A Slight Case of Overwhelm

Finding Meaning in a Time of Global & Personal Existential Crisis

Apokalypsis is the result of me exploring our shared moment of mounting global and personal existential crisis in a playful tone. The premise of the project/series is that it is no longer a case of ‘if’ or ‘when’, it is simply a question of how we navigate the rising storm. We are connected by what we share.

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So You’re Feeling Overwhelmed.

The world is on fire, the ice caps are melting, the internet is a cesspool of Funnel-Bros and Only-Fans whores, social media companies have absolutely killed social media, and there are assholes everywhere on E-scooters. The war in the Middle East looks like the end-times and a scam artist is the front-running Republican nominee for US Presidential Elections.

What Does Overwhelm Mean Exactly?

The word “overwhelm” comes to us from the Old English overhwælman, meaning to “cover over”. It has since become a term meaning to be engulfed or submerged, often by water. This places “overwhelm” in the same archetypal waters as “deluge,” both conjuring images of being overcome by forces beyond our control. Since overwhelm means “to cover over”, it then also relates the word to “apocalypse”, which comes from the Greek apokalyptein meaning to “uncover, disclose, reveal.”

You can’t make this shit up.

Ancient myths often feature a deluge, a divine flood sent to wipe the slate clean, punishing an errant humanity for its wickedness and resetting the stage for a new genesis. Deluge is a common motif found in all the mythology and folklore from every part of the world and reflects both the end of an era and the dawn of new beginnings, a reminder that destruction often heralds creation.

What is Mythos?

To the ancient mind, myths were the language—part archetypal psychology, part story—that brought order to chaos, explaining the unexplainable and taming the wild unknowns of nature and fate. Our mythic frameworks once gave us a sense of meaning and belonging, imparting essential context not only for communal and individual survival but also helped us orient ourselves in the vastness of Cosmos and Eternity.

Both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell beautifully illuminated how folklore and mythology are not only the progenitor and prototype of religion but psychology as well. Between them, they showcased mythos as a foundational element of human consciousness, weaving a profound link between our religious beliefs and psychological frameworks, offering timeless insights into the human condition.

Mythos is the collective word that captures the human capacity and need for stories and our response to that. These are our creation stories, the soap operas of gods and other supernatural beings, ways in which we described the behaviour of elemental forces and natural phenomena we found ourselves in relation to, at the mercy of but had no recourse to explain.

Mythos was the way we developed and shared a sense of coherence as cooperative groups, and how we integrated wisdom, custom and ethics. Mythos was not just a way to entertain ourselves and orient ourselves to the cosmos and nature, but also to each other and our stories provided a mechanism by which we could integrate prototypes of morality, ethics and philosophy in a shared framework of reference by which large groups could remain coherent.

In the example of the ancient Greeks, the law of the road, the law of hospitality and custom was what held peasants, kings, priests and gods to the same standards of behaviour, a convention that was depicted vividly in their myths. These depictions demonstrated guidelines and cautionary tales, illuminating a framing of natural law by which the customs were upheld and how punishment for violating the laws was inevitable.

How It’s Going So Far.

Fascinatingly, our mythos is emergent.

The stories, their tropes and archetypes do not pop up fully formed, they evolve in nuance and complexity as the societies that sustain those stories evolve in nuance in complexity. They are a product of the psyche that formulates them, and they in turn formulate the psyche of the individuals and the cultures that trade in them. Our stories described our place in the world and also the natural laws and limits of that world. Our stories defined our limits.

As we mixed and mingled, warred and colonized, we also evolved from tribes to villages, to kingdoms and empires and then to federations, republics and eventually global communities. The more complex our societies got, the more complex our stories became. Our mythic narratives gave way to ever more complex religions, ideologies and abstract operating systems of social coherence.

This is framed in the past tense, to suggest it is something that no longer happens, because the more we grew in size and complexity, the more we outgrew our stories and made room, eventually, for what we call the Age of Enlightenment. This was a moment where humanity broke the waterline of our own tribal limits and enshrined the opposite of Mythos as the lens by which to understand the world and our place in it elevating reason as the door by which we could lift ourselves out of our fatalistic relationship with chiefs, tribes, kings and priests and other intermediaries that claimed to be divinely appointed. The opposite of Mythos is called Logos, which refers to logic, reason and rationale by which we developed our sciences, our philosophies and our technology.

