Ark Head
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Ark Head
I read a piece, recently, that opens with the above meme, from a site that tends to deliver interesting essays and periodically coins useful terms (Ribbonfarm).
The piece in question uses the term "ark head" (as in "Noah's Ark") to refer to a state of mind in which everything seems to be going sideways, the world is bizarre and incomprehensible, things are unnerving and scary and changing so rapidly we can't keep up, and so for some of us (perhaps even most of us, to varying degrees) the most rational (or reflexive) thing to do is load up our personal ark, focus on whatever we can understand and do something about, and let the rest be washed away by the flood.
It's sort of like sticking one's head in the sand ("ostriching"?) except instead of just ignoring all the bad stuff, we pull our range of concern—what we allow ourselves to think about and consider doing something about—ever-inward, until we find a range of consideration that's tolerable, sustainable, and do-something-about-able.
I tend to believe we're better able to handle things at smaller, more local scales when we maintain an awareness and understanding of macro-scale happenings (all the local effort in the world won't save us from a world war or meteor impact, and federal elections can shape our lives whether or not we choose to participate in them), but I absolutely understand the impulse to reduce the scale of our perceptual world when things seem too big, complex, weird, and scary to deal with healthily.
I also think there's something to be said for taking this stance periodically, even if we choose to remain un-arked most of the time.
I have no-news days built into my week, despite spending a lot of my (practical and mental) time with stuff happening on the other side of the planet.
In any case, I think it's a useful term for describing something many of us are going through to varying degrees right now, and sometimes being able to concisely label an otherwise nebulous-seeming concept can help us define and address our relationship with it (and change that relationship, should we choose to do so).
That essay: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/09/29/ark-head/
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