Sliding into your DMs for another year of climate action and chill like
You up?
I said, this is really awkward.
I told everyone I was going to learn how to be well and detach my value from capitalism. And stuff. But all I’ve done is fucked around making coffees and going on walks.
I didn’t even start that book on degrowth. I didn’t try yoga once. What am I going to say when I go back to work? What am I supposed to say?
My friend said, I can’t believe you even turned time off into something to succeed or fail at.
I took two months off work at the end of 2022 because I was burnt out. So were a lot of you. After years of forest fires, heating crises, ‘urgent’ emails that start with it’s now or never and a planet relentessly heating up no matter how many newsletters I wrote, I was left cold.
After months of blocking out my calendar for work-life ‘balance’ and sharing self-care posts on Instagram and switching off my phone before I go to bed and other bullshit stop-gap measures that we’re told us will make us well, I was more unwell than I had ever been. We are more unwell than we have ever been.
So I took a break. What else can you do?
I had so much free time. It was weird. I am a conspicuous consumer of leisure now. I did all the fun things. I went to see my favourite band live and I read a book in a day and I spent too much money on bad mulled wine at the Christmas market. I scrolled through memes and rewatched Vikings and I got a tattoo and I went to London and spent a hell of a lot on coffee and-
And two months in, I was still anxious.
Anxious that I was wasting all this time, anxious that I was coasting along on a bubble of wilful ignorance that my privilege can afford me, anxious that I could not even take time off the ‘right’ way.
Most of all, anxious because when I stepped away from work and deadlines, I was faced with - well, the rest of the world.
You can’t smell smoke when you’re underwater. You can’t think about the rest of the world when you’re stuck in a bubble of climate terror and The Hustle.
When I was working all the time, I forgot my friends’ birthdays. I didn’t care if someone didn’t like my favourite show. I didn’t get excited about a new album release. I didn’t get angry about reckless cyclists or overthink awkward conversations.
Who has the time to care about these things when Pakistan is drowning and the rainforest emits more carbon than it absorbs?
Crises and activism can become a comfort zone, an anaesthetic to everyday heartaches. Eco-anxiety is a false friend putting everything ‘in perspective’ until you are on an island, separated from The Rest of The World.
I took leave and it was like coming up for air and realising that I have emerged in a foreign sea.
(Check out my tattoo tho)
When I was working, I lived life on one note. There was one beat in my head and it was the drumbeat of the planet is on fire, nothing else matters.
Slowing down, that one note turned into multiple notes, which turned into a cacophony of sound. Now I was tired sometimes. But I was also feeling guilty about missing birthdays, and getting angry and happy and bored, Christ I was so bored. And anxious. Not eco-anxious. Just your regular everyday anxieties. Apparently I still had those after all.
Seems that mattering is a thing of degrees. More than 1.5 of them. Significance is cultivated. If nothing really matters because the world is on fire, then everything can matter if we make it so.
Making the small things matter again is not just a richer and fuller way to live, it is necessary. When I make time to talk about nothing with my friends, I don’t need More Stuff for that dopamine hit. When I share resources with my neighbours, the deathgrip of Western individualism is loosened.
When I decide to care whether my bed is made and my plants are watered and take time to get disappointed and to daydream, life slows down to my rhythm.
I’m learning to fall back in love with the world again - the small parts of it, the transient and dismissable things - and it feels a bit like dying. Intentionally letting go of the detachment that comes with working on Lofty Global Issues, is a choice to become emotionally invested in things that are happening now and things that will happen in 2030 and 2050.
That’s kind of intense.
I don’t know what comes next. Obviously. For me, for the planet, for anything. I don’t know if we will limit heating to 2 degrees. I don’t know if we will succeed at adapting to the unadaptable. I don’t know if we will do the impossible - but these days, the impossible has a habit of happening quite often.
Thing is, I don’t really know very much about anything. Neither do you.
The world we were promised was a fiction that didn’t feature pandemics and oceans on fire.
The world we were told we lived in was also one that wouldn’t and couldn’t change. It was one where we can’t unseat governments and rich white men will always inherit power and activism is something radical.
We don’t live in that world. We never have lived there.
And after two months on leave, I (still) have no idea how to do this. The whole anti-capitalist wellness thing, I mean. The ‘being a legit adult who has her shit together as if there isn’t a war in Europe and my shirt wasn’t likely made by an underpaid woman in horrible working conditions’ thing, I mean.
I am still not satisfied. Restlessness plagues me. You know what I mean - or you wouldn’t be reading newsletters like mine.
Our capitalist economy and unequal and undemocratic political system depends on our dissatisfaction and exploitation. But we don’t need to live like that. We never did. And maybe - if we keep changing what we can change - the next generations will never have to.
I am still learning how to grow without funds and how to get rich without money. I have not found myself - don’t even know what that means - but I have found some other pretty cool stuff instead.
I have found that when I talk to my neighbours, seeds are planted. And that when I read my friend’s books, I am discovering other, better ways of living. And when I fix my mother’s coat, I am fixing far more than that.
And most of all: that all the things we were told we are lacking and need to buy - happiness, connection, time - are already here, in abundance.
***
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What’s Going On?
25 things that went right in the world in 2022.
Related: Why does it feel like everything is getting better and worse all at once?7 reasons to be cheerful about the Amazon in 2023 - and 3 reasons not to be.
Useful: How exactly we can restore the Amazon, according to scientists.Renewables set to overtake coal by 2025, according to International Energy Agency
Useful: This is how we could reduce fossil fuels to net zero by 2050.5 ways the climate crisis made life more expensive in 2022.
Related: Climate action could save an estimated 43 trillion dollars.Fossil giant BP still spending more on fossil fuels than renewables this year.
Related: Casual reminder that BP has been paying to spread climate denial for decades.Everything you need to know about climate tipping points.
Related: How do we limit heating to 2 degrees?
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Hi Cass, glad you are back. First of all, no one has anything figured out either. Second, I heard a podcast and thought of you and your texts. This one especially is quite on the same topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/01tQLJl1f8lTCXE8Tbb6cu?si=vk951kORQQaZO93vgL0ldQ
"And after two months on leave, I (still) have no idea how to do this. The whole anti-capitalist wellness thing, I mean. The ‘being a legit adult who has her shit together as if there isn’t a war in Europe and my shirt wasn’t likely made by an underpaid woman in horrible working conditions’ thing, I mean." Never related more. Amazing article.