This ushered in a time of marvels and miracles. What science, medicine and technology have enabled in us, and how empowered we are right now is unprecedented in known human history. This is a special moment.

But like any step forward that we take unconsciously, we never know what we are giving up or losing as we rush forward to embrace novelty.

Enter the Enlightenment, stage left: the era of reason, science, and individualism. This was not just a minor tweak in the script; it was a full-on plot twist. We swapped our mythic backdrops for the stark, unembellished sets of empirical and rational frameworks, where everything had to be seen to be believed. Yet, in our rush to strip down to the rational bare bones, we left behind the lush, elaborate tapestries of myth that buffered us against the existential abyss. Now, here we stand—vulnerably brilliant, magnificently enlightened, and, frankly, a tad overwhelmed.

A Rising Storm

In modern times, the onslaught of information, the rapid pace of technological advancement, and the constant connectivity can feel like a new kind of deluge. The rain is falling, we don’t have an Ark, and we can only tread water for so long.

We are already inundated with data, choices, and crises, and now, without the mythic context that once provided a buffer against chaos. Our existing stories of ideologies, and religions or other world views, regardless of their merits, are not compatible with each other.

For decades, meteorologists have used the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to categorize hurricanes into five distinct categories based on their wind speeds—a system that seemed comprehensive until recently. However, as climate change intensifies weather patterns, we are witnessing storms with such unprecedented strength that there's been talk among scientists about the need for a new category: Category 6. This potential addition reflects the reality that storms are not only becoming stronger but are also surpassing the upper limits of our existing scale. As Category 6 may sound, we are reminded that nature’s fury cares nothing for our arbitrary numeric limits and categorizations.

Our enlightenment and technological capability to forecast trouble has limits in the form of our inability to process information and circumstances we do not have context or precedent for. Without the integrated stories of calamity and catastrophe that our ancestors used to live with, we have normalised our past 80 years of relative peace and prosperity as a given. What was once a profound exception has now become ‘ordinary’.

Now, everything we encounter in the news and social media is either a distraction or another storm of drama and crisis—it is like the meagre shutters of our sanity being buffeted by the approaching cyclone for which we don’t have adequate language to describe much less the individual or collective coping mechanisms to manage.

One of the implications is that we become desensitized. This happens for the same reason that we experience hedonic adaptation. Whatever is novel is profound. Whatever we become used to, we normalise and filter out, that is how desensitisation works. What ought to alarm us and cause us distress is just another post among a million others vying for our attention. We are too overwhelmed not to be desensitized. But subconsciously, the part of us that found comfort and context through mythos is scrabbling for that context.

We are overwhelmed and our systems of social coherence that we rely on to categorise problems and address them are overwhelmed too. These systems include our governments, our media and our politics. The kinds of problems that are arising are too large and complex for any country to legislate their way out of, for any political party to form policy around and certainly for any single internet hero to define an intellectual or technological solution for.

When you rain down all the technological complexity, the intensity of crisis and drama into an ocean of our shared human story, and our islands of belief and conviction are disconnected and shrinking under the onslaught of all the complexity, the inevitable outcome can only be Overwhelm.

Let’s Get Mythical

So what can we do?

The first thing that might really help is to understand what’s going on so we can decide how to respond.

‘Overwhelm’ as a state, can be defined as a coherence problem. Any system will fail when its inputs exceed its throughput. If there is too much complexity to process, the system trying to manage all the processing becomes incoherent.

The solution to a coherence problem is regulation and integration.

It is not that you can have too much Logos. No society in human history ever suffered because they became too reasonable. Instead, it pays to understand that you can only integrate so much without the magic glue that holds all that emerging subtlety and nuance together. Mythos is that glue. And it is not a case of Mythos vs Logos either, but rather Mythos AND Logos—we absolutely need both.

Mythos is not just the story, very specifically it is how that story is integrated into the psyche. Mythos requires two things to help it stick: Imagination and Experience.

Have you ever had the experience when after scrolling on social media for too long you feel scrambled? Or if you binge-watch too many episodes of your current favourite show, or play a computer game for too long, you feel untethered and disorientated in a psychologically troubling way?

