: Caring too much about the world as an OCD symptom
I heard a podcast a while ago (probably years ago tbh) about a dad who got obsessed with global warming and conscripted his whole family into being climate activists. This meant giving up a bunch of vacations (air travel) and weekends to attend climate rallies and hours-long “coaching” sessions where he helped his daughter perfect her stump speech so she could rouse the crowd.
The podcast framed this as a moral dilemma: On the one hand, if you really believe that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of humanity, then weekends and public-speaking lessons are small sacrificies to make—that’s what the dad argued. On the other, the decision to become a full-time activist for any cause isn’t one you can reasonably make on someone else’s behalf; it’s one thing to convey to your kids your passion for climate activism, and another to force them into joining in.
My impression was that if the father’s actions began with a kernel of good intentions, he spun out of control because he suffers from moral perfectionism, aka “scrupulosity,” a common OCD trait. He fixated on climate change as the nexus of all his problems, and determined that any other difficulty could be justified if it meant progress against that goal. This sounds tyrannical, but if you squint, you can see how it’s a self-soothing behavior: it excuses Dad from having to weight competing objectives; he can just proceed according to a simple algorithm: is it good or bad for the environment? Beyond political hardliners, you also see scrupulosity in highly religious types, as well as a subset of people in highly morally charged careers like medicine and teaching.
One of the core dynamics of OCD, in my experience, is the tension between control and powerlessness: The world is a dangerous place, so I must exert maximal control over the corner I inhabit, or else anything bad that happens to me is somehow my fault. Scrupulosity.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with people who are, in their words, “Actually doing weirdly OK despite the state of the world.” They are still employed, they just got pregnant, they took a well-deserved vacation. And unfortunately, the happiness associated with these facts is eating them alive. They experience massive guilt about the rays of sunshine in their life, when the awful news about war and gas prices is such a short series of taps away.
I say “they,” but I am in this point a little. I found a way to spend some time in Europe, eat a bunch of good food, read books, write my journal. I’m holding steady despite everything. I want to celebrate that, but deep down I feel it’s not the right moment.