Sarah Jacquet‐Ray
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
But they basically said there was first of all, there's a lot of silence and crickets. And then all of a sudden it was like, Sarah, we couldn't really visualize that future. We didn't have any imagination for what it could possibly be. Everything that came up in my mind was dystopic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so we had been talking a lot about, okay, you all have come in, you're really idealistic. How are we going to move from idealism through all of these grief emotions, anxiety emotions, despair emotions about how bad things are? How do we really sit with how bad things are? And then move into something more like action or some kind of catharsis where we work together, collective efficacy.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I had done all this research on what is the emotion that we need the most to do this work for the long haul. And collective efficacy turned out to be the kind of
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
magic go holy grail of of the set of emotions and i was trying to be really explicit about this in the class and jobe just sort of threw it all at the wall at some point and said this is all pointless hope is pointless there is you know this is really bad and nothing you can tell us sarah nothing we can do together is going to change anything
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
It was deadening. Yeah, the students were absolutely dead quiet and really, really felt the despair and wondered if, in fact, that was true. Yeah, is there no point? There's no hope. And one could argue that there really isn't.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, he was speaking my truth too. Yes, and I thought to myself, I can't lift this group up. I can't do this. This is hopeless. I can't do what I've been put on this planet to do as a teacher. The problems really are the way he described.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
You know, I'm human just like the rest of everybody. And when I put a phone in front of my face, it's a very addictive thing. I definitely have been known to buy a few things on Amazon after reading some terrible news because it's right there afterwards on Twitter or Facebook or whatever.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So there's a real built-in design to have us disavow or find comfort in other forms of consumerism, whether that's alcohol or marijuana or shopping or whatever. Whatever it is, that kind of distraction is readily available to us in many ways, shapes and forms. And I'm definitely even still subject to that all the time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So I was sitting at the picnic table with my colleague, Jen Ladino, and Jen said to me, why don't you turn all of the things that you're worrying about with your students into your research? That way you could try to help your students solve this problem better. It never dawned on me to think about the role of emotions in thinking about the environment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I had completely been going down a different path with my research. And so when she said that to me, I thought, well, first of all, that's fascinating. And secondly, it makes perfect sense. Emotions are the most important thing that dictate all decision-making.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And also maybe while I'm at it, it might be able to help serve my students and make me more equipped to handle them in the classroom so I don't get so burned out.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
100%. 100%. I was thinking to myself, my students' despair is making them completely out of commission for the work we want them to do in the world. The work that they're going to find purpose in, that they might even find, gosh, maybe happiness in doing. And that's really a shame. I felt really sad for them. I thought there's something else going on here. It doesn't have to be like this.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And I think psychology and neuroscience and social movements and people who have had despair in the past while they're trying to work on massive cultural change probably have some wisdom to share about it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so Gabby got really hooked into a lot of different facets of activism in the community, on campus. And she really felt like while she was working on the problem, everything was moving in the right direction. But it meant that she could never let herself stop working on the problem. She was super hypervigilant.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The problem was so big and she was so small that she would solve her feeling of inefficacy by just working really, really hard. And there's that kind of common phrase I think a lot of activists feel, this kind of, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. this hypervigilance that has to come along with becoming aware of how bad the problems are. And that's a pretty common trope.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I mean, a lot of people go down that path until they realize something like climate change, unlike a bill getting passed, is an ongoing kind of long-term, many generations problem to solve. And if they're going to approach it like a sprint rather than a marathon, they will burn out really quick. And that's what happened to Gabby.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Exactly. So this kind of performance of being really engaged and really busy and almost to the point of kind of always displaying your bordering on burnout was a sign that you were as committed to the cause as you possibly could be.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And Gabby was really determined to make sure that she was extracting every bit of energy out of herself to reverse all of the bad impacts that she had had on the planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And I think that that pervasive complicity part that we were talking about before, that guilt part that we were talking about with Maddie before, that was driving this kind of feverish desire to undo all the harms that she was doing on the planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so I think that when you have that guilt, you think to yourself, well, I have to make amends for that. I have to go make a more positive impact on the planet than I leave on the planet. And because for any one single individual, that is impossible. It's impossible to overturn all of the problems. A single individual is not going to take all the carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And the hill to climb there is just way too big for any one person. But because of the way the environmental problems are often framed as up to us as individuals to solve, and we live in a very individualistic culture, then we think that it's up to us individually to solve and that we are solely responsible.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
