There's No Such Thing as Climate Anxiety

What else are you supposed to feel at the end of the world?

Toby Jaffe is a writer published at the Baffler, American Prospect, New Republic, and elsewhere.

I have cried several times due to so-called climate anxiety. One instance was a few years ago in the aftermath of one of those hypomanic drenchings of rain and hail that seem to now occur regularly in the northeastern United States during the spring and summer months. I was inside of a library, struggling to write something or other and procrastinating on social media as the sky and its fury clanked on the big windows looking out on NJ-124 in Chatham, New Jersey.

It was the second such storm in a week's time, and the latest in a seemingly endless death parade of “unprecedented” climate events that summer. I couldn’t help but wonder how long this parade, sure to march on unabated, could be sustained before it would stress our political, economic, and social systems beyond functionality. This wonderment led me to Twitter, where scientists, activists, and shitposters alike were in full-blown panic mode, reacting to various climate emergencies around the world by setting short, finite timelines on the coming collapse of civilization and the extinction of all life on earth. That, or some variation of the “we’re so fucked” caption above whatever apocalyptic image or hockey-stick graph was making the rounds.

Later, outside the library, I called my friend. As soon as I started to speak, I began sobbing, struggling to speak. I remember feeling so angry about the unfairness of ecological catastrophe and about the treacherous uncertainty it exacted. All I wanted, really, was reassurance and certainty that this would all be ok in the end. And yes, absolutely: My friend lovingly validated my feelings and shared in the grief. But what I most longed for was impossible, it does not exist. In that void, in the realization that reassuring certainty as it relates to the climate crisis is a dangerous illusion, comes still more rage and more tears with nowhere to go.

Repressed grief breeds anxiety, and when I am not having one of my crying episodes or suffering one of my destabilizing panics, I am haunted by a dull but persistent doom cloud, a joyless, ungrounded specter set on devouring memories, erasing the future, and thus destabilizing my present.