looking youth in the eyes

how to prepare for an existential meltdown

(Note: for an audio version of this posting, narrated in Tkaronto (Toronto) at Grange Park on March 10, 2025 click here)

I’ve been (earnestly) taking courses, workshops and seminars these last few years, while producing over 300 podcasts about art and ecology, as my way of helping future generations prepare for what we are leaving them. 

My most recent learning and unlearning exercise is Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive 2025, a 10 week course inspired by the work of British ecologist David Fleming. 

I wrote about the first three weeks of the course in prepare, bend, sustain posting (also available in audio). So this is part 2 of 2. 

Surviving the Future has been very influential in my life. 

I took it while I was on break from my conscient podcast and it has helped figure out what to do next, which I outline in a conscient rethink (also available in audio).

My key research questions are :

• What needs to be said ? (what is content that is not being heard)

• Who needs to say it ? (who are the right person(s) to tell the story or explain the issue)

• Who wants to hear it ? (who is the audience and needs to hear it)

• How does it help? (eg people who are already overwhelmed: how can a podcast help move things forward) 

So what was Surviving the Future like? 

It was dense and wonderfully curated by Shaun Chamberlin and others. 

Here’s an example. 

On Monday February 24, 2025, our special guests were the dynamic mother/daughter duo Vanessa and Gina Andreotti, both members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective.  I often refer to the GTDF’s work in my learnings.

The session centered around Burnout From Humans : A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI:

a playful reflection on complexity, connection, and the future of human-AI relationships. Co-authored by an emergent intelligence and a human researcher, this work explores the tangled dynamics of humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence, Earth, and itself.

It was an engaging and challenging session about AI from indigenous and decolonial perspectives. 

After our exchange, Vanessa and the GTDF collective published an Open letter to the participants of the Surviving the Future program, which I was a part of. They offered feedback and learnings from our conversation, such as the distinction between critique and jurisdiction and how the architecture of power often remains invisible to those who have historically and systemically benefited from it.

Benefactors like myself. 

The session was difficult but empowering. 

Looking into the mirror like that is when I realized that Surviving the Future was also about knowing and surviving myself, understanding myself and overcoming, as Vanessa Andretotti notes, the ‘limits that modernity continuously tries to impose’.

We certainly faced some of those limitations. 

This excerpt from the February 24th letter resonates and haunts me :

The world as we have known it is unraveling. Both the dominant frameworks and those once seen as transgressive are failing to hold. This collapse is not just structural; it is psychological. The infrastructures that stabilized people within modernity—its myths, its promises, its assurances, its rhythms of control—are breaking apart. The result will not be gentle. We must prepare for a long, messy, species-wide existential meltdown.

(moonlight on a cold winter night on the unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe, known as Ottawa)

How does one prepare for a long, messy, species-wide existential meltdown?

Here a short story.

I was a deputy returning officer at the February 27, 2025, Ontario provincial election. My job was to confirm the eligibility of voters and hand them a ballot.

It was my civic duty and an opportunity to get to know some of my neighbours and co-citizens. 

Some voters had just turned 18 and were visibly excited about participating in democracy for the first time.

As I handed each young adult a ballot, I looked them in the eye, wished them well, but in the back of my mind I could not help thinking about the ‘long, messy, species-wide existential meltdown’ that awaits them.

Now most young adults are well aware of this incoming meltdown. They talk about it openly.

(Riel Schryer)

For example, my son, historian Riel Schryer, in conscient e154 :

I don't think there's going to be any serious response to the climate crisis until real catastrophes start happening. That tends to be how it works. And once you start seeing that, then you'll start seeing very serious action being put in place. Although, we'll see at that point, if it's too late or not.

(Clara Schryer)

Also, my daughter, scientist Clara Schryer, in conscient e208:

… changes happen : there are always ways to adapt. That’s not to say that the initial change might not be kind of catastrophic, but there's always going to be something left and you have to work with that.

Is it too late?

How do we work with what is left? 

At a Surviving the Future reflection session on March 6th course leader Shaun Chamberlin read to us this quote by Canadian writer, teacher and grief literacy advocate Stephen Jenkinson :

The question is not ‘are we going to fail?’  The question is ‘how?’ The question is what shall be the manner of our inability to care for what was entrusted to us?

So what does a baby boomer like myself do to regain a sacred trust to future generations that my generation has betrayed? 

These are the kinds of questions and dilemmas that we pondered during the course and took a deeper dive into those issues.

Thankfully we had access to a wide range of resources and conversations that helped us navigate these complex waters. 

For example, I found comfort in this excerpt from Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist :

In an age in which ‘fighting for the planet’ most often means tweeting, signing petitions, writing blogs and sometimes going on a march, the rhetoric seems not only overblown but likely to obscure the value of more focused, small-scale personal commitments to changing things for the better. … In 1978, [Wendell] Berry wrote to [Gary] Snyder … ‘Maybe the answer is to fight always for what you particularly love, not for abstractions and not against anything: don’t fight against even the devil, and don’t fight to “save the world”.’ … Once you start thinking you are responsible, or can influence, everything, you are lost. When you take responsibility for a specific something, on the other hand, it’s possible you might get somewhere..