We will, you know, sort of burn ourselves out trying to undo all the harm that we're doing on the planet. And there's not just a misanthropy there, but there's a real self-loathing that comes around with that, too, that doesn't actually help us sustain the kind of stamina that is required to continue in the work.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Exactly. Exactly. So not only is every form of pleasure also probably tied to some kind of negative environmental impact. So there's that. But there's this kind of futility. Right.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And in fact, that is exactly what most people do when we talk about climate deniers or we talk about people who don't are unwilling to face it and how frustrated we can feel about people who don't want to face a problem. It is actually cognitively the most elegant solution.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
to the dissonance that we experience and many of us experience between how terrible the problem is and then the life that we live and how it's constantly making the problems worse. That cognitive dissonance makes it very difficult to really face into what we need to do to solve it and much easier to just say, I throw my hands up.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
There's no surprise at all that people feel this way and that they feel despairing about it. And I think it is a mistake to say that it's climate change that causes this stuff in people.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
We ought to also think about the way that they're getting that information, that kind of machinery of mediation that happens between the actual problem of climate change itself and the human being receiving that information. There's a whole machine happening there. There is the way the algorithms work on social media. There's the ways that people get their information.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
There's the fact that we get more media now in the last 20 years than we've ever gotten from all corners of the globe. It's overwhelming, a fire hose of bad stuff. There's a negativity bias of the media, which has gotten worse over the last 20 years. In addition, we're also taught we're just individuals, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So to go back to this point of individualism, oftentimes that feeling of despair comes from feeling I'm too small to fix this problem. Pseudo-inefficacy, this beautiful term that social psychologists use, is all about the negative feeling of not being able to solve a whole problem outweighing the positive feeling of being able to solve just a small part of it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so this negative feeling of I can't fix the whole problem because I'm so small is Makes us not even want to solve a little part of it. That's an actual bias in the brain. So all of these kinds of things about how small we are, how we perceive ourselves to be powerless, how big the problem is and therefore we can't tackle it, how there's nobody else around who cares as much as us.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so, you know, there's no point in ever doing it. Those are all things that are about the framing of the problem and the framing of our agency. And those things can be challenged.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, I'll never forget when that film came out. It was such a big deal. And for years later, even today, my students will tell me that what got them to care about stuff is that film. I mean, it's still resonating. But the rhetorical strategy of that film was very much to create this litany of problems. It's kind of overwhelmed to shock people into caring.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And really Al Gore was saying, nobody's caring, nobody's caring. Let's just give them more information. If they know more information and they have all the details of all the ways that it could cause disaster for everybody's lives, then maybe they'll do something about it. And I call that the scare to care technique. Right. That is really what most environmental educators use.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I mean, if we look at the brain and how fear activates people's reaction, Greta Thunberg famously said she wants people to act like their house is on fire. So that triggering of the fear in the amygdala to respond to such a crisis. That's what Al Gore was trying to do. What's the problem with the approach?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So there are certain types of people for whom the fear technique really will shake them into that reality. But what was happening, at least in my classes, which is where I was really thinking about, people are already coming in pretty scared. They're already coming in feeling really overwhelmed and powerless.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so if I just give them more and more data about how bad things are, the effect is actually to amplify that inefficacy that they're feeling. Because I'm just presenting the problem as too big for them to solve.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Right. And we think that we're getting people more paying attention more if we present the problem as really, really big. That'll get their attention and maybe they'll finally stop doing what they're doing. But in fact, the scale of the problem being so big is what causes an efficacy, which then turns into less action.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
That comes from that guilt thing, right? That I'm in eternal debt to the planet and to the world. I'm such a bad person. I've benefited so much from exploitation and extraction and violence, you know, the sort of...
