Protecting Your Mental Health & Emotional Wellbeing Amid Polycrisis, Responding to ICE, 'Bullying Bari Weiss,' & The Futures of Journalism - Anya Kamenetz | Rapid Response #14

If you’re paying attention at all, everything feels topsy-turvy at best, more likely outright depressing. Unidentified masked ICE agents are still brutalizing and snatching people off the street, free speech protections are being violated with abandon, the government shutdown continues to wreak havoc, most visible with recent news that SNAP benefits, relied on by 40 million Americans, are set to expire on Nov. 1. Then there’s the $300 million ballroom being built in the site formerly known as the East Wing of the White House, the fact that Donald Trump is suing his own Justice Department to the tune of $230 million, the cumulative $40 billion that’s been sent to bail out Argentina…and I’m literally just writing the stuff that comes to the top of my head as I sit here.

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Of course, all of that pales in comparison to what has actually been keeping me up at night the past few months: this report, which asserts that without dramatic change we’re headed for a 3°C+ world by 2050—less than 25 years from this moment. This doesn’t just mean life but a little bit hotter; it means the unraveling of the biosphere. For most of the life on this planet, us included, 3°C+ is a death sentence.

Our brains and hearts weren’t designed for this onslaught of news. That’s not a way of saying that we should bury our heads in the sand—we don’t have that luxury—but it does mean that all of us could use some guidance on how to sustain our mental health and emotional wellbeing while we commit ourselves to the work of adaptation and more liberatory futures.

This is the vital work Anya is conducting for her forthcoming book, and (though it sounds weird to put it this way after what I just wrote!) why I was excited to speak with her. What are the ways we should be thinking about mental and emotional resilience, what are practices we should consider for ourselves, and what are the dimensions we need to understand about how this is impacting young people? We discuss all of that and a whole lot more—including the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on young people and an anecdote involving Bari Weiss, now the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News.

BIO: Anya Kamenetz speaks, writes, and thinks about thriving and caring for others on a rapidly changing planet. Her newsletter on these topics is The Golden Hour. She covered education for many years including for NPR, where she co-created the podcast Life Kit: Parenting. Her last book was The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now. Kamenetz is currently an advisor to the Aspen Institute and the Climate Mental Health Network, working on new initiatives at the intersection of children, well-being, education, and climate change. Her next book, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, is about how to cope with the world right now.

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