Recently, I found myself scrolling through the news on my phone. Or maybe I wasn’t—maybe I was scrolling through Instagram and, as is the case these days, unintentionally came across the news. Reports of war, tariffs, and contradictory political theories about what’s going to happen to the U.S. barraged my brain… and I was on my way to pub trivia.

Earlier in the day, my boyfriend bought me frozen custard, and I was devastated when I got home and promptly dropped it on the sidewalk, splattering it against my car. Now, the entirety of my day felt kind of silly. Of all the things going on in the world, I was about to spend my time eating a burrito, having a drink, and trying to win a game with my friends.

Sometimes to encourage myself, I have to remember that throughout history—from ancient times to the 1940s and beyond—people have been living their own lives. I don’t know where I first came across this phrase, but imagining people “having their own little dramas” throughout historic events often puts things into perspective for me. People fell in love and had fights with their friends and drank and cooked dinner and read books and gardened and lived their own lives the best they knew how. They did that while wars raged on, while recessions hit, and while they didn’t know who would get to stay in their country. We are, by far, not the first generation to experience that. I like how this social media post sums it up:

Of course, it’s good to care. It’s important to do what you can to support causes you care about, like voting, volunteering, or going to protests. But it’s also okay to have fun and find beauty in our lives. The problems will still be there.

One piece of media that’s helping me accept all of this is Derry Girls. If you’re in the U.S., you can watch it on Netflix. It’s about five high school students—Erin, Orla, Clare, Michelle, and James—living in Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the ‘90s. In the first episode, Erin and Orla are getting ready for the first day of school when their grandfather announces, “They’re bombing the bridge, apparently.”

“Oh dear God, no,” Erin’s mom responds. “Does this mean they can’t go to school?”

In Season 1, Episode 4, the Quinn family is hosting Katya, a refugee from Ukraine, after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. She thinks the political turmoil in Ireland is ridiculous and doesn’t understand why two “flavors of the same religion” are fighting each other. Erin appears shocked and claims that it’s a little more complicated than that. Clare takes this to heart, though, and wants to break down barriers. At a house party later in the episode, she wears a shirt with a Union Jack on it to make a statement about the political conflict, claiming that it’s just a symbol. Michelle promptly informs her that she’s going to get beat up.

Clare is trying out politics and how expressing her beliefs works in her own life, and it’s met with resistance, even from her best friends. And while I don’t think Clare is wrong, I understand Michelle’s point. While Clare’s “symbol” could maybe influence how her peers view the conflict in the long term, it is definitely going to affect the little dramas of the party they’re at. Michelle knows it’s something they’ll have to deal with in the present, and for some, that immediate turmoil they’ll experience in their daily lives is enough to dissuade them from taking visible stands.

Like Michelle, I think it’s okay—and good, actually—to prioritize our worries. In August, I received a notification that my social security number, along with billions of others, may have been compromised. Maybe I should have cared a little more. I’m sure lots of people do care. But I really don’t! I’ve been carrying around a weird electronic device that has access to my location, all my passwords, and pretty much everything else about me since I was fourteen. I’m pretty confident someone else already had my social security number.

But like Clare, there are a lot of things I worry about more than that. For example, over 1,000 AmeriCorps programs were recently terminated, including at the St. Louis nonprofit I used to work at. If this had happened two years ago, I would have lost my full-time job. But it’s happening now, and it’s not affecting me—however, it is affecting the employees who are still there, as well as the survivors of human trafficking that the nonprofit serves. I know exactly what they’re going to lose, and it’s crushing to think about the ways a high-level decision like this is going to change the lives of so many individuals who relied on the services of AmeriCorps.

If I let myself be crushed by every news story that came across my phone, though, I would never get out of bed. I certainly wouldn’t have the emotional energy for the other things I care about, like listening to my sisters vent about work or giving into every one of my dog’s whims. I spend a lot of time pondering the best books to recommend to specific people. I worry about political turmoil, but I also worry about my friend who refuses to go to the doctor and the weird bugs that have showed up in my garden.

These are my little dramas, and I love them. They remind me I am not a wheel just turning through the machine of life. Having my own world to worry about brings me a lot of joy that I’m able to access every day. I like being able to walk my dog past the custard I dropped on the ground and bragging that I’m the only one on my pub trivia team who knows anything about Star Wars. Devoting emotional energy to moments like these are the only way I’m able to live through things that are certainly going to be in history books.

In Season 1, Episode 6 of Derry Girls, the season finale, Orla is performing in the school talent show. When most of the student body begins teasing her for her step aerobics routine, Erin, Clare, Michelle, and James rush up to the stage to perform with her in solidarity. Then the scene cuts from the talent show to the Quinn household, where the adults are huddled together, watching news reports of how many casualties came out of a bombing. Back and forth the scene goes, and the two events are given equal weight—the joy that comes from supporting your friends juxtaposed with national events.
No matter how many times I see it, this episode makes me cry. It feels like instructions: care about all of it, and enjoy everything you can.