Hopium vs. Doomerism

Two ways to leave. One reason to stay.

Aug 15, 2025

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Author’s note: I am reflecting on Joanna Macy’s incredible legacy of activism this week. To honor all she has taught me, I am allowing myself to be deeply inspired (once again) by the first interview I ever heard of hers: What could possibly go right?

As I write this, more than a hundred people have drowned in floods in Texas, many of them children. In Israel, Iran, Gaza, Russia, and Ukraine, people are dying in wars. And for the first time in decades, world leaders are talking openly about using nuclear weapons. Again.

Also this week, a climate scientist went viral for saying what many people already feel in their bones: it’s too late. Too late to fix this. Too late to stop the damage. Too late to hope.

I can’t pull my attention away. From the houses ripped from their foundations in Texas. From the bombs lighting up the night sky. From the parents who lost their children, whether to war, to water, or to gunfire.

And when I look at my own country, I see people not coming together, but turning on each other. Even at the neighborhood level. Even at home.

I don’t use ads or social media algorithms, just honest writing and kind people sharing it. Thank you for helping it reach someone new.

Heartbreak

My heart keeps breaking. It doesn’t break once and heal. It breaks, and breaks again.

There’s a strange truth I am coming to realize: I don’t think my heart will ever stop breaking. I don’t want it to actually. In a way, it feels like, at least while my heart is breaking, the world is inside me.

And I am flung all about it. I am everywhere. While my heart is breaking, I am briefly re-united with the universe and we are together as one.

…

If I knew that one day there would come a time of great darkness..

A time when we are faced with the greatest dangers and tests and suffering we can ever imagine..

A time like this, when so many people think it’s too late for healing, too late for peace, too late for the climate..

If there were ever a time like that coming, I think I would want to be there.

And I think you would too. I don’t know why.

I think maybe it’s a kind of solidarity.

What are you thinking about after reading this? Feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear.

Together as one

Maybe what I want, more than happiness or safety, is to feel united with my world.
To be with it in sickness and in health.
In beauty and in brutality.
To let my heart and mind be stretched out of shape trying to hold it all.
To become a creature shaped by this world.

Because the truth is: there is not one particle in any cell of my body that isn’t made from this Earth.

What I am coming to realize is that there is no limit to the violence humanity can inflict on this world.
And there is also no limit to the love we still hold for it.

I want to feel the same non-separateness with the parents who lost their children in a flood, as I do when standing on a mountaintop.
The same ache I feel during Beethoven’s Ninth as I do when a forest is razed.

I want to declare once and for all:
There is no limit to what I am willing to feel in order to stay with my world.

The False Choice Between Hope and Despair

If you’ve found yourself swinging between “maybe it’ll be okay” and “what’s the point anymore,” you’re not alone.

When things fall apart, we grab onto whatever helps us cope.

Some of us reach for hope.. Not the grounded kind, but the shiny kind that says, someone will fix this.
Others fall into despair. Because if it’s already over, at least we don’t have to try anymore. At least we don’t have to care.

Both make sense.
Both are ways out.

But the work right now isn’t hope. And it isn’t despair.

It’s staying.

Not fixing. Not producing. Just being here. Just refusing to look away.

It means letting the pain matter.
Letting yourself grieve, not as a side effect, but as proof you’re still connected.
Still alive.
Still part of something.

And beneath that grief? Rage. Not loud, flashy internet rage, but the quiet kind. The kind that says, this matters too much to shut down.

If You’re Young

If you’re young, and it feels like your whole life is being pissed on, you’re right. It is.

You were born into a time of failure. Of theft. Of irreversible damage.

You didn’t choose it. And yet here you are. That fact alone means something.

The grief, the sense of loss, the rage at the injustice of it— that is life in you.

You are alive and you love that life.

If you are not afraid of your grief or rage, if you learn to treasure it.. If you learn to see in it your care, your curiosity, and your courage, it can nurture a great clarity. Fierce clarity for what can be done (and be done by just you).

You are the illness and the medicine. You’re born as the same species that brought us to this point. You didn’t ask to be born as a human, in a time of great tragedy and danger.

And yet, you are going to prove yourself worthy of this time. By and through the support of the universe, of the ancestors, of all the critters of this world, you will find your path.

You Don’t Have to Know What to Do

Staying doesn’t mean having a solution.
It doesn’t mean being useful.

It means being present.
With your heartbreak. With your rage. With your love.

It means becoming the kind of person the world can act through.

Because maybe the real question isn’t what can I do?
But what is trying to move through me, if I let it?

You don’t need hope to stay.
You just need to not leave.

That might be enough.

Want to share your thoughts? I’d genuinely love to hear them. This space is a conversation, not just a monologue. Hit 'reply' or send me a message below.