Ask HN: In these uncertain times, how do you handle anxiousness

Depending on the diagnosis, eventually they might tell you to contact a psychiatrist to try some drugs. In my case, that helped. That’ll take time though. The therapist will probably start with the basics: sleep, food, social interaction, family, couple, exercise.

WRT the state of the world: you first have to accept that you are not going to be able to fix the whole world on your own. The cpu cycles you spend thinking about that is wasted energy. Concentrate on what you can do. That depends on your circumstances and your motivation. Donate money to charities or political parties. Teach children in the local school. Plant threes. Investigate and write to motivate others. Whatever you think will improve things.

Then (very important, but also difficult) transform those thoughts into action - don’t just them just fester inside your head. Take a piece of paper and a calendar and make a plan, and commit to it.

Also, beware that there’ll be setbacks and problems. Don’t be hard on yourself when those arrive. It’s part of the process.

Good luck!

Perhaps you need a goal for your money as well?

Perhaps you already have enough to buy something which gives you the safety net to fall onto?

For me my own little farm means water storage and solar panels and wood and stuff.

But it also means creating a garden for more biodiversity and building the soil up and trying to build it sustainable.

The farm could also have enough space to provide shelter for the rest of your family if they desire to join you.

It doesn't work this way.

Money is a fiction we created, a way to measure debts and legal liabilities. (Barter economies never existed; money emerges very quickly, and is used for this purpose.) Time is real, and it's yours. You deserve time to relax. If you spend every hour optimizing for work productivity, you'll burn yourself out and have "unplanned downtime"... trust me, that's not what you want. Better to work at a reasonable pace--in the long run, no one does more than ~1500 hours per year of meaningful work anyway--and avoid the stochasticity of unplanned downtime.

I work on my hard and soft skills through certifications so I can up even more my hourly rate.

There's nothing wrong with that. You've got to do what's best for you. No one eles will.

It's a never ending race, I've been playing this game since 2016, finding new ways to earn more, not because I'm passionate about it, but because I'm anxious everything could come crashing down in a couple of years and I'll need the money.

I hate saying this, but it could. Disaster can happen to any of us, whether personal in scale (sickness) or global (sickness again, because COVID-19 isn't necessarily over). Everyone is in the same boat, even the very rich (Bezos or Musk could get cancer). The negative outliers are dreadful. An air conditioner could fall on you tomorrow. The probability of each of your atoms quantum tunneling into the far reaches of the universe, although so infinitesimally small it's ridiculous, is technically nonzero.

This is probably an unpopular suggestion, but studying religion (don't feel pushed to pick one; study many) often helps. For my part, I think Buddhism has the most accurate model of mind and impermanence, Judaism has the strongest theology and ethics, and Christianity has a great model in Jesus (even if I don't consider him to be messiah, nor believe he considered himself such) of how to live in the world. The ancients were smarter than we give them credit for.

I feel like we are destroying our planet, destroying our economy, we make poor people poorer, stir political extremes, we alienate the younger generation with social medias, there is war in Europe, everything is about politics when it should be about science and people...

This is all true, but if you're not directly making it worse, then you shouldn't feel bad about it. If you're mining Bitcoin, you have something to feel bad about. If you're building websites for restaurants, you shouldn't feel guilty, because even though you are technically participating in capitalism--an objectively immoral system--you're also helping people (who, like you, need to eat) better their lives.

No one can predict the future. Will capitalism throw humanity off the rails? Or will it be overthrown? (And will such overthrow be a good thing, or will it be replaced by something worse?) No one knows the answers. All you can hold yourself responsible for is living one day at a time.

I've tried not caring, going to bars and restaurants and beautiful places in vacation, getting a new car, finding hobbies... but I can't pretend, I don't know how to cope anymore.

This never helps as much as it should. Hedonic adaptation happens fast. Read more, learn more, and while it's good to stay aware of the world and your role in it, this too can be overdone. You're not killing the planet every time you drive to the grocery store--at least, no more than lightning kills the planet when it starts a forest fire, as it has done for hundreds of millions of years--it's far, far more complicated than that and you can't hold yourself responsible for decisions made by others.

What's the finite set of universal human needs? How can we show this? One way is to compile a list from all the lists online and see what needs you're not meeting. Work on getting those met. Sounds like you've got some acceptance going unmet, as well as some mourning. Do you have effective grieving strategies? Have you cried through envisioning the death of the last human? What about extinction by asteroid? There's a whole world of death to explore and accept! This is why we're starting a traveling circus meant for healing, grieving, and more.

Anxiety is normal for any beliefs out of alignment with reality/nature like "There's nothing we can do about it" or "I'm but one person." And no matter what your beliefs, if you have a chronically unmet need for something and you're making plans that continue to deny it, the parts of the body needing that thing may naturally get anxious.

Money literally isn't a human need, so if you think a collapse is coming and you don't know how to live without money, part of you is probably aware you can get pretty screwed pretty quick in that scenario. So go learn that. Consider a change in career. Have you considered running away to a weird traveling donation-driven circus, becoming a death clown, and learning what it's like to have 0 money and not feel anxious? Cause that's where I'm at and I wish this peace for all. The Caravan Stage Company has also been rolling this way for decades. Maybe check them out? If you do this kind of work on yourself, you may become a person who's equipped to help family through anything. That's the journey I'm on, or so I hope. I suspect I can show it works mathematically.

And besides that, we are the group of people who have the best chance to see the bigger picture due to our good life's.its not helping me if I know that the person in china has air pollution and other issues and is busy with there also stressful life's and is too busy to see climate change

Also while I care about bio diversity there are plenty of people who don't.

Should I now stop caring? Probably not.