Author Archives: dafenir

A Final Goodbye

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Taking this class was honestly surreal. At no point in my academic life have I ever engaged in death in such a rich and generative way. Through our discussions and the weekly readings as well as our action project, I’ve began to find the answers to the multitude of questions that kept arising:

Why do I feel this helplessness/lack of control in the face of global catastrophe and death?

What is my true relationship to the earth and the earth’s system, and how am I impacting it?

The Overwhelming Feeling of Helplessness –Image credit: https://i0.wp.com/lakesidelink.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/bigstock-Stressed-Man-Sitting-On-Floor-289059874.jpg?fit=838%2C1024&ssl=1

I was able to understand that the topics that we discussed such as climate change and death as multi-dimensional: the issues permeate into social, political, and economic issues as well. Some examples includes death anxiety and political polarization, climate justice and environmental racism, disillusionment in our political institutions, and even contextualizing ourselves in the grand cosmic scheme of things.

Working through the action project allowed me to process these issues in a very productive way. Our group was tasked with design five social media posts to promote the campaign’s platform Working with WashPIRG: Save the Orcas was both an enlightening and insightful experience. Since this type of work was something I’ve never really done, it was great to learn what works and what doesn’t. The entire StO campaign was just getting started, and while that may explain some of the disorganization that my group experienced, it was nevertheless a point of frustration. Furthermore, I felt that the project that we were given to do wasn’t “enough.” I guess I didn’t really know what I expected, but given the topics that we discussed, I began to feel a sort of obligation to make real change during the class. I questioned all of my own choices and how I could not only change myself but my environment. Although the social media campaign did achieve the goal of promoting StO’s platforms and disseminating information, I felt like it didn’t do enough. Perhaps I envisioned this action project as my own immortality project, and doing what we did felt somewhat “incomplete,” which in a way felt like I wasn’t able to cement my legacy. Nevertheless, I felt that I was able to navigate some of the important themes that we had discussed all quarter in the action project.

Protesters at a Global Climate Strike protest –Image Credit: 2019 Getty Images

Contemplation and Learning a New Way to Learn

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I’ve come to realize these past several months that I don’t really understand what internalization is–I’ve always thought of it as a means of assimilating our realities into our being, but I had never understood what that process looks like until this class. Contemplation and our contemplative practices have given me merely a glimpse into how this process can be. Learning for me has always been a surface level of information absorption in which I would take in information and memorized via rote practicing until I had “understood” it. However, I never bothered to figure out the “why” or “how” something was the way it was. Through contemplation, I was able to engage with the material on a deeper level, mobilizing my emotions and even my physical body to also learn.

One of the most impactful contemplative practices that we had done was one in which Karen walked us through taking different perspectives:

  1. One that believes that the world is progressively getting worse, and that our future is bleak–a sort of pessimistic worldview.
  2. One that believes that the world is great and is healing–a more optimistic outlook.
  3. Finally, one that is indifferent to the world, and takes everything as it is–acceptance.

In each of these practices, it was notably hard to focus as these perspectives are particularly disparate. Each one was accompanied with its own set of emotions and physical reactions. When we were instructed to take on the first perspective, I had felt a lot more tense than before, and my mind started to become inundated with worrisome thoughts. In contrast, the second perspective galvanized me, and made me feel a rush of gratitude and a desire to feel active.

Images

I began to apply this thinking to Active Hope and I found that the disagreements that I had with the seemingly pointless steps to achieve progress had converted to curiosity through these practices. Our discussions have become less abstract for me, and contemplation has allowed me to feel what people were saying and what I was seeing on a very deep, personal level.

While these practices have been insightful, I do have my reservations about them. For a good amount of them, I found myself lost in my own mind and unable to really grapple with what Karen was saying. Nevertheless, these practices have been enriching, and I hope to continue exploring these practices.

 

Meaning, Purpose, and Understanding the End

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Engaging with Worm at the Core this past week has been insightful and sobering, yet surprisingly fascinating. The book’s main thesis about how our uniquely human fear of death acts as the primary force that drives human activity wouldn’t seem to make sense at first, but Worm at the Core nevertheless makes a compelling argument about our relationship with death as well as implications for many of our current institutions. In particular, the book argues that our cultures and institutions exist to subvert mortality and to give ourselves a bigger purpose to ease our anxiety about death.

