How are we doing? That’s a complicated, uncomfortable question. To a significant degree, we seem to be worried, dissatisfied, depressed, and isolated. A 2023 Surgeon General’s report notes that people feel “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” People often remark that they “don’t have the bandwidth” to do something, meaning they don’t have the mental or emotional resources to think about something or take on a task. Such people are ordinarily capable and even resilient, but these days it’s all too much.

A Yale Medicine website talks about depression and suicidal thoughts among young people constituting a crisis, linking to a Centers for Disease Control report that has been removed by the Trump administration (the removal of trustworthy information being, in itself, emblematic of some of our troubles).

A Gallup poll early this year showed a continuing decline in the proportion of people in the U.S. who are very satisfied with how their personal lives are going. A recent American Psychiatric Association poll showed Americans anxious about current events, family safety, economics, their health, and other issues. 

Why all this unhappiness? I cannot remember a time when we faced so many challenges. Even during the 1960s when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war, I don’t remember things feeling like this. Maybe it’s because so many things seem to be falling apart in society and government, all at once. Maybe because grinding poverty and gold-inlaid greed have surpassed the Gilded Age in which people became obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps because we are continuing to wreck the climate while societies and governments struggle to even admit that it’s real. 

“Polycrisis.” When you do a search for it, you find page after page of articles. There’s even a website devoted to understanding it. An article from a couple of years ago on the World Economic Forum describes it as multiple crises happening at once (like climate change, the Covid pandemic, loss of social cohesion, war in Ukraine and Russian expansionism, oligarchy, resurgent fascism) which can interact with each other producing an effect different from the sum of the separate crises. 

What can we do? Each of us, individually, can make choices that will help, though the tasks seem overwhelming – beyond our “bandwidth.” What comes to my mind is a quote from Tolkien, an exchange between Gandalf and Frodo that (in the books, not the movies) occurs when Frodo is discovering that the fate of his world may hang on what he does with a supremely dangerous tool of the enemy:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 2

This is our time – the time that is given us. What can we do that might nudge us toward a better life and a better culture? Individually and as a society, what do we value and how do we show it in our lives? What ways of living do we choose, and does it align with our beliefs? I think we need to do more than vote people out (even that option seems to be in jeopardy) and get back to what we were doing. Instead, we need to think very purposefully about the kind of society we want to (re)build and the kinds of kids we want to raise. Can we relate to each other as thinking and feeling individuals worthy of the same dignity and compassion that we expect for ourselves? Does that extend to people of different genders, races, and other ways of sorting each other into “us” as opposed to “them”?

Can we relate to the Earth as more than a big-box store and a theme park? We insist on measuring economic health in terms of growth, so that we must pretend that we can never slow down in our extraction of material from the Earth in order to produce more “product” to sell. We pretend that growth can be unlimited, that if the trend line on the graph becomes flat, the economy is stagnant and the ponzi scheme might unravel. But we could dream of a sustainable way of making our living from each other and from the Earth. We could use the same creativity and intellect that we have expended on nuclear physics or computing technology. If we applied that effort to creating such an economy, surely something good would emerge.

But we could dream of such things only if we want to live more equitably, more in harmony with each other and with the planet. As long as we consider such things to be naive fantasies, nothing much will happen. If we are raised to believe that ruthless competition is the only way to survive, that other people are objects that can be useful or not, we will stay on our current path. If we have been taught that the land, water, air, and every living thing was divinely intended to be used and despoiled by us, we keep in motion a scheme that ultimately will run out, regardless of how we might use our technology to keep it going a while longer.

That seems to be the society we have created. Clear-eyed, remorseless competition and wealth creation because we cannot imagine an alternative in today’s world. More technology, machinery, and artificial intelligence as the only salvation from the messes we create. More of what Joanna Macy called the industrial growth society.

Joanna Macy was a teacher of Buddhism and Deep Ecology whose later writings describe what she called The Great Turning, in which we begin to turn away from the industrial growth society and build a culture that can sustain healthy societies and ecosystems. Her writing, and that of writers like Rebecca Solnit, offer a useful perspective on hope for us – what Macy called, in her book of the same name, Active Hope. It is not an optimism that says “it’s gonna be OK” and allows us to wait in passive expectation for things to get better. It is not something we have, but instead something we do. It is acknowledging the actions that are still possible and working to bring about change, even if it’s little by little. I strongly recommend her writings and her work that she called “The Work That Reconnects”.