Dirt: The indomitable human spirit
Ultimately, we learned (or at least some of us did) that if we look after each other, we can get through these kinds of things together. We learned the lesson that humans learn again and again about ourselves (and seem to need to learn again and again): that “the worst of times can often bring out the best in us.”56 We learned that resilience isn’t
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas.
Kim Stanley Robinson • Dystopias Now | Commune
Gallows humor is also a kind of hope. If we can still laugh, we can still hope. Not with a “things are going to be OK” kind of hope. But with a no-matter-how-terrible-things-are-they’re-somehow-still-OK kind of hope. That kind of hope requires a deep laugh, not a cheap laugh. The cheap, dismissive, don’t-go-there-just-keep-it-lite laughs are actual
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
An extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves is at large in the world, though it is hard to say how it will counteract the dead weight of neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, environmental destructions, and well-marketed mindlessness.