By Esther Kim
From plane crashes to egg shortages, the bad news that streams ceaselessly into our private phones feels overwhelming. It’s logical to feel paranoid. The politics aren’t helping.
But being Korean, as far as I understand it, means knowing something about survival, for better and for worse. We’ve lived in a state of chronic war since the ceasefire. There’s little good that comes of it, but at least it’s drilled emergency preparedness and crisis response into society here. So, I try to remember what I still know and can do.
That includes swimming, sailing and wildlife first aid. Skills I picked up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. At 18, I worked as a camp counselor at an all-girls Christian sleepaway camp in upstate New York. Located on an island surrounded by a freshwater lake, this camp was one of the toughest jobs I’ve had. Each Sunday, boatloads of bright-eyed parents would arrive with their daughters as we counselors greeted them with our welcome song. About 100 new campers, aged 8 to 18, stayed with us for one-week sessions.
The girls were tough. To my awe and disbelief, one of my 8-year-olds, a wiry girl with a crown of blonde hair, completed a 10-mile run for her Advanced Running badge. A few teenage campers earned their Advanced Wildlife badge by bushwhacking or cutting their trails through woods in the High Peaks.
Counselor training was fittingly absurd. What if a deer tramples your co-counselor, breaking her leg? What if you run into a bear while pooing in the woods? What if a camper breaks her collarbone while water skiing? After three lessons, we were certified to teach archery and administer “wildlife first aid." On the first day, counselors performed the orientation skit inside the wood-cabin dining hall. The skit covered what not to do in case of a lightning strike (turn your bum up) or rabid bats (grab it with your bare hands) to the peels of girlish laughter.
There I learned it's better to be prepared than scared. In that spirit, some unsolicited advice for this coming year.
Breathe. Don’t panic. Stay calm. Listen to "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" read by Douglas Adams. Are you scared? Pick one thing to do.
Pack a go bag with a basic disaster supplies kit for your home. Expect the wilder winds, waters and fires. The summer is officially monsoon and wildfire season. Consider your basic utilities — electricity, gas, running water — and how you will go a few days without in case of an outage. You can’t go wrong with an emergency radio, extra masks, cash, a flashlight or lighter, iodine tablets, gaffer tape, a first-aid kit and extra batteries. Your kit depends on where you live, so prepare your household for the most likely specific disaster scenarios. Sign up for local emergency alerts from local apps before a disaster strikes. Zoom Earth is useful for typhoons, and MiseMise for air quality.
Brush up on first aid and safety training. Know cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), the Heimlich maneuver and other first aid skills. CPR is an emergency procedure performed when a person's heart stops beating and the Heimlich when a person is choking. Youth centers, local government offices and schools should offer quality training for free.
Further afield, women journalists can seek out the International Women’s Media Foundation's excellent physical safety and hostile environment first aid training.
Call your people. Trust dissolves in times of “strongmen” leaders and cult figures. Turn to people you trust, individuals and support groups who make time for you and you make time for. This does not scale. Social media is neither very social nor is it media. Replace online with offline time. Who do you visit, call, eat meals with, buy gifts for and hold in your thoughts? If the problems feel too large, seek organized help. Be deliberate this year in defining your community and giving your attention.
Journalist Ed Yong wrote, “We are drowning in systems that strip the intentionality away from our social lives, and that offer us the illusion of community in place of the reality of it.” Once upon a time, we bought a print newspaper, a dictionary, a film camera and a paper map instead of our smartphone. Act like an old fogey.
Learn digital safety and literacy. Our physical world is tied to the digital world like never before. Consider time on social media, like smoking a cigarette. British comedian Stewart Lee observed that Twitter, now known as X, (before Elon Musk, Trump, or TikTok), is “like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers. It’s a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation.”
Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff calls the platforms “surveillance capitalism.” Citing her, Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa has spoken powerfully on how Facebook led to the dissolution of democracy. These platforms enact real-time behavior modification experiments on large human populations.
Understand that we live in an age of disinformation, unfettered propaganda, troll farms and surveillance. Be mindful of your YouTube and podcast consumption. Consult resources developed by nonprofits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, such as the Freedom of the Press’s digital security checklist for journalists.
Make art. Take playing seriously. Sing, dance, play pretend, sculpt, embroider, draw, whittle. Artists are simply people who never stop playing. In another context, time, or place, art like pottery is an essential craft for daily life. Artists are people who obsess like engineers in materials but with a dash of metaphysical thinking. Develop a life and art offline, without sharing amateur attempts and rehearsals to the platform for the approval of an online audience. Ideas, especially good ones, need time to ferment, incubate and percolate. Don’t monetize everything. Privacy is priceless.
Rest, responsibility and reciprocity are essential. We’re all on the same planet ride. Read Robin Wall Kimmerer. Our brains cannot process this internet. They have not evolved for this amount of shallow stimulation. Nor were we meant to know the thoughts of thousands of strangers on everything, so remember to unplug, destress and heal. Turn off the Insta play videos on social media platforms, if you can. Limit screen time. Being chronically stressed and consuming the firehose of news-as-entertainment does not make one a Superior Man: It can, however, make a person more brittle, irritable, pedantic, selfish and self-righteous.
So, choose your battles. Go garden. Look up. Study the trees and skies. Play a team sport. Form a bad band. Even the Earth needs rest. God rested on the Sabbath, I've heard. Be deliberate with your limited time here. Remember that a lot can happen in a year.
Esther Kim is a writer from New York living in Taiwan. She is working on her first book.
English (United States) ·