Thanks so much for joining me.
Launching this newsletter, like so many things in life, is a leap of faith. It’s a running jump from where I’ve been and where I am to somewhere still formless and hypothetical. To state the obvious, it’s an act of creation, with all the labour and uncertainty and excitement and potential that entails.
It’s nerve-wracking to put yourself out there. To put myself out here. I’m sure to make mistakes, fumble the ball, get things wrong. It’s easy to feel like I shouldn’t even try. Just go back to the way things were.
But the way things were wasn’t working.
So first, and foremost, and forever — thank you for your eyeballs and your time. I’ll try to honour them with each publication. I’m going to experiment to find what works, which really means finding out how I can best enlighten, assist, and entertain. I can’t do this without you, so I’m counting on your honest criticism, questions, and ideas.
Ok — on with the show!
I’m kicking things off with a reflective introduction. I figured perhaps you should know a bit about me and why I’m writing before I start lobbing links each week(ish). If this gives you some ideas about how I might be able to serve you, I hope you’ll let me know.
Burning Out on a Warming Planet
“Maybe you feel it too: a creeping sense that the world is going haywire. A darkness spreading across the horizon of our aspirations for our families, our communities, our world. An emerging dismay that possibilities for a good future, for ourselves and our kids, are ebbing away.” — Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon, “Commanding Hope” (2020).
I’ll be tempted to cite Tad a lot in the weeks and months ahead. I had the great fortune of studying with him during my Master’s. Reading The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down in the late aughts validated so much of my intuitive sentiment about the state of play in the world. I wasn’t crazy. Things really were bad and on a rollercoaster track to far worse. And we were missing our big shots to make things better.
Now, almost a year after reports of a new disease began circulating on Weibo and Twitter, I suspect we’re all a lot more familiar with that itchy sense of gloom and uncertainty, especially as we try so hard to hold together some trappings of normalcy.
Like many “climate people”, I’ve lived with these feelings for a long time — the intuitive dread that world-changing crisis lurks on the horizon coupled with the maddening loneliness of Cassandra, cursed with glimpses of an avoidable future but powerless to steer us off its rocky shoals.
And all the while busy — oh so busy — just getting by.
By the time I started my Master’s, I was already well-educated in both planetary distress and personal precarity.
I became an activist in the early 2000s. I was already concerned about the state and fate of the planet and society (my mom would say I “came by it honestly”), but the disinformation, destabilization, and predictable horrors of the Iraq invasion and the Orwellian War on Terror politicized and ‘woke’ me.
I’ll never forget what I felt seeing Hanz Blix, then chief weapons inspector for the UN, have his expert opinion swept aside in a wave of opportunistic jingoism — a dark prelude to the politicization of knowledge to come.
Iraq is cooperating. There are no WMDs. They’re going to invade anyway and destabilize the entire region. So many will die.
Anger. Fear. Despair.
Neglecting my formal studies, I spent most of my time on campus with the newspaper in the library, or in the glow of the language lab’s computers, my ADHD eyes voracious for indy news and message boards. I brought friends to marches, rallies, and teach-ins.
I changed majors, but my grades tanked as I found greater purpose, community, and identity outside of the classroom.
I also struggled to manage work and school. I remember the burning resentment that a full shift at the coffee shop cost me 8 hours of my life (plus travel), but only paid me $56 before tax. It felt like a cruel joke. Entrusted with a key and the responsibility of closing up alone, I would scrounge under the crumb-laden couch cushions to add a few coins to my meagre tip jar.
I joined Greenpeace around 2004. I started as a sun-kissed street canvasser and soon became a team leader. It was a step up. I was still angry, fearful, and despairing, but now, at least, I had a community.
I made lifelong friends, each of us from different backgrounds, reckoning together with our shared trauma — seeing the crash ahead and struggling to make anyone notice.
I spent 3 years trying to get people across Toronto to understand and care about climate change, forest loss, and food security, holding fast to a binder and my best smile.
