Category: Daily updates

Yesterday I got my steel bedframe, futon, pillows, and bedding delivered by my cousin Oleksa and his partner. I had no space for them in my temporary student co-op digs, and my aunt offered to hang on to them until I had a new place.

That means that the move which began in March when I learned that I would be forced to leave my room on Marlee Street because the landlords illegally refused to add me to the lease has finally ended. It also means no more sleeping on the floor with a yellow foam sleeping bad, Thermarest collapsible pillow, and light-duty MEC sleeping bag.

Because the pay working as a food delivery cyclist is so dismal — and because ultimately I need a job with career advancement potential and the prospect of doing useful work on climate change — I am beginning another round of job research and applications tomorrow: job portals for all levels of government, universities, academic publishers, energy companies, environmental NGOs, and really anything plausible.

The search is a bit of a grim one largely because of the very specific experience requirements for nearly any position I look at. Employers mostly want to take on someone who has recently done a very similar job and can provide references to show their aptitude at it. When it comes to applicants without experience who have the potential to be good at the work, it would be risky and counter-intuitive to hire someone promising over someone proven. The kind of entry-level jobs where it is possible to get in without prior experience, and where it is also possible to advance, seem to be vanishingly rare.

The social dimensions and office politics of climate change work are also a confounding factor. Even people and organizations whose job it is to highlight the severity of the crisis don’t appreciate being reminded of that in person. The world is full of thousands of people working on one narrow aspect of the climate problem, but pulling back to consider the scale of the problem overall compared with the scale of our efforts to combat it is deeply upsetting and demoralizing: especially to the sort of mid-career professionals with young kids who occupy most of the professional positions related to climate change. Having kids makes it psychologically intolerable to recognize the depth of our catastrophe, and the natural response to someone bringing up such uncomfortable ideas is to wrap the worry-inducing person up in smooth layers like a pearl until they are silent and no longer an irritant to the normal course of business.

Even compared to recent low feelings, I am now feeling emotionally and psychologically about as bad as I ever have.

All the way back to kindergarten or before, I either had school or work to occupy and engage me each fall, and to give structure and purpose to the time ahead.

Now I am feeling utterly alone — like the ‘nowhere to go’ feeling that haunted the PhD (from knowing that I was too radical on climate to work for government or mainstream NGOs but not radical enough to work for activist NGOs) has been realized. Somehow, despite spending all the time since 2007 working or studying, I have become drastically less employable than I was when I finished my undergrad in 2005. At the same time as my own prospects feel erorded, the global picture has darkened mercilessly.

I feel like I have been in a crisis at least since I learned that I was going to lose my housing on Markham Street in early 2018. I feel like I have lost my connections with or been pushed out of all the important organizations in my life, and that anywhere I can go now is a reminder of how isolated I am, how much has gone wrong, and how bad the projections for the future are. When I stay home, I can’t help feeling insecure because I don’t have income to cover the rent. When I go to U of T, it feels like a club I am no longer part of. Out and about in the city, I feel surrounded by a society that has been told for thirty years now that our habits will be the ruin of our planet, and which has decided to plow straight ahead regardless. Every car I see driving is a reminder to me of that choice, as is every grocery store groaning with fresh produce and luxury foods, given my knowledge about how we are denying such bounty to our successors, and that people in 100 years may be unwilling to believe that there was ever such easy plenty in the world. Visiting Vancouver was often an over-busy and stressful reminder that I don’t have a refuge there either.

In part because people have pulled back on socializing since COVID, I feel like I don’t have any friends left — nobody who I could drop in on, or meet for a coffee, or even telephone and expect an answer from. Life feels divided into two camps: (a) one of people who are actually doing well, but find it uncomfortable to recognize how badly the rest of us are in crisis and so mostly choose to ignore it to stay comfortable and (b) people too much in crisis themselves to provide any aid or uplift. Indeed, my feeling of lacking the material and psychological resources to provide such aid and uplift to friends and family in difficulty is a major contributor to overall feelings of uselessness, hopelessness, and dread about what is to come.

Today more than at any time I can recall recently, I wish I could just stop thinking. Thinking feels like it’s just a conduit for more pain and fear. When you are a fly on the kitchen counter — as the shadow of the fly-swatter has you framed, and the lethal web is swooshing forward — it is better not to be able to understand what is happening.