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

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:

As an avid skier, I am often confronted with a dilemma; I can ride the chairlift as most do, or I can “earn my turns” as many in the community say, towing my gear and myself up the mountain as I hike. Just as how a roadside vista or your friend’s Instagram pictures pale in comparison to the views at the climax of your backpacking trip, the tiring muscles, the extra hours expended, and the other seemingly unnecessary challenges all serve to inflate the sense of satisfaction.

Source: Myself
A view which looked much better after a hike

Despite this, many thousands more will ride the chairlift or like a photo for every person who hikes up the hill or who took the photo. There exists a contradiction wherein people love overcoming adversity, but will simultaneously work to avoid facing adversity in the first place.

Translated to the life of a student, final exams or lengthy essays will often induce a sense of anxiety. While dropping a class is the only true way to circumnavigate this hardship, for many this option is not viable, meaning students find themselves turning to avoidance mechanisms, including procrastination or the skipping of class. Yet, just as my previous examples, walking out of an exam room knowing you have made it through another segment of your education or receiving a grade provides an amplified degree of accomplishment.

Having come to terms with some of my personal vices, I registered for this class knowing it would force me to overcome hurdles I have grown accustomed to turning away from. In choosing a discussion-based class such as this, I accepted that I have to venture beyond my psychological comfort zone which has seen me rely on my peers to speak up even when I have the answer. There will be no opportunity to push aside readings given the gravity of their role in our seminars and learning. Through this class, I have chosen to “earn my turns,” facing personal hardship in exchange for even greater intellectual satisfaction.

Only a few weeks into class, this duality of turning away from, and overcoming the uncomfortable has already manifested in our content through the work of Samuel Alexander who writes that world thought leaders will self-censor in favor of more palatable ideas. While he writes specifically in regards to the demise of societal structures, this precedent exists on a variety of scales, whether it be skiing, class or global catastrophe.

Sources:

Samuel Alexander’s This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire – and what lies beyond.

Last class, I started thinking about how present bias, especially in Westernized “wellness” movements, disrupts and discourages looking towards the future. I thought about how dominant narratives of “living in the moment” invisibilize the future. For example, when I worry about the future, I attempt to ground myself back in this moment, which is a practice that has been reified by guided meditation and therapy sessions. Thus, after years of subscribing to “living in the moment”, I’ve found it harder to look into the future and oftentimes discourage myself from doing so. 

Moreover, as my peer Ryan remarked, it can feel impossible to look towards the future when the present feels suffocating and ever changing. There’s an image I think about (to the right with image description below)that represents the magnitude of circumstances many find themselves thinking about in the present, let alone the future.

Art by Mushroomhead

For instance, when dealing with a global pandemic, food insecurity, housing/school payments, bodily autonomy, and mental health, it can seem impossible (for me, at least) to think about future-oriented issues. While “future-oriented” issues have an immense stake in the present (such as climate change), they seem less tangible and therefore, more likely to be relegated to the back of the mind while more “pressing” concerns take the frontal space in the brain.

Reference 1 in Survey regarding Youth and Climate Anxiety (Nature)

While I do think about climate change when provoked, my positionality and privilege have allowed me a large reprieve from constant climate anxiety, compounded with my inability to cope with my “present”. This is a privileged position, as those with different positionalities/experiences are forced into contemplation of the future by means of survival. As I move throughout this course, I hope to integrate more future-oriented thinking without diagnosing it as a “negative practice”. Additionally, I hope to challenge my traditional labels of “present” and “future” in order to engage in systems thinking and holistic consideration of the planet and the issues it is facing.

Image Descriptions and Citations Below:

[Image description of first image]: A blue-faced individual, wearing a white mask, in front of a dripping blue and green earth. Surrounding the earth is plastic waste represented by forks/food/containers and waste of resources represented by dripping tubes. 

[Image description of second image]: An image taken from Nature’s landmark survey of climate anxiety. At the top is a sliding bar measuring respondent’s climate anxiety from “extremely worried to not worried”. The statistics read, “extremely worried: 27%, very worried: 32%, moderately worried: 25%, a little worried: 11%, not worried: 5%”. Below the bar, is a phrase that reads “climate change makes me feel…” with a series of different emotions and represented percentage in bars. The varying emotions and related percentages read, “sad: 68%, afraid: 68%, anxious: 63%, angry: 58%, powerless: 57%, guilty: 51%, optimistic: 32%, indifferent: 30%”

Image Citations:

Depiction of Climate/Present Anxiety: Mushroomhead. (06/28/2021.). Climate and Other World Anxiety. https://www.psd.gov.sg/challenge/ideas/trends/eco-anxiety-the-psychological-impact-of-climate-change

Graph: Reference 1 (09/22/2021). Young people’s climate anxiety revealed in landmark survey. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8 

Source Citations:

Thompson, T. (2021, September 22). Young People’s Climate Anxiety revealed in landmark survey. Nature News. Retrieved October 10, 2022, from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8