Scenic Route, Social Change and Mental Health Conversations for Perfectionists
Forget the fast lane! The Scenic Route is where perfectionists slow down, get better, and create real change.
We explore:
- Mental health wisdom (minus toxic positivity)
- Social change (that starts from within)
- System critiques (with actionable solutions)
- Inner wisdom (over external validation)
- Mindfulness for minimalists (no crystals required)
Join Jennifer Walter, sociologist (MASoc UCC) and recovering perfectionist, for weekly conversations that blend critical thinking with oh-so-much compassion.
Whether you're questioning everything or trying to find peace amongst the chaos, you'll find space here for your inner voice, mindset, mental health, and collective change — you're in the right place. We make space for both personal healing and collective change — with a side of potty humour.
New episodes drop every Tuesday.
The longest way round is the shortest way home – and that's exactly why we're taking the Scenic Route.
Ready to walk the scenic route?
The view here is *chef's kiss.*
Scenic Route, Social Change and Mental Health Conversations for Perfectionists
Political Burnout is Real: How to Change the World Without Breaking Yourself
Feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world? You're not alone, and more importantly – it's not your fault. In this episode, we're diving into the hidden forces behind your political exhaustion and uncovering practical strategies to stay engaged without burning out.
What you'll discover:
- The shocking truth about information overload (hint: it's actually by design)
- Why your brain's "overwhelm" is a perfectly normal response to abnormal circumstances
- Political economist Naomi Klein's groundbreaking research on the strategic use of chaos
- Three actionable strategies to protect your mental health while staying engaged
- The revolutionary power of setting boundaries in the age of endless news cycles
Featured insights:
- The science behind cognitive overload and democratic participation
- How modern media dynamics affect our ability to process information
- Practical tips for building sustainable activism
- Why self-care isn't selfish – it's revolutionary
Your Action Steps:
- The Power of Two
- Building Your Information Squad
- The 48-Hour Rule
Remember: Your rest is resistance. Your boundaries are brave. And your choice to stay grounded and connected – that's the foundation of any meaningful change.
New episodes drop every Tuesday.
See you on the Scenic Route.
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READY FOR YOUR SCENIC ROUTE?
Visit jenniferwalter.me — your cozy corner of the internet where recovering perfectionists come to breathe, dream, and embrace a softer way of living – while creating real change in their communities.
Keep the conversation going:
DAILY DOSE OF CHILL
Tap into your inner wisdom and let it guide you.
Need a gentle nudge in the right direction? The Scenic Route Affirmation Card Deck Deck is your online permission slip to trust your inner compass. Grab yours and let's see what wisdom awaits you today:
👉 Pull Your Daily Affirmation Card
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Hey, beautiful humans, welcome to the scenic route, where we tackle life's chaos with a side of potty humor and zero bullshit. I'm your host, jen, and today we're going where it hurts again and we're just looking at how the world keeps on getting feeling more bunkers day by day and how our brains are just kind of like out of function and what we can do about it and why this is all really really important. So let's dive in. There's a different way to think about mental health, and it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home, and that's exactly why we're taking the scenic route. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Route podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms and rebel with many causes Together. We're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're treating perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together.
Jennifer Walter:You know that feeling when you open your phone in the morning and immediately want to like close it again, although you know you should. When you open your phone in the morning and immediately want to like, close it again, although you know you should not look at your phone the first minutes while wake after waking up blah, blah, blah, right. But hey, when your group chat is blowing up with five different crisis and you don't dare to go on social media and it just feels all very much overwhelming. And this doesn't have anything to do with bad luck or poor time and time management or you being like a special soft snowflake, right. It's really crucial to know that this feeling of overwhelm, it isn't a bug in the system, it's a feature. Right.
Jennifer Walter:The chaos flooding your feed isn't random at all, but it's part of a documented pattern that political economists and media scholars have been tracking for years, and this is also why Naomi Klein's research just hits different. She noticed something that's going on that's going to change how you see every crisis that comes across your street. So, like she, she's a. She's a canadian political economist and known for her shock doctrine theory that eliminates um, a powerful pattern in modern governance right, the strategic use of multiple rapid fire policy changes and executive actions to overwhelm public discourse and democratic processes. So, when dozens of major policy shifts are implemented simultaneously or in a really short period of time, even the most engaged citizens and institutions struggle to analyze and respond effectively. So the shock doctrine isn't about chaotic governance, it's about using chaos as a tool to deliberately create even more chaos. So each wave of changes serves kind of like as a smokescreen for the next and the next and the next, creating a perpetual state of cognitive overload.
