the status quo. When we are unhappy, the steps we are encouraged to take are generally non-disruptive to both the system and our own lives. Signing a petition, for example, is unlikely to shake up the opposition or change the shape of our day. Joining an organization and pooling our respective capacities in order to have a larger social impact, however, can affect the course of our lives and help cultivate new possibilities. Starting a pod or a mutual aid project could make life more livable for people who engage with those efforts. Creating a political education group can help participants develop a generative analysis, or lead to the pursuit of a shared political objective. All of these actions foster potential, and all of them involve connecting with other people in direct, meaningful ways. This has always posed challenges. We live under capitalism, an alienating system that teaches us to view other people as threats, competitors, or sites of extraction. What might they take from us? What can we get from them? Six million years of evolution has biologically geared us toward cooperative struggle, but we have been societally conditioned in opposition to these instincts. We have been deskilled socially, and I believe that is truer right now than it has been at any other point in my lifetime.
The average person in the US spends at least 2.5 hours a day scrolling. For many people, that number is much higher. When we think about how much time we spend at work, managing our finances, commuting, maintaining our households, preparing meals, and taking care of loved ones, among other tasks, 2.5 hours is a lot. But what’s even more concerning than the amount of time we spend scrolling is that the activity has become a stand-in for other forms of connection and enrichment that we desperately need. Instead of reading a book, or intentionally seeking out news stories from trusted journalists and outlets, we endure a hailstorm of brutal headlines. Instead of attending a community gathering, an organizing meeting, or hopping on Zoom to catch up with friends, many people spend hours scrolling through the takes and complaints of strangers.
On social media, headlines, takes, and reactions simply happen. We react with clicks and takes, or simply continue to endure this happening of things. The experience is relentless and marked by a sense of inevitability. There is always more to consume. There is always pain. We return to the pain, knowing it's there, and not knowing how to do something else instead, however depressed or unsatisfied we may feel. The pain is reliable, and may be paired with amusement and other sensations.
In this environment, most social relations are fairly disposable. If we follow a person for saying the right things, unfollowing them for saying the wrong thing is a simple matter. If we have a parasocial sense of admiration for someone, we may be inclined to yank them off their pedestal when their imperfections become apparent, or when they simply aren’t who we imagined they were. If we are using social media as a substitute for real social contact with someone we know, we can become a consumer of the content they curate, rather than someone who enjoys genuine intimacy with them.
Of course, we wouldn’t participate in these headline-chasing, take-amplifying, content-craving cycles if we weren’t getting something out of it. Much has been written about how our dopamine-seeking patterns have been altered by social media. However, our relationship to these platforms isn’t as simple as a stimulus and reward cycle. For many people, social media has replaced old social and information seeking routines. When I grew up, for example, we got the newspaper and watched the news at particular times each day. If you wanted to check in on your friends, you had to reach out to them. There was no centralized feed where news about the world, or the people in our lives, trickled through algorithmic filters for our approval or engagement. If we wanted to talk about politics, we got together in coffee houses, joined clubs or attended meetings. Now, our impulse to seek political banter, social awareness, or news about the world has been packaged into a system that makes us feel connected, while also siloing us off in algorithmic spheres of interest.
The digital realities we inhabit are shaped by the people, publications and organizations we follow, and the influence of algorithms. In this setting, people often forget that others have digital lives that have been curated in vastly different ways, due to their own choices, associations, and the algorithms governing their experience. People frequently assume that other people are witnessing the same injustices, dangers, and human suffering that they are seeing, and simply do not care, when in truth, most people aren’t seeing those things at all. We are living our lives in unique algorithmic bubbles and mistaking them for the world.
More and more often, I am seeing people live the entirety of their political lives, or at least, the vast majority of their political lives, on social media. I am not talking about people whose organizing largely occurs virtually, as there are many ways that people engage with activism digitally (including meetings, webinars, discussion groups, and other projects that are largely conducted online), but rather, people whose political existence is mostly or completely confined to the infrastructure of social media. For such people, the ability to work across differences is often lacking or entirely absent, because social media does not involve that kind of engagement. Social media is a performance-based technology. Collective action is not performance-based. It is grounded in relationships, cooperation, and an ability to prioritize shared objectives.
