I think a root cause for why I have been struggling so much with everything in life is that I am desperately fearful and unhappy, and I don’t know what to do about it. Our civilizational crisis makes me feel more anger, sadness, grief, and isolation than I know how to cope with. Since I don’t have a stable emotional platform, everything else feels precarious and I am constantly both anxious and self-rebuking for having ended up in this situation and not knowing what to do.
This sense of profound and inescapable crisis traces back at least to my time in government, when I realized that it is in no sense capable, or even directed toward, solving our actual problems. Our government works for the car companies and fossil fuel companies, and hardly thinks at all about the long-term future. Life since has felt like more rejection by dysfunctional systems. These emotions are intensely alienating, since people are naturally drawn to and want to please people who seem to have it all figured out, while they are repulsed by those in despair.
The world in which our minds and emotions evolved bears little resemblance to the world which they are now trying to cope with, leaving us unbalanced and floundering. It is hard to even imagine what the way out could be, when it seems like we citizens collectively respond to each new challenge and setback with another round of self-destructive choices. We see the cliff edge approaching, and choose to jam down the accelerator even harder.
Related:
- On the possibility of leading an ethical life (2007, end Oxford era)
- Dark days for climate change policy (2009, Ottawa era)
- Order and chaos in politics (2012, early PhD era)
- Climate change and conflict between generations (2012)
- Some thoughts on the civil service (2013)
- Traumatized by violence (2016)
- Confronting ineffectiveness as an activist (2016)
- Inequality, entitlement, and the breakdown of social cohesion (2016)
- 10 years in Toronto (2019)
- Canada and Toronto’s housing markets (2021)
- Jost introduces system justification theory (2023)
- 173 days after my thesis defence (2023, post-Phd)
- Languishing (2023)
- Halfway through life (2023)
- The affect heuristic (2024)
- Little good ever comes from discussing climate change or nuclear weapons socially (2024)
- Open Process Manifesto (2025)
- Permeated (2025)
- Living history (2026)
- Controlling parents (2026)