Then, I landed the first of a series of contracts working with the campaign teams out of the office. Over the next few years, I took on roles in research, outreach, advocacy, and direct action.
This was an exciting jump. I helped with reports about forest fires and global warming, and the viability of clean energy in Canada. I bird-dogged politicians, trying to put clean energy on the 2007 electoral agenda, and in 2009, I worked on a national campaign to show legislators that “Renewable Is Doable” with a “Blueprint for Canada’s Clean Energy Future.”
Under the direction of a former Navy Frogman, I also helped renovate a warehouse that would become Greenpeace’s Canadian base of ‘direct action’ training and operations. I got arrested a couple of times as part of a campaign pushing the global tissue industry to improve their supply-chain standards. And I helped train and support other front-line volunteers in Non-Violent Direct Action (NVDA).
I thought seriously about going to sea aboard one of Greenpeace’s ships. Instead, as NGO funding shrank amid the Global Financial Crisis, I felt I had to jump ship to keep growing. I got a serving job in a busy, boozy bar and went back to school.
“Few millennials are surprised. We don’t expect jobs, or the companies that provide them, to last. So many of us live under storms of debt threatening to swallow us up at any moment. We’re exhausted by the labor of trying to maintain some sort of equilibrium: for our kids, in our relationships, in our financial lives. We’ve been conditioned to precarity.” — Anne Helen Peterson, “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” (2020).
I had to adapt quickly to the thumping frenzy of nightlife work. I’d always been a dive-bar guy — I didn’t know much about top 40 or sportsball or expensive beer. But I managed.
From 2008-2012, I served up an unholy volume of nachos and booze, chased tequila-fueled dine-and-dashers, and helped break up fights between our ever-charming guests.
I also helped advocate and agitate for basic fairness and safety. It was a tough job. One day, we were asked to work when the bar was so thick with varnish fumes it made a server vomit. Shortly before I left for grad school, there was a violent armed robbery, likely set up by former security guards, one of whom was rumoured to be our manager’s coke dealer.
Drinking and smoking like I had something to prove, I emerged into the daylight as the top graduate of Glendon College’s bilingual political science department and was accepted to the cutting-edge Master’s program at the Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA). Tad and another great mind, Simon Dalby, supervised my research into ‘geo-engineering’ — proposals to deliberately intervene in the climate system as a desperate, dangerous response to the human-caused destabilization that’s already underway.
I also got involved with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a think tank in Waterloo. I worked on security trends in the Asia-Pacific, scenario analysis on China, the shifting geopolitics of the melting Arctic, and the changing nature of diplomacy. I shared research with the Calgary Centre for Strategic Studies, the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, and Harvard’s Interdisciplinary Summer School on Geoengineering.
I thought about doing my PhD, but I was demoralized by the academic job market. I saw friends smarter than I was stringing together teaching contracts and struggling to get by.
So although getting into the BSIA had felt like a triumphant escape from precarity, I burned out and fell back into it.
By this point, I had poured years of energy into thinking about our uncertain future, but through a period where it often felt impossible to get people to care about the risks and crises bearing down on us. I’d been carrying around tortured visions of a future in which runaway climate change destabilizes … everything. Our food systems. Our economies. Our politics. Our societies. Our homes.
All the while, like so many folks, I had been trying my best to get by with a long line of short-term contracts, precarious jobs, and crummy apartments. I was carrying some intergenerational trauma too — the violent, living legacy of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy that scaffolded the Jamaican half of my family’s story in particular.
So, toward the end of my MA, I ran out of funding, got anxious and depressed, and struggled to complete my final work as this all started to catch up with me. I already battled with insomnia after the bar and a run-in with bedbugs, and it began getting worse.
When there was a family crisis back in Toronto, I was secretly grateful for the chance to move home to take care of them. Sure, I was 30, sleeping on the couch, and couldn’t afford a coffee, but saying “I’m taking care of my family” felt better than “I’m broke and depressed and can’t find a steady job.”