Jennifer Walter:Klein's research shows how the strategy operates on three different levels. First, like there's a psychological component, our brains have limited capacity for processing complex information. When we're hit with multiple significant changes at once, we tend to experience like a sort of cognitive paralysis. It's not a lack of empathy or that we stop caring. Like our minds just really literally cannot process everything at once all the time with the depth that is required or needed. Second, there is an institutional breakdown. Democratic systems are designed for deliberate, thoughtful consideration of changes. Systems are designed for deliberate, thoughtful consideration of changes. Legislative bodies, courts, media outlets, civil societies, organizations all need time to analyze, debate and respond to major policy shifts. When they flooded with multiple simultaneously changes, these institutional safeguards start to buckle. And here it's where it gets even more interesting and scary too right.
Jennifer Walter:The third level is about power dynamics. The shock doctrine exploits what Klein calls the crisis opportunity. During periods of uphill whether those are natural disasters, like we saw with Katrina in the US, economic crashes or political turmoil, as we're seeing right now, in the first days of the Trump presidency radical changes can be pushed through with minimal resistance. Why? Because, while the public is still reeling from the initial shock, those in power are already executing well-prepared plans. Right. When traditional checks and balances are overwhelmed, when media coverage is all over their place, when public attention is fractured across multiple crises and multiple interests, while being deeply divided anyway, that's when the most consequential changes often slip through.
Jennifer Walter:The shock isn't about creating confusion. It's about exploiting that confusion to reshape society in ways that might face fierce resistance under normal circumstances. So think about it. Right. When you're processing one major change, your brain's like I got this babe. But when 20 different massive changes hit you at once, I mean your mental CPU crashes. There's no other way. That's exactly the point. It's like when your toddler creates chaos in one room so they can go and sneak cookies from the kitchen cupboard. Right? Except we're talking policies that affect millions of lives and not like delicious cookies, although we should also talk about cookies. But, like Klein, spotted this pattern everywhere she, from political upheels to economic crisis, the playbook always the same create enough chaos that people can't process what's really going down. And the scariest part, she showed it works. It's the playbook. It works Because while we're all trying to figure out what just happened with issue A, that we already have issue B, truth said, are sliding through the back door Smokescreen again, again. So this is also where it gets really interesting, back in the 60s.
Jennifer Walter:I'm going to hit you now with another sociological uh theory bit, because we need to notice this is the backbone of also media studies. Um, renowned media theorist theorist, marshall McLuhan, predicted our current social media nightmare with very unsettling accuracy. He said one of his hypotheses and theories were when humans face information overload, we don't rise to the occasion, we shut down, right. And even if we think to how it goes back to like our mental cpu shutting down right, I mean when I grab my phone in the morning and I check and I have like three global crisis, I have I don't know three domestic emergencies and my I don't know my mom sending me weird shit I don't want to see. Then I have some friend who has something going on in their life and then, I don't know, maybe my astrology app tells me it's Mercury retrograde or whatever. My brain is like no, what, no, what, no fucking way, and I even didn't even have my first coffee. And this like nope is what Lomite-Lewin calls the numbness effect. When everything screams for attention, we end up hearing nothing at all. So we really need to be like okay, but how do we get on from this?
Jennifer Walter:There's one more bit that's important, and that's agenda setting theory. It helps us really to understand how media shapes, not just what we think, but how we think about it. Traditionally, the media's ability to focus public attention has been a cornerstone of democratic discourse. When journalists collectively shine a spotlight on an issue, it tends to rise to the top of public consciousness and often leads to policy action. But here is where it, kind of like, gets muddy and messy. In our current landscape, when multiple major policies in crisis compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse and it's not like, as the public wouldn't be fragmented enough already, as is, the traditional agenda-setting function of media, starts to break down. Instead of focused spotlight, we get kind of like you know, like this very awful disco strobe light effect, flashing from one crisis to another and your brain is completely going nuts and there's never enough light to illuminate a single issue, and the implications are significant.
Jennifer Walter:There's a depth problem, once and foremost. Right, when newsrooms are forced to cover dozens of major stories, they default to service-level coverage, right? I mean, if I have a gazillion tasks on my to-do list, I tend to do the bare minimum, and that usually I don't know. That works on some days when you do a corporate job, right. But when you're talking complex policies that deserve deep analysis and they just get reduced to headlines and soundbites, we have a problem. When that's supposed to be the backbone of political discourse, the what, the policy change itself gets covered, but the crucial how and why they often get lost.
Jennifer Walter:We see also the emergence of what scholars call competing crisis narratives. When everything's present, is urgent, the public loses the ability to distinguish between levels of importance. A diplomatic crisis gets the same weight as a celebrity scandal, which gets the same attention as a major climate climate policy shift. Does that also do with our fucked up like celebrity culture? But that's we're gonna, that's another, that's another episode. But and the most see what this does to democratic oversight is fun, is really scary.
