Before taking this course, and increasingly since, I have tried to view the world through the lens that the systems we create are a constant coping mechanism to deal with human mortality.
Whilst engaging with the podcast this week I became enthralled with the relationship between death and the ego. The accumulation of ‘death anxiety’ into one’s own greed and prosperity and how this affects the planet – could this lead to the downfall of our civilisation?
However, I have also been playing with the thought that rather than this being an inescapable death cycle, maybe our civilisation itself, as a construct, can die and move into a post-industrialisation era without mass global collapse. Arguably we are at breaking point, meaning that now is the time to move from one era of human innovation into another that centres around planetary protection or we will fall into the death cycle and drive ourselves into complete extinction.
Moreover, engaging in Thursday’s reading materials lead me to reflect on my own relationship with climate change, specifically in relation to my own relationship with death. I remember at around fourteen I developed quite a cynical attitude towards climate change, basically ‘we’re all going to die and there is nothing you or I can do about it’. However, my switch from nihilistic pessimism fuelled by teenage angst to climate positivism or at least the ‘we should at least try to do something’ attitude was also accompanied by a mass cultural shift. It was that of the Fridays for Future movement that saw a whole generational shift – an uprising of youth, and an increase in ‘climate anxiety’ as well as education. The movement, although influential, did not span to the lengths it could have, but it may have created an incandescent generation, one which can launch society into a new era of human revolution and away from the ever-looming death cycle.
Image credits: Talia Pettitt, Nov 2021
Teenage angst to revolutionary spirit (a playlist):
Attached is a playlist I made to encapsulate the feeling of teenage angst turned to the revolutionary spirit that drove that Fridays for Future movement and should continue to provoke all people to take a stand and push our civilisation into a new sphere of human living that puts planetary survival first. Music change often accompanies large cultural shifts in our society and therefore should be a highlight of any political movement – art and protest go hand-in-hand.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ErqHTS6y1h68owiTI3Hfq?si=6b81b0fd7cf544db
References:
Photo credits, Talia Pettitt, taken at COP26 in Glasgow, November 2021
Jacopa Simonetta, 2016, “The other side of the global crisis: entropy and the collapse of civilizations”
Tosin Thompson, 2021, “Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey”
Shakar Vedantam et al., 2019, We’re All Gonna Die! How Fear Of Death Drives Our Behavior
I had a similar path of thinking when considering how climate change affects my thoughts of attempting to save the environment. I think especially even in the first few days of this class and in the past few years as I have gotten older, I have shifted my thinking towards a more positive mindset. The way I think of it is that if I see no point in doing something because we are all going to die anyway and our lives are such a small insignificant point in time in the life of the earth, it begs the question; what is there to live for then? Our mortality should not be the thing that drives us to accept our fate because our lives will end regardless, it should be the thing that motivates us to change the fate we think we see coming.