Table of Harvard Youth Poll Responses.

Worm at the Core postulates that people strive to be a part of an enduring culture, as it ties us with the past as well as the future. This allows to achieve a sort of “symbolic immortality” as people would persist for as long as the culture does. For me, achieving symbolic immortality can be fulfilling to us as it gives us a greater purpose. Contributing and being a part of something that has been there long before me and long after me is so powerful. Conversely, this may suggest that cultural breakdown or transitions in states of the world may leave people feeling purposeless and immensely anxious. In the context of the Anthropocene and our current issues, I suspect that this cultural erosion is happening rapidly.

A relatively recent Harvard study revealed that 51% of young Americans (age 18-29) reported feeling down, depressed, and even hopeless, and 28% reported having suicidal or self-harming thoughts. With political polarization increasing in the US, the ongoing climate change crisis, the pandemic, and other social issues in the foreground of our minds, many political, cultural, and economic institutions are being scrutinized as well as revolutionized. This continuous, sustained existential dread we are facing has in part, in my view, been driven by this cultural/institutional erosion. We can no longer hide behind the guise of what has worked or existed, and we must face reality–something that may make us feel purposeless or a perhaps even a sense of indifference. We may believe that because Anthropocene processes may mean that nothing as we know will exist, life itself is meaningless. However, I think that if we were to reorient our paradigms to contemplate this drastic cultural change, we can effectively manage our anxieties and create a better, more meaningful future for ourselves.

Opening My Eyes to Insanity

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This past week has been quite eye-opening as much as it was sobering. I thought I knew what kind of class I would be taking when I saw its title, but this past week continued to show me with how much I don’t know, as well as how incomplete many of my previous mental frameworks are. One of the more exciting prospects though is that I can be challenged to think within an interdisciplinary lens which can bring about new conclusions that couldn’t happen otherwise. My background is in economics, and while it is excellent in describing the mechanics of a lot of social phenomena, it is very sterile and devoid of the emotions and the grit that’s necessary to truly understand many of the greatest social issues of our time–including climate change.

Richard Heinberg’s discussion around energy most aptly sums up my current feelings. He discusses the limits of power in a given system, and particularly for humans. It has the inexorable truth that we as a species have reached a limit to our strive for power, and now we are experiencing diminishing returns and over-consumption. This may ultimately culminate in what Heinberg describes as an involuntary power limit in which the cessation of power may be death, collapse, and possibly extinction.

Climate Anxiety Survey Results from Nature.

When I read the word “extinction,” I get frustrated that I can’t possibly fathom such a prospect. After all, how can I conceptualize non-existence? This frustration ultimately turns into anxiety and I get stuck. According to a recent Nature study, many of my contemporaries testify that climate change has made them feel sad, anxious, and even powerless. I’ve always understood that environmental threats have been looming over our existence, but I never realized how insane it all is.

However, I’ve slowly been learning the importance of resilience, or how Heinberg describes it as “the capacity of a system to encounter disruption and still maintain its basic structure and functions.” Applying this to my own life has been very helpful in managing my anxieties about our current crisis as well as giving me a tool to understand how we can adapt our current systems for if (and most likely when) a societal collapse occurs. Innovation and restructuring broken systems will be paramount to building our new foundation that will be more suited for all life.

Citations:

Ahmad, Thair, et al. “Developing Economics.” Developing Economics, Developing Economics, 19 Sept. 2022, developingeconomics.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/economy-862×796-1.jpg.

“Climate Anxiety Survey Results from Nature.” Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8 

Heinberg, Richard. “The Big Picture.” Resilience, 9 Aug. 2021, www.resilience.org/stories/2018-12-17/the-big-picture/.

“Optimum Power: Sustaining Our Power Over Time.” Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, by Richard Heinberg, New Society Publishers, 2021, pp. 186–191.

Thompson, Tosin. “Climate Anxiety Survey Results from Nature.” Nature, Nature, 30 Sept. 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8.