On How We Cope (Or Not) With An Overwhelming World

Caring about our future doesn’t have to be a full-time job of heartbreak

Caring about our future doesn’t have to be a full-time job of heartbreak (created by author)

My social media feed has become a scrolling obituary. That’s what it amounts to, basically. There’s this unshakable impression that we’ve crossed some invisible line. The ice caps are melting, authoritarians are winning, privacy is vanishing, robots are learning, infrastructure is failing — somehow everything’s deteriorating and my grocery bill keeps climbing higher. It’s the lamest dystopia imaginable, the kind where you are still paying your student loans in your mid-30s.

We had the chance to prevent runway carbon emissions, but instead, we were manipulated into addiction. Now we might be past several climate tipping points. The planet’s already cooking in heatwaves and megafloods, and the only people still optimistic are the ones selling carbon offsets. It really feels like we’re witnessing the sixth mass extinction, but instead of dinosaurs and asteroids, we have Copernicus alerts showing new temperature records.

It’s totally understandable that doomscrolling disaster would make us want to hide under weighted blankets and never come out. If the planet were dying for lack of climate anxiety tweets, I’d rally my most cynical writer friends and we’d save the world by dinnertime. But if…