The Sky is Falling but I’m Reading Jonah Hill’s Text Messages to his Ex-Girlfriend. Is it Apathy?
My window of tolerance with climate-crises news is wide, but I found myself turning away from the latest updates these last few weeks. My social media feeds are full of climatologists, oceanographers, biologists, meteorologists, climate activists-journalists, etc, so my curated-reality is supersaturated with climate news. Even so, "doom-scrolling” became more literal as many of the specialists I follow interrupted their usual messaging and allowed their inner-Cassandras/Chicken Littles to take over. They identified the first week of July as a wake-up call, the other side of a tipping point we’d skipped over, one domino of many left to fall, the beginning of the end. We consumed monotonous maps covered in different reds and oranges, telling us of temperatures that our brains could only register as “really hot.” (And the heat story doesn’t include the images we saw of stranded motorists clutching the roofs of their cars while surfing flash-flooded streets in Zaragoza, Spain, the ground beneath a railroad track washing way in Ludlow, Vermont, or people trying to navigate waist-deep water in New Delhi.)
But even if you barely dip your toes in the [currently very hot] waters of climate news, I’m sure you caught the gist of what’s going on these past few weeks. El Nino weather patterns + green-house gas induced global heating = hot, hot, hot weather. July 4th, 2023 was the hottest day ever recorded. Until July 5th happened. And then July 6th…and so on and so on. It was the most clearly depicted example of what the Bureau of Linguistical Reality call brokenrecordrecordbreaking or “a recurring feeling of deja vu, quiet terror, and slow shock which is both acute and familiar that occurs when opening a newspaper, radio program or website and reading a headline that that year (month, season, day) has broken the record for the hottest on record.”
Instead of leaning into this moment that my research should have prepared me for and digging my heels in mentally, I spent an indefensible amount of time reading through Jonah Hill’s text messages to his ex-girlfriend. (P.S. You can only call something a boundary when it limits what people should expect from you; trying to limit other people’s actions is just called control.) I contemplated the power dynamics of Keke Palmer’s current relationship. I also watched Victor Wembanyama’s security guard maybe-definitely slap Britney Spears in the face. Then I Googled Victor Wembanyama holding things that look very tiny in his enormous hands. Then I scrolled through Britney Spears’ Instagram…which then led me to Google “Is Britney Spears okay?” Basically, I distracted myself with different kinds of disasters, surreal spectacles that had no actual effect on me.
After a week or so of avoiding the climate news (a privilege that is not available to billions of people right now–or ever), my writing goals began to challenge my comfort and forced me into some self-reflection. My brain was simultaneously labeling my avoidance as apathy, while also telling me that my feelings at the time were definitely not apathetic. But I desperately wanted to call them apathy anyway because classifying those awful and existential feelings as apathy gave me permission to move on with my day. (Apathy isn’t made for wallowing; that’s melancholia.)
Referring to these terrible feelings as apathy not only allows us to walk away from them. This misnomer also leaves out a really important part of our relationship with the climate crisis: our unconscious minds. That pesky place where 95% of our brain activity happens—our inner-dark matter, bending and pulling our behavior and personality into patterns we don’t fully comprehend.
“It’s complicated,” would be a much more accurate descriptor of our relationship with the climate crisis. Obviously it’s more complicated than “it’s complicated” but that’s a start, and it’s a start that pushes us past apathy. Apathy is a dangerous place to start because apathy is a beginning and an ending; it shuts down the conversation entirely—in an annoyingly apt way. So I propose that we crack open our relationship with the climate crisis with “it’s complicated.”
And luckily (for my credentials), there are plenty of ecophilosophers and psychologists arguing that our relationship with the climate crisis goes way beyond apathy.
