Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a double major in history and linguistics, not that she knows what to do with that. She plays on Women’s Club Soccer Gold for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Today in the United States, we live in a world that I can best describe as one long trainwreck. You know, one of those metaphorical ones that you don’t want to look at but can’t seem to help? And I think that this is especially true on a college campus, where people are generally engaged with the world that surrounds them and are more politically engaged than other places. That’s certainly true for me. For better or worse, I like to pay attention to what is going on politically, and these days it certainly feels like it’s for the worse, which brings me to the point I want to make with this article. Every once in a while, you need to look away from the trainwreck.
That can feel like a really hard thing to do. After all, the trainwreck idiom exists for a reason. Also, for anyone who is as plugged into their phone as I am (which is too much) it can kind of feel like you’re drowning in notifications, which today so often seem to be about what crazy thing has happened recently (thank you to my algorithm for that one). So it’s not like avoiding the trainwreck is as simple as walking to another window — or walking away entirely. The digital age has invented a trainwreck that follows you and surrounds you, kind of like a shadow or an overwhelming feeling of dread.
That’s not to say that sometimes we shouldn’t look at the trainwreck. Trainwrecks are tragedies, and traumatic ones, that require and inherently create witnesses. Our particular trainwreck, with all of its implicit and explicit threats to the future of American democracy, is certainly both tragic and traumatic and deserves our attention and our witnessing. However, as much as it sometimes gets all of mine, it does not deserve all of our attention all the time — whether my algorithm thinks it does or not.
Maybe this isn’t a problem that affects all of us, it might just be a problem that affects me, but I tend to believe there are at least a few other me’s out there who are trapped in a loop of trainwreck-watching. And I have tried to get out of it: I have limits on my social media apps and I try not to use my phone before I go to bed, but with apps that are designed to be addicting and algorithms on my phone that regrettably know how much time I spend reading news articles (the occupational hazard of doing newspaper stuff, unfortunately) it’s a losing battle from the jump.
So for the (admittedly maybe few) people out there a little like me, do yourself a favor. Turn your TV off, turn your phone off (or better yet leave it behind), go outside, go be near people, read a book you’ve been putting off reading — do literally anything, but just let yourself be for a minute or two. Then, if it’s your vibe, get involved with activist opportunities, or read another article to educate yourself or whatever you need to do to pay witness or respond to what is going on today.
Again, maybe some of you already know this, but for those of us that sometimes need a reminder, balance is important, especially for students who have so much to balance and so many deadlines to meet. I often find myself out of balance. I guess basically what I’m trying to say is don’t spend so much time worrying about the future that you forget the present [insert “Kung Fu Panda” quote here], and that nothing is more important than giving yourself a break every now and then. The trainwreck will in all likelihood still be there, so go outside, maybe when you come back it won’t look so awful (or it will, but you’ll be better able to deal with it).