As I limped across the finish line with my writing, the then-Director of my program threw me a lifeline, recruiting me as his assistant on the Re-examining Japan in Global Context Project. The project convenes Japanese and Western experts to examine decades-long challenges in Japan (like energy scarcity, demographic aging, and disaster preparedness) that are of increasing relevance in Canada and elsewhere. I’m still gratefully involved 6 years later.
However, although it’s been a feast for the mind, the project was not meant to provide anything approaching a full-time income. For a time, I tried to string a living together with freelance editing and as an ESL teacher while sending around job applications.
Looking back, perhaps I should have kept hustling for full-time work, saved up money, and gotten into therapy. Instead, desperate for an escape from my parents’ couch, my precarious teaching job, and my own perverse sense of failure, I signed up for the LSAT and got into UofT law.
Law school was a crushing slog. I had hoped to find community, but felt disconnected from my peers, many of whom came from unfathomably (to me) privileged backgrounds, and all of whom were competing for the same limited grades, volunteer positions, and jobs. Immediately drowning in debt (tuition started around $35k/year in my first year, and was almost $40k by the time I graduated), I took the first job I could land, which happened to be on Bay Street.
The big corporate law firm I joined gave me good training and a great salary. I grew as a professional and learned a lot. But after 3 years of unrelenting pressure and 10 months of workweeks that occasionally topped out around 100 hours, I felt like I was dying.
This was a new level in the circles of burnout hell. The most profound exhaustion ever. Chronic pain, insomnia, and unrelenting brain fog. Numbness and despair.
After a few visits to the doctor, I was relieved to find I wasn’t dying. I was just #ded.
Big Law and Big Law School felt like they demanded every waking moment, every joule of effort just to keep from falling behind. When my contract ended in May, I was relieved that the pandemic had spared me from hireback (and also felt guilty and ungrateful for feeling this way).
And then, the long, slow struggle up out of the muck. Maybe you know the one.
I started dragging myself for walks every day to clear my head and get my aching, tin-man body moving again following the desk marathon. I made short lists of small tasks to help me “win the day” and drip some dopamine back into my brain. I began reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and reconnecting with myself in the process. I browsed Psychology Today for agonizing weeks and made a list of therapists to email. I started reading for pleasure again, listening to podcasts, and writing little notes to myself on my phone. Some of these notes would become Crisis Century.
If it’s not clear by now, this project is profoundly therapeutic for me. I’ve started this newsletter, in part, so that I can find my voice, my sense of connection, and my sense of purpose again. However, lest this all read as hopelessly self-indulgent, I hope to offer you something as well.
In re-working this piece and flipping through Anne Helen Peterson’s promising new book, I’m really struck that burnout has simply become part of the contemporary condition for many of us.
It’s hard for me to talk about burnout without reflecting on the constant, gnawing despair of living through slow-motion catastrophes like ecological breakdown and economic dysfunction while the adults in the room shuffle the chairs and pretend the house isn’t on fire.
In the age of global warming and precarity, I’ve been working through burnout for much of my life.
But now, mid-30s, too many degrees in hand, I can’t deny that I am one of the adults in the room, and it’s my responsibility to call it like I see it in the hopes that others don’t feel as alone as I have.
There’s been a sort of jarring dissonance to much of the 21st century.
I felt it watching the invasion of Iraq on trumped up intelligence. I felt it serving drinks in a busy party bar, while the wall-sized TV played footage of BP’s uncapped well bellowing fossil energy into the Gulf. I felt it on my hurried trips to the office kitchen to grab a snack for “Wellness Wednesday”, hoping not to get ambushed with a new assignment on the way, and later being told to “keep working until you can’t work anymore.”
This dissonance hurts all of us, but it will continue for as long as we try to cling to ways of doing, ways of thinking, and ways of being that are not working.
If we don’t change, our personal and planetary burnout will get worse.
Exhausting as it’s been to try to stare into the gale, I’ve been far worse off for the times I’ve tried to ignore it.
Reflecting on my wayward wandering through life so far, I think a few lessons stand out when it comes to facing burnout on a warming planet.