Since the climate crisis is a hyperobject—something ecophilospher Timothy Morton defines as a problem that is happening everywhere at all times and is therefore too big for our brains to comprehend—it’s not something that most of us want to sit around and think about. Inevitably when we think about the climate crisis, despite our best efforts, we quickly become overwhelmed by the scope and size of it all. Even people who frequently think about problems on the hyperobject scale and have coping mechanisms take breaks to protect their sanity. My personal coping mechanism is to either zoom out until the problem becomes smaller and then I research around it (reading relevant theory, philosophy, or psychology), or I zoom in and look at one small piece of the climate crisis puzzle, research something hyperlocal (which is very easy to do in the Gulf South). Changing my spatial relationship with environmental breakdown (again, a privilege that billions no longer have) saves me from thinking I must tackle the big picture all at once. But like a metaphor, these coping mechanisms break down eventually. As Jeff VanderMeer points out in Annihilation, “There is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.”
And what kind of coping mechanisms (or metaphors) can handle the incomprehensible fact that the heat index hit 152°F in the Persian Gulf this week.
So when faced with a problem as huge and complex as the climate crisis, we begin to think that nothing we do as individuals will ever make any difference at all. And from a certain angle, we are correct. If you look at all of the greenhouse gasses being pumped into the atmosphere at any given moment, your individual decision to ride your bike or drive an electric car creates very little change to that number. And Timothy Morton points out in their book Being Ecological that even if our individual choices do actually matter (and they do), the crisis is so large that “we won’t be able to get high up enough above the world to see exactly what that [effect] looks like.” So in other words, our individual decisions—when looked at from an impossible panoramic scale that we couldn’t comprehend even if we had access to it—are statistically insignificant. And thinking about those emissions-generating-decisions we must make on a daily basis (that are statistically insignificant) reminds us that our environment is collapsing and the earth might be unable to sustain our species much longer. So, it’s easy to understand why we avoid thinking about them at all.
And I wouldn’t call all of that apathy. I would call it a whole lot of something happening in your subconscious that’s able to be triggered by a plastic spoon or a trip to the gas station. I would call it ambivalence, terror, or grief. I would call it self-preservation, but I definitely wouldn’t call it apathy. (See, it’s complicated.)
Psychologist and climate communicator Renee Lertzman argues in Environmental Melancholia that most of us are not apathetic about the environmental crisis. Instead, we are incredibly conflicted because of our reliance on the structures and industries and habits that perpetuate the climate crisis. We then feel guilty about our own participation in the destruction of the environment, which leads to defensiveness. Our collective defensiveness creates and supports narratives that allow us to be aware—even hyper-aware—of the exploitative nature of certain industries and the excessiveness of our consumption, without making changes to our individual behaviors. These narratives become embedded in our culture, in our traditions, our holidays, our identities—actually, these narratives become our culture and identities—and then it’s difficult and even painful to break away from them. Especially when our decisions are statistically insignificant to the climate crisis and thinking about changing those seemingly insignificant decisions plunges you into an existential mire. (Again, I’m not saying these decisions are actually insignificant.)
The best way to get rid of that guilt and defensiveness that keeps many of us standing still in this very slow fight for our lives is to first identify those feelings happening in your subconscious. The feelings we have when we’re reminded that the earth we inhabit today is significantly different than the one we grew up in; when we’re reminded that we’ve lost a lot of something that we cannot get back; when our children ask us questions about air quality or the heat index; when we feel an overwhelming sense of something in response to those moments, we have to acknowledge and name those feelings, and stop tucking them under the concept of apathy. Those conflicted feelings are most likely rooted in your care for the environment, not your lack of care. They are probably fear, anger, sadness, or grief, not a lack of fear, anger, sadness, or grief. According to Lertzman, what we’ve assumed to be apathy is actually just the painful experience of feeling useless in this crisis, of having no way to contribute or help. She argues that “we must not assume that the concern is absent but rather that it may be seeking a home” (136). And before we can find a home for our concern and start to feel useful in this fight, we have to first acknowledge it, even if it hurts to do so.
Apathy doesn’t keep us running in place when it comes to the climate crisis. If we were apathetic, the news about the climate wouldn’t scare or compel us to distraction. If we were apathetic, the climate crisis wouldn’t constantly exist in our minds, a low hum in the background that is easy to ignore until it isn’t. If you were truly apathetic, you wouldn’t still be reading this.