When we pull ourselves away, we invariably struggle to connect with people and conversation and we are unable to be present with a meal or a meaningful moment. The reason for this is that the human brain and consciousness cannot integrate all that virtual and synthetic experience without the gravity of lived experience to counter-balance it. And then of course the nervous system is not designed to distinguish between actual and virtual experience so it cannot integrate the stimulation to the imagination of either without sufficient space.

Scrolling can be particularly deranging because at least with binge-watching there was continuity. With social media scrolling the algorithm does not give a fuck about your psychological coherence, and if you are an undiscerning scroller, you get whatever an undead algorithm presents to you next. The algorithm is designed by behavioural psychologists to hook and retain your attention and to game your dopamine system. They are designed to learn what hooks you and adapt accordingly to drag you in.

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REMEMBER

The best kind of advice feels less like an imperative and more like a real invitation, the kind you feel blessed to receive. The best kind of wisdom therefore should feel less like learning and more like remembering. Uncovering the veil does not add anything new to the scene, it simply reveals what was already there.

Here are three considerations to deal with Overwhelm. The first two considerations involve Presence, Intentionality and Discernment, which are how we establish the conditions for coherence. The third is how we integrate Coherence.

#1 Make Space

The first consideration is to adapt your habits to give your psyche and nervous system adequate space to integrate. This has to mean regulating what you feed it and then balancing this with exercise, walks in nature and human connection time. This is how we address Presence in the moment, wherein we can reconnect with our own Intentionality and invoke our own Discernment.

Presence and Intentionality and Discernment are the formula for a superpower we can develop through effort and repetition. ‘Making space’ is not just removing ourselves from the noise, but how we insulate ourselves from it when we cannot. (Life happens off the mat.)

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

—Viktor Frankl

We know that our social media platform companies employ behavioural psychologists to ensure the experience/interface is designed insidiously to capture and retain our attention. We are the actual platform, and we are the ones being gamed. The obvious wisdom is to delete the app, citing the adage that “if you don’t bring the ice cream home you can't be tempted to eat it”.

This is a great short-term strategy but if we avoid challenge, we avoid growth.

The answer we find, as with so many things, is to realise the redundancy of ‘control’ and lean rather towards self-mastery. Choosing our inner ‘stance’, is a subtle game-changing upgrade that is always available and something we can develop through exercise. If we can practice this with equanimity, that is allow ourselves to fail, keep failing and simply try again, if we stay committed to this stance and we practice this level of intentionality, we eventually ‘train’ our nervous systems to navigate the spaces we move through without being compromised or hooked. These tools after all are here to stay and how we use them is determined by our level of self-mastery.

This is how we begin to captain our own ships, instead of just being a plaything of the elements.

#2 Captaining Your Ship

Secondly, you would benefit from building your own ark of reason and sanity—something that can get you off your island. You need to learn how to navigate rough seas. This is what we call a daily practice. This might include things like meditation, yoga, journaling and other forms of presence. The aim here is to begin to define your Intentionality, the direction you want to navigate towards, as well as your Discernment.

The reason captains would keep a ‘Captain’s Log’, was so that they could track the things that happened and how they handled it so that they could keep referring to it and improve their craft as captains over time.

The ship needs to be steered and maintained. The course needs to be checked and updated, and you need to know how to handle the lows of feeling stuck just as much as the squalls and rough seas which are part of the journey.

We have to build our ship while sailing it. We have to expand the conversation with our journey, not just our immediate horizon.

#3 Expanding The Conversation.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your life, the demands of your relationships, the projects of your wellness and personal development, and the state of trouble in the world—the cure for that is coherence. Mythos is the perennial medium of establishing coherence, of making order out of chaos.

Overwhelm often results from being stuck in a literal interpretation or the granular details of our experiences. The antidote to this is to embrace the figurative and the symbolic. Complex ideas are best understood through stories and metaphors, as analogy allows us to grasp concepts that might initially seem beyond our reach. It is how we belong to a wider conversation than the reductionist purview of the literal.

Consider how much you remember from school or factual documentaries; we tend to forget specific dates and numbers but retain the essence of the stories. We are naturally adept at remembering narratives because they resonate with our intrinsic way of understanding the world.

There are rich and rewarding practices that you can explore, but as a start, you need to start simply by making room for the language of the figurative, and secondly to start challenging the narrative of your own story.

Stories were once our only way to make our bewildering existence coherent. Stories are how we create and connect to meaning.

Connect with better stories and make yours epic,

Rocco