Jennifer Walter:Traditional watchdog journalism also requires time and resources to investigate, verify and explain complex issues, and if they don't have the time, they need more resources, they need more heads to do this. But real investigative journalism is expensive, right, and newsrooms have been reduced, staff has been laid off. It's always cost, cost, cost, um. Most biggest newsletters already in the hands of billionaires anyway. That's, that's another layer of fucked up. But there are not. Also, they're not making available enough resources, monetary or non-monetary, to work like to sort of soften, to just soften all of this and kind of like fall back on and be like you know, okay, there's a lot, yeah. So this is where the whole power dynamic also really gets especially dark right. As traditional media outlets struggle financially, there are these millionaire buyouts of major news organizations. So when the watchdogs are owned by the very powers they're supposed to be watching, how fierce can their bite be? So all of this is kind of like the perfect storm, right. So all of this is kind of like the perfect storm, right, where concentrated wealth shapes our information landscape, while an overwhelming news cycle makes it harder to follow the money and power.
Jennifer Walter:It's not just about being overwhelmed by information. It's about who benefits from that overwhelm. It's always who benefits from what's going on, and the end result A kind of democratic paralysis by information overload. Like I don't know. If it would be a computer software, democraticx would not be executing. The public sphere becomes so saturated with competitive narratives and crises that meaningful civic engagement becomes just so increasingly difficult. And this isn't just about being overwhelmed, it's about systematic weakening of our ability to engage and inform. The magic democratic discourse. It's a playbook. It has been proven time and time again. So I don't want to give you any kind of mental cpu overload, right. So we're keeping it simple. There are some, I don't know. I don't want to say good news, but there are things we can do to sort of combat this on a personal level, right, because we first need to take care of ourselves on a personal level and then we can spread it out.
Jennifer Walter:Strategy one the power of two. I really do recommend pick one or two issues that you personally care deeply about, just to let the rest go, stay in your lane. For me personally, that's feminine, like intersectional, feminist issues, like access to women's health care, including abortions, um, this is the whole kind of like class discourse, um, and like anything that has to do with capitalism, critique, which basically is everything. But like, those are, those are my two. And like do I not care about the climate? I very much do, but this is not something where I, where I have the greatest passion for right I was the times I was marching on the street were for feminist issues, like Women's Day, and not for Fridays for Future, and that's okay. Right, pick two, pick the two you're most passionate about, because that's where you will have the most stamina, because this is not a race, this is a marathon.
Jennifer Walter:And strategy two could be like build, build your squad. This could be finding five, a group of friends that all follow the same, the same issue, who care deeply about the same issue. Maybe like start like a book club for saving democracy, um, and like do talk about things that you've seen, or share things you've seen related to your core issue in a chat. Um, this could also mean really find the scholars or journalists that cover your topic of interest and you know they cover it well and use what they aggregate from all the vast resources, um, and like help and to help you kind of like figuring things out. And I think that strategy. Three is the most crucial of all.
Jennifer Walter:It's kind of like the 48 hour rule all it's kind of like the 48 hour rule, I'd say unless something is literally on fire, wait two days before reacting to breaking news. The most urgent news is hardly ever as urgent, and this is, of course, something that works. If you're not a journalist yourself, then it might not be. But again, if we're always reacting immediately to what's going on, you will never, you will have a hard time leaving that cycle of reacting to things. So I think it's time again for um bell hooks truth that illuminated powerfully that if the world is designed to exhaust and fragment us, caring for our mental well-being isn't just self-preservation, it's a radical political act.
Jennifer Walter:Hooks taught us that love, including self-love and community care, are our most powerful tools of resistance. So I think she said, when we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. So taking care of your mental peace isn't selfish, it's revolutionary. And to rest, rest is resistance, right when systems of power, once you're scared, exhausted and disconnected from your own truth, choosing focus and rest becomes really an act of rebellion. And we need space, our minds need space to process and see what our truth is. So your rest is resistance. Your boundaries are brave and your choice to stay grounded and connected to yourself and to your community. That's the foundation of any meaningful change.
Jennifer Walter:So, if this episode hit home, have a look at my treehouse. There are other resources out there to support you. Like, come online on social media or on the podcast notes, drop your comments, let me know how to sit with you, tag me, email me. I'm always happy to hear from you. And um, hey, yeah, until next week. New episode will be out next tuesday. And yeah, remember this is we need our stamina. This is a marathon and the road might be bumpy on the scenic route, but the views are worth it. So see you again on the scenic route. And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the Cine Group Podcast.
Jennifer Walter:Thank you for spending time with us, curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode. Visit us at cinegrouppodcastcom for everything you need. And if you're ready to embrace your scenic route, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my Cine Group Affirmation Card Deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner voice and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your Scenic Route Affirmation today and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the Scenic Route is not just about the destination, but the experiences, learnings and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here and I look forward to seeing you on the scenic route again.
