Outrage Fatigue Syndrome

I was chatting with some of the Blue Voices last night, and a subject with which I am totally familiar came up in the conversation. I am familiar with it, but have never been able to express its essence in one compact phrase, in other words - to give it a name. Thank our lucky blue stars for Duane, who managed to name it quite succinctly and precisely: Outrage Fatigue Syndrome. Which from now on we will call OFS. I'll bet we are not the only members of the blogging universe who occasionally suffer from this malady.

Does this sound familiar? You wake up, get your first cup of coffee, sit down at your computer and start scanning the news from all your various sources, feeds, groups, etc. You move on to reading your favorite news and opinion writers, probably mostly other bloggers. You get up to fetch another cup of coffee and maybe an enormous something containing a lot of carbs and sugar, in order to stem that feeling of total despair. Sit back down, roam around a little more, decide it's time to get down to your own writing.

But, the despair and fury overcome the danish, and you are tempted to put your fist through the monitor, or hurl your coffee cup through a large pane of glass. Your journey through the news and views of the day has resulted in such an accumulation of outrage that you find it almost impossible to put sensible words in order and say anything worthwhile at all. Impossible even to choose a subject from the outrage menu and put thoughts into any coherent form. All you are really capable of doing is banging your head repeatedly against your desk. There you are: all the symptoms of OFS. Full blown.

The only remedy I have found for OFS is to take a break from attempting to write, just sit back for a few days. I lighten up on the news-and-views-reading, maybe read a novel. ( Amy Tan's new one is very good, by the way. ) A few days of abstaining from blogging seems to bring down the fever, the symptoms abate, and I am ready to start the whole process all over again. Any folk remedies from other bloggers will be welcomed here.

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