Collective action also requires us to build trust. Trust is forged through an exchange of vulnerability. It is built through experiments in interdependence. For some of us, those experiments can be very challenging. But in order to accomplish tasks collectively, we have to learn to take chances, and to rely on each other. That means I do my part while trusting that you will do yours. I watch your back, and trust that you’ll watch mine. We all stare down our enemies together, believing that we will help and defend one another. This kind of collective belief in one another doesn’t happen overnight. It is the product of countless exchanges wherein people allow themselves to depend on one another.
It is very difficult for such exchanges to occur meaningfully on social media. Algorithms and onlookers often reward conflict and the self-righteous performance of politics or disdain. There is no practice of trust or rehearsal for the larger struggles we face. Instead, we have spaces in which we can demonstrate that we are well-informed and seek approval for our emotional responses to what hurts us.
Learning to Share Ourselves Again
I recently spoke with my friend Shane Burley about the relationships and personal growth that organizing requires. “I do think that organizing is a communal relationship, as much as any interpersonal relationship, and yet we no longer allow the space for those relationships to grow,” Shane said. “You cannot truly build community if people don't know who you are and you aren't willing to be vulnerable, and social media simply is not built for that—nor is it safe to be truly vulnerable online.” Shane said that conditions have shifted in the pandemic era, making it harder for people to be together in-person at the scale they once were.
In addition to navigating COVID safety and other material concerns, many of us are suffering from a kind of social atrophy. Activists who experience difficult moments together often form close emotional bonds. Early in the pandemic, many of us experienced profound losses in a more isolated way. Our habits and coping skills became more insular. In some ways, we unlearned the practice of togetherness. Many of us became more socially avoidant and more accustomed to being alone, even if we were lonely. As Shane says, “I think that we have actually gone through a lot of pain apart from each other and forgot what healing and collective processing is actually like.”
Shane noted that he is no exception to these trends. “I am the best example of being easily drawn away from community,” he said. “It's really easy to shrink your circle, to operate only through intermediary software and screens, and it's entirely understandable why that would be the reaction. But whatever we want to see in the future has to start with us learning to actually share ourselves with each other again.”
“We are going to have to actively do the work of re-establishing emotional bonds with each other, rather than simply assuming those patterns will develop as they once did,” Shane said. “I don't think this is altogether different from the ‘epidemic of loneliness’ that is happening, or the phenomenon of men who can't form friendships,” he explained. “We approach many issues with a lot of compassion and harm reduction, and I think we should do the same here.”
Shane also stressed that friendships and comradery can be difficult, and that we sometimes recoil from those pains. “When my parents died very suddenly I really retreated from people,” Shane said. “Being around my friends, all of whom were trying their best and really cared about me, was actually really painful. Everything they said set me off.”
Relearning how to be human together, rather than simply posting through our way through catastrophe, will be challenging, but essential. “We can't survive the coming onslaught if we don't relearn our ability to be together,” Shane said. “By practicing interdependence, we can create the conditions for an entirely new kind of bonded community that has the capacity to defend itself and fight back. What we do now to flourish will show us the path to an entirely new way of living. But it's not pre-ordained, it requires choices and actions,” Shane explained.
One thing I was reminded of, as Shane and I discussed the situation, was how I learned to connect with co-strugglers I previously would have dismissed—either due to my biases, or theirs. Those connections were formed in the context of struggle and through a shared recognition that we needed each other. Disconnection, inaction, and digital seclusion is robbing people of those experiences. As Shane told me, “When you are on a strike or blockading a house, that is traumatic, and with the heat turned up, you really learn how to live with other people.”
Shane emphasized that the current crisis will require us to “step way outside ourselves.” While we have, at times, been separated by forces beyond our control, and deprived of resources that might aid our resilience, we cannot confront the current crisis in isolation. “We have simply never dealt with an assault at this level in any recent memory.”
