Climate Anxiety and a Less Predictable World
Climate change makes me anxious. I don’t have a more sophisticated way of saying it. I read about fires, floods, extreme weather, species disappearing and predictions about what the next several decades might look like, and sometimes I feel helpless.
I’m a therapist. I know about nervous-system regulation, grounding and staying in the present. I know what I’m supposed to do with anxiety. But knowing those things doesn’t make me immune to what is happening around me. I also don’t think climate anxiety is simply an anxiety problem. Some of what we’re frightened about is real, and I don’t want to regulate myself into pretending otherwise.
I find myself wondering what happens to us psychologically when we’re faced with something this enormous that none of us can individually control. We need some sense of predictability to feel safe in the world. We make plans, build relationships, have children, think about retirement and generally move through life assuming there will be a recognizable future waiting for us. We don’t necessarily notice that assumption until something starts shaking it.
Attachment is part of this too. We usually talk about attachment in terms of relationships with other people, but I think there is also something about being attached to a sense of continuity. We need to believe, at least most of the time, that the world we wake up in tomorrow will still be recognizable enough to make plans inside of it. That there will be seasons, places we love, communities we know, some basic continuity between the life we are living now and the one we imagine ten or twenty years from now.
When that starts to feel less certain, I think it touches something deeper than ordinary worry. It can unsettle our sense of safety, belonging and future. Maybe that is part of why climate change can feel so psychologically enormous. It isn’t only fear about a specific event. It can make the whole backdrop of life feel less dependable.
And climate change isn’t the only place I feel that sense of the ground shifting.
Which brings me to AI. Don’t even get me started! I cannot even think straight when I reflect on AI: fear, anger, relief at the ease it can provide. It’s so confusing.
When Technology Starts to Feel Like Too Much
I’m a Gen Xer and The Terminator is etched into my brain, so yes, the anxiety I have around AI is real. I’m trying to understand it. I’m trying to remain open to the possibility that the benefits will outweigh the costs. I am absolutely not convinced yet.
It’s complicated because I use AI. I find it helpful when I’m exhausted, really short on time, or my brain has just stopped cooperating. Like most people, I appreciate something that makes my life a little easier. And at the same time, I’m increasingly uneasy about it.
I worry about the environmental cost, including the water and energy required to support this technology. I worry about what happens to our brains when answers become instantaneous. There is something important, I think, about struggling with an idea. Reading something slowly. Being bored. Not knowing the answer. Getting frustrated. Sitting with something long enough that eventually you find your own way through it.
I’m as susceptible to the quick answer as anybody else, which is partly what concerns me. I don’t know what happens if we gradually outsource more and more of that struggle. I’m not saying technology is inherently bad. Obviously I use it. I’m saying I’m not sure we understand yet what we might lose alongside everything we gain.
As a therapist, of course I wonder whether AI will eventually replace some of what therapists do. I really don’t know. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to know exactly where this technology will be in ten or twenty years. What I do know is that therapy, at least the way I practise it, isn’t simply an exchange of information. The relationship itself matters. Two people affect each other. We misunderstand each other. Hopefully we repair. People bring their histories, attachment patterns and old expectations about relationships into new relationships, including the therapeutic one, and we get curious about what happens between us.
The imperfect parts matter too. What worries me is the possibility that we become so enamoured with efficiency that we start treating human messiness as another problem technology should solve. I don’t want everything to be efficient! I don’t think everything meaningful is meant to be efficient, we need the challenges and the messiness to expand ourselves.
Climate change and AI are obviously very different things, although increasingly they aren’t completely separate environmentally. But what they bring up in me is similar: this uncomfortable recognition that the world is changing incredibly quickly and I nor you have very little control over where any of it goes.
Trying to Stay Human in a World That Won’t Slow Down
I’ve been wondering whether we’re actually meant to adapt this fast.
Human beings have always lived through change, obviously. I know that. But there is something strange about asking one nervous system to take in environmental crisis, war, political upheaval, a pandemic, twenty-four-hour information, social media, rapidly changing technology and machines that can suddenly do things we were told were uniquely human.
Perhaps some of what we call anxiety is also a fairly understandable response to being asked to absorb an enormous amount of change in a very short period of time.
Spirituality helps me think about some of this, but it does not make me magically accepting of uncertainty. I spent years studying Zen, so impermanence isn’t exactly a new concept for me. Apparently understanding impermanence and actually enjoying it are two completely different things. I understand that everything changes. I’m just not always comfortable with the speed of the change.
I really don’t want to become so good at regulating myself that I stop paying attention to what matters to me. There has to be some space between being completely overwhelmed by the world and numbing ourselves to it.
I’m still trying to find that space.
I’m trying to figure out how much attention to pay. I want to know what’s happening without consuming so much information that my nervous system starts behaving as though I personally have been assigned responsibility for solving the planet. I want to use technology when it is genuinely useful without automatically reaching for it every time I don’t know something, I’m bored, or something feels difficult.
I want to leave some room for books. Boredom. Conversations that wander around and don’t accomplish anything. Nature. Other people. Sitting with a question for a while. My own thoughts. Maybe even being inefficient sometimes.