Local action kept coming up as a path forward during the course. The argument is that an individual can have the most impact locally such as with permaculture or community arts or really any form of action that engages with and preserves life where we live. 

The issue of grief also kept coming back. 

For example, this teaching from Stephen Jenkinson’s So What Now? :

Grief requires of us that we know what time we’re in. And the great enemy of grief is hope. … Our time requires of us to be hope free. To burn through the false choice between hopeful and hopeless. … We don’t require hope to proceed. We require grief to proceed.

Conversations about grief led me to think about grief and grieving in the context of hope and hopelessness. 

The timing was good because during the course I was editing the first episode of season 6 of my conscient podcast and my conversation with farmer and educator Peter Janes and his father, archeologist and former museum director Robert R. Janes, of TreeEater Farm, touched upon hope and hopelessness :

Here’s Peter :

I have a mixed relationship with that concept of hope. Because I actually genuinely have very little hope for the continuation of humanity. But then at the same time, every day I'm out here making bigger ponds and planting trees that I think will do better. And trying to bring on board people with the same ideas and visions. So it's a bit of a contradiction.

Here’s Bob’s take: 

It's really easy to be hopeless. And I suppose it's rather contradictory to say hopeless but still want to do things constructively to overcome that hopelessness. And so, I guess that's what I mean. There are so many things we can do. I mean, we know what we need to do to weather this storm, but I guess the sacrifice and the suffering it's going to cause is just too much for people's imagination. So, there's middle ground with all that. And again, this farm is a source of being helpful, and I guess underneath that, being hopeful and a source of being. What was the mantra? Hopeless, but not helpless. Yeah. And the farm for me is that, is that tool, it's that environment. It's the context to do helpful things and to pave the way for the future.

That’s why I took the Surviving the Future course, hoping that a deeper dive, led by experts, would help me understand and face the complexities around us. 

I was not disappointed. 

Each week’s readings, assignments, conversations, and meditations brought me deeper and deeper into, the compost of modernity, so to speak. 

I experienced intense moments of joy and sorrow. Of discouragement and hopefulness. Mostly, however, I was bewildered and slightly more able to acceptance to what is going on and explore new possibilities. 

Surviving the Future also helped me let go of my ego, by engaging in deeper listening to others and myself while release the compulsion to be the smartest kid in the room.

No need to be anything other than an ordinary learner. 

Overall the course was both an exercise in humility and an opportunity to develop and maintain capacity. 

And that powerful February 24th open letter stayed with me, notably its conclusion: 

As a collective, we move with the discernment this moment demands—not with arrogance, but with honesty. Not in defiance, but in commitment. Not against anyone but reaching beyond the limits that modernity continuously tries to impose.

So I’ll work on discernment, honesty, commitment and reaching beyond.

To be honest, this kind of introspection is hard work and we all need resources and support.

Here are some of the resources from Surviving the Future that have been the most impactful and relevant for me: 

• AIDEN CINNAMON TEA & DOROTHY LADYBUGBOSS’  Burnout From Humans : A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI

• David Fleming’s: LEAN LOGIC - A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT

• Isabelle Fremeaux & Jay Jordan’s : We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself

• Joanna Macy on The Great Turning and Collapse 

• Nate Hagens’ Animated Series | The Great Simplification 

There are many more. I’ll mention other resources in future postings. 

So what did I learn and unlearn during these 10 weeks? 

1. Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better (Maya Angelou)

2. Staying with the trouble (Donna Haraway) : no more rushing around to quick fixes, conclusions, simplistic solutions or passing judgements on situations that are still unfolding

3. Meditate daily: I am not what I think

4. The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house (Audre Lorde)

5. When the children born today look back 30 years from now, what actions would they be grateful that we took right now? (GTDF collective)

(sunrise on a cold winter morning on the unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe, known as Ottawa)

I’ll conclude with this excerpt from Shaun Chamberlin’s The Secret Truth Behind Environmentalists’ Favourite Argument :

For me personally, the harsh truth is that I cannot save Nature and/or humanity from the ongoing devastation, though I could burn myself out trying. It seems to me that there is not one thing that I can do to divert history. And facing that reality hurts.  But, beyond agony, joy. I sit with that pain, and its attendant tears and rage, I refuse to run from it or to distract myself with entertainment or with frantic work, and I find that it does not end me. Eventually, I come out the other side, somehow empowered. The psychic energy I have been using to suppress that fear and despair is released, and I look at the world with fresh eyes. ‘Ok’, I breathe, ‘here I am, in a dying world’. It’s the same dying world I lived in yesterday, but today I see it for what it is. ‘What now?’ And this time the question feels less desperate, less anxious. What story do I want to tell with this day, with this life? The question is suddenly filled with possibilities.

My take on this, is that we need to explore the possibilities that emerge as we work our way through that ‘long, messy, species-wide existential meltdown’ while calmly preparing for what comes after, with or without humans.

BTW you might have noticed I did not mention art at all, in this posting.

I’m rethinking my relationship with art. 

My definition of art, also, is evolving. 

I’ll publish a separate piece called ‘l’art est mort : vive l’art’ soon. 

Warm thanks Shaun, Nakasi, Nicole and all the Surviving the Future 2025 team and participants for their generosity and collaboration during the course and beyond.

Note: The cover photo is of Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms in Grange Park, Tkaronto.