When did everything start to fall apart?
Living through unprecedented times
Only by looking into the dystopian futures can we focus on finding our way out…
When did you start to feel like everything had begun to fall apart?
For me it was when I was in New York for Thanksgiving in 2015, having a conversation with someone about the prospect of Trump getting in - until that point I had perceived Trump as a sideshow, not someone who would gain the nomination, and certainly not the US presidency.
That pit of despair again in the office just off Times Square in January 2017, the floor dead silent through the inauguration. Watching the TV on mute, as I stuck post-it notes to the wall, mapping out my team’s strategy for the coming year. I moved my flight back to London and spent my last hours of that trip protesting on the streets of New York with my colleagues, a sea of women in their knitted pink beanies.
This silence was not dissimilar to the one I experienced on the Piccadilly Line on June 24 in 2016, the morning after the Brexit vote. I had never known quiet like this on the tube, the collective sense of shock as people started to piece together what this would mean.
Like many who matured through the Obama era, I had come to believe the phrase of Martin Luther King Jr that President Obama often quoted: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (And yes, I recognise the rich, white, Western-centric privilege of this view.)
At the time I had hoped that these moments would be blips, as we would all bend that arc towards something better. Two and a bit years into a pandemic, as 50 years of women’s access to basic healthcare is stolen from them, and as other human rights come under threat, while people in the UK and much of the world face unprecedented rates of inflation, and the effects of the climate crisis really start to accelerate, it’s safe to say that this hope has been misplaced.
Back in the middle of 2020, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, I created a framework that would allow us to think about what was happening then and what would happen into the future, called Compound Collective Trauma. The fundamental idea that underpins it, is that we are living through a period where multiple traumatic events are happening at the same time and we have to figure out how to navigate them without a period of recovery in between.
The things that sit at the bottom three levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (an imperfect model, I know) were, and are, under threat, with people facing new threats around having their physiological, safety and belonging needs met.
Back in 2020, the six threats outlined were:
Pandemic
Recession and economic instability
Fear of violence
Climate crisis
Political Instability
Social and cultural inequality
Revisiting that framework, it is now necessary to add the erosion of basic human rights to the list.
Different countries have faced different permutations of these, with Australia primarily facing challenges around the pandemic and the climate crisis, while the UK navigates the pandemic, inequality and economic instability, and the US faces most of them. It’s also important to recognise that the nature of the infodemic is such, that even when something is happening elsewhere, it still feels as though it is happening here. In 2018, research found that anticipatory trauma responses were occurring in some people people in response to media exposure and social discussions of disasters and large-scale threats.
While there are many different ways that people react to traumatic experiences (get in touch if you want to discuss, it’s a topic I’ve worked around before), one response to trauma is an inability to imagine a positive future.
Writing about this on Psychology Today, therapist Annie Wright explains that access to autobiographical data can be impaired, so when the ability to reach back into the past and construct a sound, cohesive narrative is impaired, it may make it difficult, if not impossible to mentally time travel into the future and achieve the mental flexibility required to visualise a future—let alone a positive future.
With that in mind, collective compounding traumas rob us of individual dreams and futures, which is leading to antipathy when it comes to imagining the future, and leaving us caught in the current cycle of nostalgia fetishisation.
People who ascribe to manifestation culture (another interesting trend that I’ve been working with clients on) imagine the things that they want as if they are real, and outside any magical elements, it gives them the motivation to act as if these things could come true, giving them the motivation to create it.
When it comes to the future, right now, it’s hard to manifest a preferable future because it’s so hard for people to imagine what that could look like, because we are spending time fighting to protect what we already had, or thought we had.
I saw this in Packy McCormick’s Not Boring newsletter today (he’s focusing on optimism, so head there if you need cheering after reading this), an article written by Michael Chabon for the Long Now Foundation in 2006, but feels really relevant now.
If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.
So, where do we go from here?
A radical re-imaging of the future. What would you like your/our collective future to look like? (please send me an email, I’d love to hear from you)
Elsewhere:
‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing the Future
Saying good-bye to one of my favourite grown-ups, captured so beautifully by his son Seb: Ian Law obituary
I should be able to mute America
If you are obsessed with the coastal grandmother chic (or just obsessed with the interiors in Nancy Meyer films, as I am), escape into the profile AD did on her house.
Smooth brain life: Meet the Self-Described ‘Bimbos’ of TikTok
“My Lover And Companion”: Women Explain Why They Buy Male Sex Dolls
Secondhand Surge: Inflation, Product Scarcity, and New Tech Platforms Fuel Resale Market
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