Done Giving up?
This is me, struggling with hope, whilst the polycrisis is making it's case against it.
I’m not done with the world. I’m done waiting for it to change without us.
I keep hoping things will shift without me demanding it. What if that’s the trap? The hope we're used to floats, feels nice, does nothing (stay calm, stay patient, stay put). I'm not interested in staying anything. 89% of us, worldwide, want real change, not incremental fixes. Almost none of us know that. We each think we're the only one, so we've stopped saying it out loud. Keeping this a secret is costing us. Researchers call this pluralistic ignorance: most of us think we're the exception. We're not.
This is Us!
Adults Done Giving Up
I used to think change was a massive, untakeable step. Then I met people taking small ones, on purpose, without knowing it would work. None of them had a plan, or waited for permission.
I’m Serena.
There's a photo of me when I was five, holding an umbrella. It looks like it's raining but it isn't. My grandmother is pouring water from above to create the illusion. I didn't know the difference. I could feel the water, so I stood there braced, holding my umbrella as though it mattered.
We don't just respond to reality. We respond to what we believe we're standing in. How much energy do we spend bracing for storms? Conserving. Protecting. Building systems to shield ourselves from collapse when the storm might not even be real. Someone's just pouring water and we've mistaken it for weather.
Climate collapse is real. Inequality is real. But I think many of us are solving the wrong problem. We're preparing for what we think is inevitable when we could be creating what's possible. We're conserving energy for endurance when we could be channelling it towards imagination.
A child holding an umbrella in manufactured rain isn't wrong, she's responding rationally to her perception. Once you see the grandmother with the watering can, everything changes. Not “How do I survive this storm?” but “What am I actually standing in?” Not because the water stops, but because you realise you have more choices than you thought.
