There’s no avoiding it: Things feel pretty bleak. To witness venture-capital-fueled AI domination, democracy’s steady drift toward authoritarianism, state-sanctioned genocide, and, of course, the collapse of one climate boundary after another, is to encounter a profound, at times overwhelming, sense of despair.

But what if the path forward lies in accepting, rather than resisting, this despair? In his new book, Learning to Live in the Dark: Essays in a Time of Catastrophe, climate activist and journalist Wen Stephenson argues that the only way to confront the crises of our time is to meet this despair head-on—to see it for what it is, to feel it, and to accept what it means about where we are and where we must go. In this episode, Wen discusses how he's dealt with his own climate despair and how we can all "live into this era of climate and political and social catastrophe…while holding on to our humanity.”

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