#climate dread

Hi Anon,

I am so sorry that you are feeling this way and that it took me some time to get to your ask—you and your fears are always welcome here. You have been on my mind since I got this ask as I’ve been thinking about the best way to answer it.

It is deeply unfair that you are already feeling this burden so acutely as a teenager. Please know that you are not alone—there are so many extremely smart, dedicated, and talented people working to make sure that people like you have a future to look forward to. You are inheriting a legacy of generations of older humans who have fought and continue to fight to protect our planet and mitigate climate change. We are in a better situation now than we would have been without their actions and the number of people who care deeply about this issue gets bigger every day.

If you are regularly having panic attacks or anxiety that feels beyond your control, please seek support from friends, family, or a mental health professional—or find a trusted friend or family member to help you access mental health resources if needed. We all need extra support sometimes (myself included!)—mental health professionals can help you build strategies and access resources to keep yourself regulated when you run into major anxiety triggers.

It is completely reasonable to have concerns about what the future will hold—but you absolutely still have a future and the chance to live a meaningful and fulfilling life even in the midst of this crisis. We will face new and different obstacles from past generations, but there is still ample opportunity to mitigate the scope of this crisis, to adapt our communities to weather the challenges of climate change, and to leverage this necessary change to build a better world.

On this journey there will continue to be times when there is bad news and setbacks and difficult change—and this means that cultivating resilience and coping strategies is an important part of building your own adaptability and preventing a constant drain on your mental health.

This includes 1) Building an arsenal of healthy coping strategies and mental health resources that work for you (climate anxiety can be treated with many of the same strategies as other types of anxiety). 2) Avoiding messages of despair and seeking out sources of hope and energy. Surround yourself with people and media that feed your hope, join communities working to make things better, focus on the piece of the puzzle you can help with and don’t dwell on bad news that you can’t do anything about. Anxiety isn’t activism. 3) Even when you get really good at the previous step, there are still times when the world throws setbacks and despair in your face and you have to grit your teeth and choose hope anyway. This is the hard one and it takes time and practice—but this is how you get through those rough patches when there is a slew of bad news and all seems to be for nothing.

On days when the world doesn’t offer hope, hope is a gift you give to yourself. It is the only way we have kept fighting this far and it is the only way we will succeed in the end. Go looking for something to be hopeful about, and if you cannot find it, make it yourself.

Imagining a future for yourself--a future with hope and meaning--is a big part of this.

I’ve linked a few other posts that I hope will help you here: (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X) (X)

I hope that this helps you. I wish I had an easy trick to tell you to switch off the anxiety. I wish that I could give you a hug through the internet and tell you that you aren’t alone and we are going to be ok. Please, please take care of yourself <3

and then everything turned out fine-ish? like obviously they destroyed a ton of countries and everything in their cold war but they did not blow up the world. not a single atomic bomb was detonated in a war action after hiroshima and nagasaki as far as i know. i might be wrong but as far as i can tell the whole thing just kinda petered out with the soviet union failing?

i don't think they knew that it would turn out fine. they probably thought the world might end suddenly, any day.

i think that my generation and the impending climate doom aren't that different. we also know about this approaching world-ending catastrophe, and that it's the idiots up there who are doing bullshit and dooming us all. we don't have any reason to believe it'll all turn out okay.

I enjoyed this conversation, both in terms of its perspective on the internal drive to achieve more faster (that it pays to focus on experiencing great things instead of crossing a maximum number of items from the to-do list) as well as its perspective on climate dread and generally feeling like you're standing on the precipice of a catastrophe.

IPCC's #ClimateReport 2021 via @ipcc_ch @zentouro #climatechange #climatecrisis #climateaction

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released their latest assessment report on the physical science basis of climate change. “If the last few reports are any indication, we’re hopefully going to see a groundswell of climate action.” Continue reading

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