Our hostility toward one another is also complicating our ability to engage with each other constructively in the face of these threats. “I think we should also recognize that we have become harsher,” Shane said. “The collapse of the center—caused by the failure of status quo politics to meet human needs—tends to inculcate a politics of resentment and cruelty on the right, but the left is not immune to this dynamic,” he said. “The situation is hard and when we feel powerless we tend to take power over each other, and so I do think the worsening of material conditions makes us angrier and more unkind to each other as well.”
Another Response is Possible
Even in moments of crisis, when we desperately need each other, resentment and distrust can drive us apart. “Sometimes, I feel like the greatest trick the right ever pulled was convincing the left that people are terrible,” my friend Aaron Goggans recently told me. Aaron is the co-creator of the WildSeed Society, and his insights about trauma, spirituality, and how activists can help each other heal have been deeply important to me.
“There is an unfortunate reality that while tragedy can bring a community together, when that tragedy is man-made, or when the response to that tragedy is cruel or inconsiderate, people tend to lose trust in their neighbors,” Aaron said. “In this way, the cruelty of Trump’s response to the pandemic didn’t just kill vulnerable people, it also killed the vulnerable’s faith in other people.”
Aaron pointed out that negative conclusions about human potential and human decency are supported by the content algorithms “controlled by tech bros” have curated for us. Conspiracy theories, conflict, and condemnation are amplified on social media.
“[Tech moguls] consider most people NPCs [non-player characters],” Aaron said. Tech oligarchs view most everyday people as disposable because we are not relevant to the games they are playing. If we are not invested in each other’s survival because we think that most people (or massive swaths of people) are simply irredeemable, and therefore disposable, our worldview becomes more compatible with the oligarchs’ design.
“If we evaluated human nature by the thousands of acts of human kindness and solidarity that allowed so many of us to survive the last few years, we would come to very different conclusions about people,” Aaron said. “The kind of conclusion that says maybe people aren’t just self-interested rational actors, but deeply social, positively enmeshed, whole human beings who want so deeply to love and be loved.”
Aaron argues that the political terrain has previously been shaped by our regard for one another in ways that have gone largely unacknowledged. “It wasn’t the resistance of elites, social media fights or the political genius of Biden’s campaign that denied Trump the White House in 2020,” he said. Aaron believes that the momentum of mutual aid efforts, in opposition to Trump’s catastrophic response to COVID, had a decisive political impact. “It was the public narrative we built around taking care of each that shouted ‘another response is possible’ that pushed a record number of people to polls.”
Aaron still believes that “another response is possible” and that we should rally people around the need to address the struggles we face in humane and caring ways. “Every time Musk or Trump weaponizes cruelty to shock a group into compliance we have to show, not with our outrage but with our care, that another response is possible,” he said.
While many may be tempted to dismiss those whose previous positions have disappointed us, Aaron urges restraint. “Every time we want to point out that those who are just now coming to our side didn’t change their mind until they were personally affected, we have to pause,” he said. “We have to remember that our moment of radicalization was likely too late for those that came before us.”
Aaron stressed that “a more compassionate response will not only be more effective in keeping people on our side, but much more likely to build the world we want.”
When The Lights Go Out
While considering how we can do the work of reclaiming our agency and relearning togetherness, I also talked to my friend Dean Spade. Dean’s most recent book, Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, is an invaluable resource for people who are grappling with these issues.
“Right now, the thing we need most is to get together with other people, care for people, and take bold, disruptive collective action to protect people and the planet,” Dean told me. “We also need robust support systems to help us through the crises that are mounting—more floods, fires, storms, cancers, pandemics, mental health struggles, evictions, deportations, attacks from cops and emboldened right-wingers.”
Dean stressed that our enemies benefit from our continued isolation. “Our opponents want us separated from one another and unable to coordinate to fight back together,” he said. “And it's working—people are more isolated than ever. More of us live alone, more of us don't have friends who would visit us in the hospital, or who we could tell if we were in danger in a relationship,” Dean said. “Many of our friendships have become more shallow, mostly happening online. Most people have lost the skills they need to find more friends, deepen friendships, count on others, and be a reliable support for others.”