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
idea that my presence on the planet is on the backs of so much suffering and so much bad stuff and so the only logical place i can go for that is to martyr myself right to sacrifice everything i have to sacrifice my time my energy my well-being especially and that if i'm not actually doing that that i'm not that i'm not contributing enough
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, and so I call that a kind of martyrdom, and I think it's really seductive, especially for young people who are just learning about how their privileges have landed them where they are.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
What the research is showing us is that the feeling of being in a collective is really an essential part of doing this. We have that famous quote from Bill McKibben when he's asked, what's the one thing I can do to solve this problem? What's one thing? And he says, stop being just I. Stop just being you.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
start to see yourself in this broader collective, start to plug into a collective because a collective actually has kind of the effects that are, the sum is greater than the parts. And I use the metaphor of the choir, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When you're in a choir and you're lots of people singing and you need to catch your breath, or maybe you have a little frog in your throat or something, you can take a moment out and kind of settle your body again, get your voice back, knowing that the rest of the choir is carrying that song. Whereas if you feel like you're the only one singing, there's no space for that, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so you just keep singing and you just sing through the suffering of it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And this need for kind of recovering and recuperating and making sure you're resourced so that you can keep getting up in the morning and doing the work you're trying to do, much less go to class and do your homework and, you know, have a thriving life, is something that I think a lot of people are starting to come around to.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
But I would also say that there's something else to it as well, which is that if they don't actually live the life that they're trying to preserve, then they've already kind of lost the battle. And what I mean by that is, you know, this visualization activity where you're imagining this future where everything's great. There are ways that we can live in that way now.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
What are the great things about that future? Well, maybe we feel rested. Maybe we feel joyful. Maybe we're listening to music. Maybe we're dancing. Maybe we're eating good food, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
These sort of like the qualities of life that we want to save the planet to preserve for ourselves are things that we can have now and to surrender them now with the thought that you can have them later after you've achieved utopia is a way of surrendering it unnecessarily early.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So I'd say for most people, that awareness that you're part of a collective, that there's a choir there is part of it, but also seeking that out and plugging into collective community. There's some really interesting research that shows that action towards climate change, in fact, doesn't address climate anxiety. It doesn't alleviate our sense of despair about climate change.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
that action in a collective is the essential thing and so there's a sort of misnomer that happens there's a misunderstanding that if we do some actions we'll feel better but in fact it's the collective part that makes us feel better and less so the action itself And so the collective makes us feel efficacious. The collective has that social contagion factor of hope and joy and pleasure.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Our brains are designed, we're social creatures. So to do all that stuff, it addresses so many of the other problems that we have. We know from the U.S. Surgeon General, we have this loneliness epidemic and it's really bad for young people. And so what I like to say is that addressing individualism is the core for both our mental health and it's also what the planet needs from us.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Chris Jordan is an artist, and he was making a film trying to document the destruction of all the deaths of albatross birds on the Midway Atoll, and he made a film about it called Midway. And he would go out there and... check out the stomachs of these birds and these dead birds all over the atoll, peel them open and take pictures of their bared stomachs with all of this plastic in it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And just from looking at a picture of one of these albatross, you can tell that this albatross died of ingesting all these small plastics. As he describes it, he's looking at these stomachs of the albatross as like looking at the mirror of what humanity has done to nature or what our relationship, our fraught relationship with nature is. He went eight times and he finally made the film of it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The first couple of times he went and the way that he felt about it was just sheer horror. He was crying over these albatross bodies. He felt this incredible sense of despair. He had never even seen an albatross before. Very few people ever get to go to Midway. And here was evidence of great human impact happening far, far away from anybody's, any human life at all in the first place.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And he felt that if humans could impact the world in such a massive way where they're not even ever showing up or any presence of human activity, this was really a bad state.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah. So I would say about 15 years ago when I started teaching environmental studies, it was a little bit of a boutique subject and people would come in and get the information, how bad things are, figure out how they can do some fixing and carry on with their merry way.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so in the beginning, his primary emotion that kind of eclipsed all the other possibilities was this grief and horror. And then over time, he started to realize the beauty of the albatross and the beauty of the place and the beauty of these birds, and he came to love the birds. So...
