Notes on Despair
Let's be honest—it's easy to feel despair when talking about climate change. But there is a way to move past it, and it's not positive climate stories.
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Despair (noun)
di-ˈsper
1: utter loss of hope
I’ve had people ask me before—mostly in my podcasting days—about my take on hope. In the context of the climate crisis, what gives me hope? What advice do I have for others seeking it?
It may not have been the answer some wanted to hear, but after a lot of personal reflection on the concept of “hope,” I told people I thought hope was overrated. I still believe this. Of course, I didn’t stop there. I explained that, to me, hope is not some abstract thing that can be attained or a certain attitude or belief you can cultivate if you just try hard enough. “Hope” is a verb.
A co-worker once (very kindly) gifted me a book called Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (I was, uh, really going through it at the time, and my co-worker apparently picked up on that.) In Factfulness, the authors—Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund—argue that in spite of its myriad problems, the world is just really not that bad and that things are, on balance, actually way better than they used to be. It came with glowing praise from Bill and Melinda Gates.
I’d heard many of the talking points Rosling employs in the book—a smaller percentage of people live in poverty now than ever before, infant mortality rates around the world are lower than ever, girls have more access to education in more places than ever, certain diseases that once plagued mankind have been eradicated, etc., etc.
I don’t dispute these statements. They are, as far as I can tell, true, and for that we should be thankful. But there is one little caveat undermining every one of them: climate change threatens to undo every bit of progress we’ve made in these areas in recent decades. If we don’t find a way to meaningfully mitigate climate change, we will regress significantly, and all that progress will be lost.
The point of me sharing this with you is not to scare or depress you but to make the point that if you want to find hope, making a full, honest assessment of the situation for what it is will not help you. I am sorry to say it, but things are incredibly bleak. You are not going to find many reasons to be hopeful by looking at the facts.
For all the recent, exciting strides in climate action compared to past decades squandered trying to ignore the problem, the world is still woefully behind on lowering emissions. Climate models consistently prove to be too conservative when confronted with reality, and there is reason to believe that global temperatures have already risen 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) above the pre-industrial average—the very disaster the Paris agreement sought to avert. Last November, the United Nations issued a warning that we are now on track to see warming of 2.5ºC (4.5ºF) to 2.9ºC (5.2ºF) by the end of this century lest we really get our act together.
It is not hyperbolic or alarmist to say that warming of 3ºC likely spells the end for human civilization on this planet, not to mention death and suffering on a truly massive, unimaginable scale. That warming will stay with us for a very long time—we’re talking time on a geologic scale, as in Homo sapiens may well go extinct before global temperatures return to pre-industrial levels.
These figures are not “apocalypse porn”—they represent some of the best intel we have on the severity of climate change right now. We need to be candid about just how dire the situation is, whether most people will believe it or not. People are, after all, predisposed to believe that calamities cannot befall them (normalcy bias).
By now you’re probably thinking that if this blog post was supposed to be cleverly subversive and leave you with a refreshed and nuanced perspective on what it means to have hope, you were sorely mistaken. Let me finish.
So trying to stick to the facts is not a good formula for cultivating hope. Oh shit—it turns out to do quite the opposite. Now you’re wallowing in despair. “Doomscrolling” is a colloquialism recently inducted to the popular lexicon in the age of social media and polycrisis, and I think it’s an apt term to describe this phase of psychologically processing the true state of affairs vis-à-vis climate change. It’s like passing a car crash on the highway—you can’t look away, but the more you look, the more disturbed you become. There’s a reason why the expression is “wallowing in misery.”
If you ever watched the 2021 Bo Burnham Netflix special Inside, you will have witnessed a grown man experiencing the doomscrolling phase firsthand on a global stage. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a musical comedy, and I highly recommend it. In one of the last songs, Burnham sings:
You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside
I loved Inside because it perfectly captures the complex and difficult feelings so many people had during the pandemic, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the summer of protests, and in the final days of the Trump presidency when it truly felt like the country was teetering on the edge of a cliff. It was a time of extreme disillusion for a lot of Americans—especially, I think, white Americans who were realizing for the first time what many other people had already known.
It was shocking and horrifying, and a lot of us really freaked out. I know I did, and I thought at the time that I already had a pretty good handle on how fucked the world is.
Once things finally settled down a little and society started adjusting to a new normal, many people came to resent others still seemingly stuck in the doomscrolling phase. The pejorative “doomer” quickly became part of internet slang, especially on Twitter, and was frequently lobbed at those who appeared to embrace nihilism after succumbing to despair—and understandably so! Nihilism doesn’t help anyone, and there is definitely a slippery slope between accepting how bad things are and becoming a nihilist.
But again, what does any of this have to do with hope? you might be wondering. Here I expect to arrive at the point I’ve spent 1,200 words trying to articulate, which is this:
If the incessant cycle of bad news and assholes like me on the internet proclaiming the collapse of civilization like a Westboro Baptist nut shouting dark forebodings from the Book of Revelation has got you down bad, it will not, dear reader, behoove you to seek solace in the facts™. And yet, confront them you must. But you must do so in such a way that you don’t let them overwhelm you. You mustn’t turn to nihilism. Rather, there is a third way that I recommend.
Keep your head down. Seriously, that’s it. Take it one day at a time. Stay informed enough to prepare as much as you reasonably can, but otherwise spend your time putting in the work. And what is the work, you ask? It’s probably not becoming the next Greta Thunberg or Jane Goodall, but if that is your destiny, far be it from me to stand in your way.
The work is:
- Creating a meaningful life
- Learning the names of birds and trees
- Being satisfied with enough
- Living within your means
- Going on walks without your phone
- Being kind to people and the earth
- Getting to know your neighbors, coworkers, the barista or bartender you interact with regularly on a surface level at your favorite place
- Buying less shit
- Practicing restraint
- Calling your brother/sister/mom/dad/grandma/aunt/whoever
- Showing up to organize at political gatherings when you can
- Doing something nice for someone else with no hidden agenda
- Giving gifts for no reason and without expecting something in return
- Making an effort to stay in touch with friends
- Creating art
- Noticing how you’re feeling, whether good or bad, and paying attention to how that feeling manifests in your body, staying with it
This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the point.
There’s a book I picked up in Vancouver, BC a few years ago called—wait for it—Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky. It’s a short little thing, small enough to fit in your back pocket, and not all of it is good. There was, however, one quote from Bringhurst’s contribution to it that stuck with me:
…We don’t have forever. Much more than half the time of life on earth is spent. Why make it any worse or briefer than it has to be? Let’s have more knowledge and less power. Let’s have more meaning and less control. Let’s have more truth, more birdsong, more reverential silence, and less jabber. You, your species, your entire evolutionary family, and your planet will die tomorrow. How do you want to spend today?
And that’s all.
Was this post worth writing? Was it all just mealymouthed bumper stickers from a would-be Great Value Ram Dass? Maybe so. But so far it’s worked for me, and it might work for you, too. If not, so what? Forget I said anything. But I think you should at least give it a try.