Don’t Look Away From the Storm
From credit card debt to climate change, we’re always worse off when we ignore our problems. I’m not prescribing doomscrolling. Being engaged in the world doesn’t mean you should keep your eyes glued to misery and anger all the time — we have to nourish ourselves. But unplugging from the stark reality of our challenges for long periods (as I felt I had to in law school) wasn’t nourishing — it just made me feel disconnected and adrift.
For one thing, we guarantee terrible outcomes by ignoring complex & long-term challenges like pandemic disease risk, or climate change, or racism. Along the way, ignorance or willful blindness, while promising bliss, actually create dissonance that can impose a massive cognitive and emotional toll.
Asking ourselves or each other to pretend things are ok can make our burnout worse. We have to work through our feelings about this collective trauma.Community Matters
I’ve been lucky. At key points in this journey, I’ve found people who lifted me up, and found my own strength in raising them up in return.
Greenpeace became my family — we were in it together. So too did my colleagues at the bar — we had to look out for each other to get through. Once again with my Master’s cohort — all of us were driven to help each other better understand the world so that we could better shape its future. I struggled, in the end, because folks had dispersed to jobs and internships and I was one of the few left in Waterloo. Similarly, law school was crushing, in part, because I desperately hoped to find this sense of community again, but failed. For one thing, we were all too busy pretending we were ok.
Find your community of people who are wrestling with the same beasts, and you won’t feel so alone. They’re probably already around you — your coworkers, your family, your friends. You just need to have the courage to acknowledge the fears and stresses that so many of us are feeling (see no. 1). By helping each other, you’ll be able to channel your struggle into shared meaning. And you’ll feel more centred in who you are.
Your Purpose is Your Power
You’ve stared into the gale and connected with your community, so now what? You can’t change the underlying crisis conditions overnight. Crisis is the new normal, remember? The pandemic isn’t going to go away tomorrow, and it’s not the only crisis we’re facing — so what can we do?
We can try to be deliberate about how we feel about *waves hands* all this. What point shall we make with this moment in our story?
Sometimes your purpose is clear, and this is an easy question to answer. When I was at Greenpeace, we were out to save the world. Even though it was overwhelming and exhausting, it felt incredible. When I was working in the bar, dealing with long hours, angry guests, and ambivalent management, our purpose was taking care of each other — keeping each other safe and getting through, together. Community can be a powerful source of purpose, after all.
Sometimes finding your purpose is much harder. But we can choose what stories we tell ourselves.
When I burned out at the end of my Master’s and moved back home, I had two stories to choose from. In the first, I was a flailing, broke, shameful failure, sleeping on the couch while my cohort went off to prestigious internships and jobs. In the other story, I was doing what I could to help my family (and take care of myself) in a time of need.
The second story helped me get through.
I’m trying to do the same things again now: finding authenticity, community, and purpose in writing Crisis Century for you. If you’ve read this far — thank you — and I sincerely hope you’ll stick with me in the weeks and months ahead.
I expect that this newsletter will be weekly-ish. I may take two weeks before the next one. But now that you know who I am, there’s a lot more I’d like to share.
I’ll be experimenting with content. My plan is to curate a mix of news and analysis, as well as original commentary and reflection like this.
But I’d really like to hear from you — what do you think so far? What questions do you have? Is there an article you’d like to see? What type of content would be helpful? What can Crisis Century do for you?
And if you’re not subscribed yet…
Until next time,
Aladdin
“I felt it on my hurried trips to the office kitchen to grab a snack for “Wellness Wednesday”, hoping not to get ambushed with a new assignment on the way, and later being told to “keep working until you can’t work anymore.”
This dissonance hurts all of us, but it will continue for as long as we try to cling to ways of doing, ways of thinking, and ways of being that are not working”
Wow... this is the type of content and honestly that would make me read every week. How can people address these global issues if they aren’t in a headspace to process them? What happens when the world is too burnt out to solve their own problems? They are questions worth pondering and too often overlooked. I am glad you are addressing this!
Thanks for the nice compliment in there. Good luck with this venture; crisis indeed!