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
he started to have a better sense of how you can have terrible emotions like horror and grief alongside other kinds of emotions that seem like they can't happen at the same time, like beauty and joy and love.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so recognizing the both and-ness of being able to have deeply have experienced grief and horror and despair about what's happening came right alongside these other emotions like love and beauty and
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
and allowed him to access a different set of emotions that was much more sophisticated and that he argues is much more supportive of the kind of long-term work that we need to be doing to protect the planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yes, exactly. And I do think that there's something here that is more sophisticated, what I call in my book, climate wisdom, more sophisticated than the binary emotional language that we have in most dominant American culture, which is either you're feeling really positive feelings or you're feeling really negative feelings or comfortable or uncomfortable, however you want to call them.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And you can't have this complexity of both and at any particular moment. And I think what it really calls us to do is to open up the possibility of this much broader complexity of that the climate crisis is not just this doom and gloom despair thing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The reason why we have fear, the reason that motivates us to act like our house is on fire is because there's something that we really love that is under threat. And the love is what we can really tap to sustain long-term work. It's not that the grief or the despair or the fear go away, but that they can open a door to helping us tap this much more enriching, resourcing set of emotions as well.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
About 10 years ago, though, something really seemed to have shifted in my students where they were coming in already pretty informed about how bad things were. And so they would come to my office hours to tell me, oh, that reading or that movie or that thing that you showed in class really pulled the rug out from underneath me in whatever particular way.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Absolutely. I love that description. And I think that's where climate discourse, climate storytelling, and our psychology really come together. The story that the planet wants us to live in is one where we have efficacy and we can, in fact, fix this problem. And in fact, the problem is fixable in the time that we are here on the planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so there's a sense of living in a story or choosing a story that activates the most energy from us. Because all those stories are true. It's true that things are worse. It's true that things are better. It is absolutely both and.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so I'm thinking here about the insight that many neuroscientists will tell you, which is that the brain is a pleasure-seeking machine. And so much environmental work and so much environmental knowledge, if you open up the door into that stuff, it doesn't feel very pleasurable. There is requests for us to sacrifice. There's requests for us to deny our pleasure.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
There's requests for us to give up things, right? Renounce our attachment to fossil fuels, renounce things. And so most people don't want to sign up for those kinds of unpleasurable things and self-denial feelings.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And I think one of the things that ought to really happen around environmental and climate work is a reframing around all the things that we could gain, all the pleasures we could gain, sort of using the way our brains are naturally designed to leverage better climate action around the pleasures we'll have, the things that we'll gain, rather than the things that we'll sacrifice.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Some people think about this in terms of thinking about environmentalism as a kind of abundance thing rather than a sacrifice or a scarcity thing. And I think that they're really on to something.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, I often think about the kinds of things that you can do on an individual scale, even things like resting and recuperating, all just being sort of irrelevant. I mean, I was a product of that same kind of martyrdom mythology that we were talking about earlier. And I think that one of the things that's come out of all this research is that I need to make sure there's pleasure in my life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
It showed me that how complicit I am in the problem or how bad the future is going to look. And it got overwhelming for me. I couldn't contain it in my class or even in office hours.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I need to make sure I'm feeding the stuff that's in my life that I love, that I'm worried climate change is gonna change. So if I make sure that those things are growing, those things are thriving, That is one way to make the problem smaller as well, right? If the things that I love, I'm nurturing and I'm making those things bigger and bigger, like a garden metaphor, right?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I'm planting, I'm putting fertilizer, I'm putting the sunlight on the stuff that I love. That is another way to make them resilient to the threats that are going to come around the corner, if not already here. And so there's this sort of metaphor of gardening that I love there, but there's also the actual gardening, right? I want to have a relationship with the more than human world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I want to care about it. I want to tend to it. I want to recognize and see and appreciate my relationships with other stuff that's outside of me and my phone. And so there's a sense of this is a way of trying to get into a little bit more of right relationship in my daily life, in the way I walk around in the world. I say in my classes, we have to save the environment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Well, what's one first step I can take? I can look to the environment that's right in my backyard and I can do something to nurture it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so there's a couple of things at work here. First of all, we are just one person. And also, we are part of many collectives and many communities. That's always true, both at the same time. And so this notion that all of our actions of our life, no matter how hard we work, are going to amount to nothing, really does change the goalposts to something that's impossible anyway.