Fear of the future

I don’t know if you’re into the science. You might be thinking of temperature rises, ocean acidification and feedback loops. Or perhaps you’re just looking at the weather forecast, horrified. You used to look forward to summer, but now you dread it. Everywhere is on fire. Or underwater. This year was bad but next year, you know, will be worse.

Or perhaps it's the political direction that seems to go only one way. Or it's the rise of AI, taking your job, everything you've worked hard for.

The future can be scary. We are dealing with frontiers that we've never dealt with before. And the conversation around those things might not match how you feel. Stories about heatwaves are covered with a photo of people at the beach. Everyone is losing their jobs to robots yet no one seems to do anything about it. Conflict feels like it's everywhere but it's met with a detached shrug.

And within that context, there is you. Perhaps you think that your problems are trivial. Perhaps you struggle to believe you have a right to be upset or hurt. It might be difficult to plan for a future - whether that's your career or your kids - when everything around you, around us, seems to be collapsing. Perhaps you have lost your direction, or your lust for life.

The world’s suffering is real. But yours is too. We can make space for that. We have to.

I cannot, however much I want to, take carbon out of the atmosphere. I cannot change the movers and shakers of global geopolitics. I cannot undo AI. But I can be with you. I can listen. You don’t have to be alone.

I am here to hold your grief, to sit with you and help you make sense of the world. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helps. I know that it does. I've spent a year researching how therapists are working with this material. This big, impossible material that makes it hard to connect to the joy of your life. I get it, believe me. But here's what I know. Whatever the future holds, however bad it gets, there can still be community, friends, kinship. You can still love.