2025 and the Myth of “Better”

​Like many folks, I’ve struggled to manage my mental health in Trumpworld this year. A bagful of tactics have come into play: media blackouts, self-care distractions, therapy, pharma, zazen (Zen meditation), prayer. Yet while they’ve all helped, none have made me “better.”

Ah, that word: better. As in “feel better!” or (what some say to children after putting a bandage on a scrape) “all better!” I’ve taken better for granted. Ever since childhood, I would get sick, go to the doctor, and get better. I’d see therapists, they’d give me tools to work through my issues, and I’d get better. Better was the default state, the steady state from which life was meant to be lived.

Best of all, better always seemed achievable, more or less, as long as I took the steps to achieve it. Now I’m seeing just how much it’s influenced by conditions beyond our control. Big, foundational conditions—like the stability of our government.

I have zero idea what it’s like to live amid government instability. Like others in my generation, I’ve lived through the Great Recession, the horror of 9/11, the Nixon impeachment, the upheaval of the 1960s—hard knocks aplenty, but nothing that threatened to upend our entire way of life. Nothing like, say, living in Assad’s Syria after 2011, or in Venezuela under the dictator Maduro, or in South Sudan today.

Now, however, we are getting a taste of that instability, with massive government upheaval, an uptick in political violence, and an administration hell-bent on accumulating power. Some groups—immigrants especially—are feeling their foundations shake as they never have before.

In other words, there’s been a shift in our bedrock as a nation. And bedrock shifts give birth to anxiety, massive boatloads of it.

That puts the mythical better out of reach.

Rather than yearn for better, then, I’m trying this: to see the anxiety clearly, live into it, and manage my own life in this new reality, all while expecting to feel blech. To find other things besides “feeling better” to lean into.

Those other things do exist, thank God. Lately I’ve found myself drawn toward fostering qualities that I call existentials: inner strength, resilience, character, equanimity, even joy (so much more than a feeling). I’m savoring the deep sense of being held by the infinite web of interconnection among all beings.

That’s me; your mileage may vary. The basic suggestion here is to take the presence of anxiety as a given, and find your way into life anyway.

A fundamental truth from Buddhist wisdom is that everything changes, that we only have right here, right now to act into with wisdom and compassion—whether right here, right now is perfect or less so. That’s a profound bit of guiding wisdom for any time.