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so what I'm suggesting there is that the small actions that we can do are really all we can do anyways. even if you had all the power on the planet, you could make very little difference in the climate crisis.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so we really have to figure out what is our motivation for doing these kinds of actions that isn't based on knowing that our actions are gonna make the difference we wanna see in the world. We have to find some non-instrumentalist
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
approach to why it is that we're doing those actions and I think that gives us permission to do things that are small not because we think that they will add up to anything big but because they themselves inherently are adding something positive into the world and that is a good enough reason to do it in and of itself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The binary thinking that goes into either we're going to have an apocalypse or we're going to have a utopia means that we don't really think that we can do anything unless it's going to give us the utopia.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yes. There's this kind of Western American consumer culture that sort of makes us think that everything is all about us. Right. Personalizing everything, aggrandizing our ego. And I think that there's some sort of beautiful invitation in seeing yourself in a collective that is also about saying, I don't actually matter that much. Right.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
This sort of a counterintuitive instead of saying, oh, I'm going to show up in the world and make this big, huge, positive impact.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
This kind of surrendering of the ego, the surrendering that you can be the savior that saves everything actually gives you permission to not be terribly effective all the time, gives you permission to find pleasure in the work, gives you permission to rest if you need to.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
To know and recognize that you are certainly just a small creature in this big wide ocean of other people doing this kind of work who are collectively very important. If we attach too much to our achieving in our lifetime, that which we think we should do to save the planet, we will always, always, always feel like we're falling short. And that can be very undermining.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
In addition, I think that this also invites us to tap into much more kind of humble, grounded, long-term engagement rather than this kind of, I need to be the savior, and if I'm not the savior, then I give up.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so this mom seems to be videotaping her son in the backseat in his car seat, and he's crying. He's really wailing. And he seems like he may have just learned in a class or somewhere else how much damage humans have done to the planet in the form of killing animals and trash. all kinds of things paving forests over with cement.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And he's really crying and devastated having learned the extent and scope of human impact on the planet. And he wants very much to get out there and fix it and yell at those adults.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so it started going viral and everyone said, yeah, this feels just like my environmental studies classes. This is what you do to us, Sarah. And so it clarified for me that what was happening with the overwhelming information they were getting was that they were really melting down inside.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
They may not have been always melting down like that six-year-old in my classes or even in office hours, although it felt sometimes we were on the border of that. But it was really clear that that's how they were feeling inside.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so this was actually before she had come to college and she had become very cognizant of all the problems and she was thinking about things like free trade and labor practices, climate change, the transportation of our products we consume, the life cycle of all the products we consume. And she was really... deeply engaged in trying to become a more conscientious consumer.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so when she would go to the store with her family or on her own to just maybe get some deodorant or the essentials of life, much less food to eat, she would look at the product and think of all of the damage that this product has caused in the world. Every ounce of consumption is some sort of impact. You could calculate your ecological footprint by the stuff that you consume.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And when young people are often getting this activity in their classes and
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
environmental science classes in high school or such called the ecological footprint activity where their teachers are asking them to calculate how many worlds would be required for them to keep up with their consumer lifestyles and it causes young people to sort of tailspin in guilt and complicity and how much just their normal lives um cost the earth and and she just couldn't bring herself to purchase the thing and participate in all of that harm
