It’s a problem of multiple levels: geopolitics are nutty, local troubles are swirling, and even my own personal day-to-day struggles with identity, aging, and finding a fit in society weigh on my mind.

Every one of these things takes up space in my brain, running in the background always, day and night, like an app that you can’t uninstall from your phone, and eating up battery life.

By mid-afternoon I’m toast.

We can’t escape our worlds, and one of the biggest struggles that anyone who tries to create and make and share faces today (and has probably faced through all time and history) is that we live in a society that demands a certain share of our mental battery.

It is inescapable.

Politics. Society. Climate. Culture. War. Famine. Economics. Life and death.

None of us get to park our creative selves into a bubble and create outside of reality, no matter how much we might convince ourselves of the opposite.

I don’t claim to have a strategy to deal with it, to fight the feeling of burning toast in your soul, but I do think that accepting the reality of that fact might be a big first step.