These problems also interfere with our ability to organize. “Many people try to enter our movement groups and find we aren't good at being welcoming, at supporting people in learning new solidarities,” Dean said. “Social life on the internet has made people more afraid to make mistakes in public, and less tolerant of each other's learning and growing processes.”
To build beyond these impediments, we must rebuild our social skills. “We desperately need to increase our abilities to trust others, be trustworthy, care for people even if we don't like them, connect with people different from ourselves, accept critical feedback non-defensively, approach new people and welcome new people into groups,” Dean said. “Without these skills, we can't mount the kinds of resistance that are so essential now.”
Dean stressed that this means building support systems and political work outside of social media. “Online relationships can be an important part of our support system, but we all also need local, in-person support for when we're sick, when the lights go out, when communications are down, and when we're facing local violence.”
Moves We Can Make
I began this piece by talking about how acting with agency can help us cope with trauma and avoid cycles of immobilization and learned helplessness. It’s important to note that acting with agency isn’t always elaborate or dramatic. As Elise Granata recently wrote:
I’m thinking about agency on the (seemingly) smallest scale. I experience agency when I sew a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months. When I tidy up my clothes chair that I have been meaning to tidy for months. When I mail a friend a letter…that I have been meaning to mail for months. (There is a theme and the theme is “for months”.)
Acting with agency is about overcoming inertia and stepping into action. Our first step out of a frozen state will likely be a small one. That’s okay. If you need some ideas about what those small steps might look like, Granata’s recent piece extends a number of questions that might help you along.
If you find that you are living most of your political life on social media, I am not suggesting that you abandon those platforms altogether. (Though divesting from Meta and X is probably a good idea. If you want to join me on Bluesky, you can always use my starter packs.) I don’t think it makes sense for most of us to attempt to excise the flawed infrastructure we have come to rely upon without creating or locating something to take its place. So, rather than thinking in terms of subtraction, think about what activities and routines you can add to your life that will keep you more informed and connected, or allow you to enact your values. Can you use your phone to scroll through articles or a book, instead of social media? How can you contribute to efforts to reduce suffering, and create more safety and justice in your community? What human connections can you deepen or initiate?
My friend Maya Schenwar, who is one of the editors of the book We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, has been co-organizing a political discussion group for caregivers. The discussion group was inspired by We Grow the World Together, and a contributor from the anthology speaks at each gathering—though participants are not required to do any advance reading. “Coming together with other caregivers every other Saturday, in person, has allowed us to connect around issues that many of us usually grapple with in isolated ways,” Maya told me. “It has also made space for us to talk concretely about the ways in which we can apply lessons we’ve learned through caregiving to our organizing in this moment. Plus, we talk and eat and affirm each other’s humanity and even laugh, which is not nothing!”
Creating discussion groups and book clubs is a great way to bring people together in this moment. I have also talked with people who have hosted zine making and craft nights to bring people together in fellowship and conversation. One of my co-strugglers has created a conflict resolution study group. When Spring begins, I plan to co-host another “Struggle Hour” where members of my local organizing community can enjoy food and beverages and discuss the work ahead in a low-stakes environment.
Some will minimize such efforts or dismiss them as ineffectual or trite, given the scope of our problems. But in a moment when so many people are stuck in a cycle of doomscrolling and public panic on social media, the most important move a frozen person can make is whatever breaks the cycle. When so many people are isolated, community-affirming events are vital. When everything feels like it is simultaneously too much, and not enough, we must recognize the importance of beginning. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, we must strive to reduce the distance between our actions and our values. Whatever brings us closer to other people, whatever allows us to act, rather than simply react, is worthwhile. Inching our way forward will allow us to find our stride, and if we move together, we will become more powerful. Any of the ties that bind us can become lifelines in times of crisis, so let’s enliven our connections and live more fully, rather than confining ourselves to the digital infrastructure that would restrain us.
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