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And so it went as far as making her think she would just erase herself and her body as a way of not having impact and of being more acceptable ethically on the planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, I actually call it eco-nihilism because I started to see not only my students not show up to class, they go into pretty severe depressions where they weren't even leaving their rooms.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And we hear a lot about young people's mental health crisis, but very few people who are talking about the mental health crisis of young people are saying maybe there's something to do with the climate crisis, maybe there's something to do with the feeling of huge amounts of uncertainty that they face in their adult lives. And they're not looking forward to their futures.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So, yeah, I think that there's that complicity factor, the guilt. I don't want to have an impact. I want to refrain from my negative impact on the planet and this kind of shame for being a human at all, that humanity is inherently just terrible for the planet and doing terrible things. And so, yeah, just wanting to not be around anymore seems like the logical result for a lot of these people.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so he actually felt so terrible about the climate crisis, and he had been a lawyer for a long time doing litigation around oil companies and trying to fix climate change from the sort of legal perspective. And he had come across so many hurdles and so many walls that he became very, very despairing about the options and pathways for addressing the problem, given our current situation.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
With the tools that we have, we can't fix this problem is, I think, what he ultimately concluded. And he set himself on fire and immolated himself, leaving a suicide note that said something to the effect of, I'm doing to myself what humanity is doing to the planet. I want to illustrate in my immolation. Our dependence on fossil fuels is killing us. And Win Bruce also in 2022 did the same thing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So we've had sort of multiple of these. And I definitely have had students and talked to many people whose children have done this, not immolated, but ended their lives because of how despairing they feel about climate change specifically.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yes. Yeah. I mean, a climate suicide is, I think, the more common term for it. But yes, there's a sort of nihilistic, logical place to go when you realize that the problem is so big and so bad and you are so small to fix it and you are also part of the problem.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, so we were on a walk and we were just having a regular conversation about the state of the world as you do with your 12-year-old. And she was just really dogging on humans. And it felt a little bit like she was parroting what she had heard elsewhere or maybe in her classes or what her friends were talking about.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Like it was a cool thing to do to say, oh, humans suck and humans are doing such terrible things. And I thought to myself, she was really absorbing that message from whatever places she was getting that message from, feeling despairing about how humans are hopeless, that there's nothing good humans can do to add to the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And it made me concerned a little bit about the potential for her own nihilistic tendencies. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When people's prefrontal cortexes are not developed and they can't figure out gray areas, they're in this black and white thinking mode, which is also really perpetuated by a lot of the media we consume and the ways that social media algorithms work. You know, we live in these black and whites, and I think it's really easy to slip into humanity is terrible.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And a lot of environmental teaching also leans in that direction. Many of my students take classes where even the title is called Human Impacts on the Environment. National Science Foundation grants, will give special grants for people to measure human impacts on the environment with no nuance around what that category of human even means or whether it's all bad or some bad, some good.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The stories that we hear about what good humans can bring to the planet are very limited and rare. And so there's a huge negativity bias out there on portraying stories about whether humans can do anything good or not. And mostly, for the most part, It's really easy to get pretty misanthropic about what the fate of the possibility of humans doing anything good.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I asked them to cast themselves forward about 10 or 15 years and close their eyes and think about the sounds, the smells, the sights, all of the things that their body would perceive if they were in a world that they desired, the world that actually had come to manifest all the things that they hoped for, the things that they'd come to college to go fix about the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Imagine if it all came to pass. What would that world feel like, look like, smell like, and sound like?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
There's all kinds of things that fear prevents us from doing. And I was trying to invite them into a different part of their brain, so to speak, around what they would desire about their futures. So then they could think about what would this be the steps to take to get there? Or maybe even where does that already exist in my life and how can I nurture that and build on that?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And what happened was... I thought we were all going along just fine. And I was in this sort of Zen meditation mode, visualizing with them with their eyes all closed. And I asked them, OK, slowly open your eyes and come back and share what that world was like, thinking it would be this utopic, cathartic experience for all of us.