Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Aviv.

Friends, this episode features me and Unumaliy talking about how to stop catastrophizing

and start changing ourselves and the world.

Let me take a cue here from philosopher Le Biggenstein first.

He wrote, when we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will

reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now. It does not occur to us

that its path is not a straight line, but a curve, constantly changing direction. So many of us right now are catastrophizing. Are you catastrophizing lately?

Have you noticed? This is related to the direction that we can see. Catastrophizing is a gesture that has

become exacerbated in the post-pandemic landscape. When we have fear, rather than allowing

it to rise and fall in time, it consumes more time than it should. It becomes a fantasy of the future,

making the future a fixed point, destination made out of the direction we can see. We come up with scenarios

in which something we thought could be stable will now be laid to waste. So whether you're

doing this by catastrophizing the environment, imagining land masses underwater, or feeling

a tightness over your thoughts of fascism overrunning

all governments or seeing your own beloved social movements fall to pieces. Or maybe it's more

personal than that. It's probably happening on both levels. So you feel a pain somewhere, a strange

pain and you begin to conceive of it as a terminal disease.

Your partner's phone is binging and binging with texts, and that means definitely they are cheating, lying.

That's the end of the relationship. Or you notice that your social media posts aren't getting likes.

That means no one's interested in what you have to share anymore,

and that's going to affect your livelihood, et cetera, et cetera.

In all of these motions, we create an image of the future,

...