On the way to peak shittiness

Same as Nicolas Magand and for the same reasons as outlined in his post “Are we at peak shittiness?” I have been mostly quiet here (and online in general) for the last couple of months. There was just so much “bad stuff” going on in the world and in my newsfeeds that I felt more and more depressed and angry by the minute. Writing something in public would have probably just ended with a lot or sarcasm closing in on cynicism.

Now the near year has started and I have a beautiful new Hobonichi Planner which I will use to document the days more thoroughly and put my emotions and frustration into that so that you don’t have to read them here… or at least most of the time 😄 I’ve somehow never understood why people keep a diary but I think the whole idea is slowly growing on me.

So far I’ve always just written down a list of events for each day but now it’s time to also offload some emotions there to completely capture the day. And that’s absolutely necessary with what January has in stock:

• Last weekend basically all hope fell apart that Austria would not get a far-right government with failed coalition talks between the parties ÖVP, SPÖ, and NEOS.
• Donald Trump is getting louder and louder about annexing Greenland. Since Greenland belongs to Denmark and Denmark and the USA are NATO partners this just sounds like a grand idea…
• If the far-right FPÖ can really set up a government for Austria, this will probably lead to a lot of the advancement we’ve made over the last years regarding climate change mitigation being undone. I wonder what all that will mean for instance for the “Klimaticket” which allows you to ride all public transports in Austria for a flat fee (and which I heavily depend on).
• Elon Musk is injecting himself more and more into European politics first with an article for the German newspaper “Die Welt” (I’m so not linking to that here!) and promoting the AfD and now with efforts in the UK and Italy.
• Donald Trump becomes president in 11 days…
• Huge fires around Los Angeles.
• …

I’m pretty sure I will need that diary/journal quite a lot during January as I don’t think we’ve reached “peak shittiness” yet but it’s definitely a start…