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How should we think about aging when the impacts of climate change can make the future feel so uncertain? That’s a question Sarah Ray, professor and chair of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt, has been helping her students consider. Though climate anxiety can cause some to feel overwhelmed, Ray has tips for how to minimize doom loops and inaction. How to Age Up co-hosts Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan talk about how current climate concerns compare to the existential crises of previous generations, and how to practice hope during uncertain times.

The following is a transcript:

Natalie Brennan: What did you want to be when you grew up?

Yasmin Tayag: Honestly, Tomb Raider.

Brennan: I hate to have to admit I have no idea what that is

Tayag: Natalie! The iconic video game Lara Croft: Tomb Raider? Angelina Jolie’s best movie role? She’s a hot archeologist who travels around the world searching for lost artifacts and fighting off enemies.

Brennan: I’m obsessed. That’s actually perfect for you. The next logical step in your science-reporting journey.

Tayag: It’s still kind of my dream job.

Brennan: Hey—I believe in you! :)

Tayag: I’m Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer with The Atlantic.

Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, producer at The Atlantic.

Tayag: This is How to Age Up.

[Music ends.]

Tayag: Natalie, what was your dream job?

Brennan: I don’t know that growing up I had a dream job.

Tayag: That’s very Gen Z of you.

Brennan: What do you mean? Like, in a “I don’t dream of labor” way?

Tayag: No; I’ve just been thinking a lot about how your generation struggles to imagine the future.

Brennan: And can you blame us?

Tayag: No. But it’s something I think about with younger generations, too—I worry about the future of my son, Jaime, a lot.

Brennan: Yeah. I mean, economically, politically—most of all because of climate change—I was already worried about a lot of these things when I was a teen, and that feeling has just become more intense as I’ve gotten older. So, yeah. I imagine that kids now, who are constantly exposed to fears about the climate from such a young age, picture an even bleaker future.

Tayag: Right. But when you just rattled off that list, what happened to you?

Brennan: What do you mean? Like, how do I feel right now?

Tayag: Yeah.

Brennan: Awful. Like, frozen.

Tayag: And who wouldn’t be? Psychiatrists have given what you’re feeling a name: It’s called climate anxiety. And in the same way in therapy you may work through paralysis in regards to your personal anxiety, scientists are starting to think through, psychologically, how we could move through our climate anxiety.

Sarah Ray: ’Cause I’m that weird person who’s like, No, we don’t need action. We just need better thoughts. It’s not about 10 things you can do to save the planet. There’s a hundred million books out there. This is like 10 things you can think about to save the planet.

Tayag: Natalie, that’s Dr. Sarah Ray. She’s a professor and chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt. And she studies how emotions play into our thinking about the climate. She wrote the book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety—and she pointed to one moment that really launched her into action about all this.

[Music.]

Ray: I was trying to do an activity with my students. Where I kind of guided them through almost a meditation, if you will, which was my first time ever doing anything weird like that. I was like, “This is gonna be a little weird. You gotta just go with me on this.” And I had them kind of close their eyes and visualize a future that they would desire.

Tayag: Mm-hmm.

Ray: A future where everything that they had hoped for and worked for in their life had come to manifest and come to pass. And I asked them to feel it and smell it and taste it and all that. And the whole thing is very embodied, which is unusual for me at the time. And when the exercise ended, I expected them to come back after this trance I’d put them in, and have all these visions of utopia to share. And then, of course, what we would do is sort of backward design: “Okay, what’s the very next step to kind of get from here to there? Now that you’ve visualized what you want, let’s start moving in that direction”—instead of constantly being gripped by fear of a future that they dread. Right? So with climate change and all of the things that are happening, one of the things I noticed with my students is that they didn’t desire their future. They were afraid of it.

Tayag: Oh!

Ray: And so they turned to me, and they said, Sarah, we didn’t, we couldn’t really imagine a future. We don’t have any tools for imagining what we would desire, and all we could imagine was, like, either blankness or the apocalypse. That they had seen in the most recent whatever, video or film or whatever that they’d seen, or news, right?

Tayag: Yeah.

Ray: So that was a real moment: a wake-up call for me. I thought, How can we expect these young people to do all the work we want them to do, to fix all the problems that are out there, if they don’t even want to exist in that future? [Laughter.]

Tayag: Yeah.

Ray: They don’t even desire anything about that future.

Tayag: It’s just so grim.

Ray: It was really depressing.

Tayag: It’s really depressing!

Ray: Yeah. I cried. Yeah; that was the first moment I thought, This is really bad.

Tayag: So what happened next?

Ray: So it wasn’t just that they were living in a scary world; it was that they were getting information about a scary world in a very particular way. This was maybe 10 or 12 years ago.