How to Age Up on a Warming Planet

Summary

Podcast Summary: How to Age Up on a Warming Planet

Podcast Information:

• Title: How to Age Up
• Host/Author: The Atlantic
• Description: The science around aging is expanding but are our cultural narratives keeping up?
• Episode: How to Age Up on a Warming Planet
• Release Date: May 12, 2025

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Introduction

In the thought-provoking episode titled "How to Age Up on a Warming Planet," hosted by Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan of The Atlantic, Dr. Sarah Ray, a professor and chair of the Environmental Studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt, delves into the intricate relationship between aging, climate change, and the psychological impacts these global challenges impose on individuals, especially the younger generations.

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Understanding Climate Anxiety

The conversation kicks off with the concept of Climate Anxiety, a term psychiatrists use to describe the paralyzing fear and dread individuals feel about the escalating climate crisis.

Dr. Sarah Ray (03:20): "Psychiatrists have given what you're feeling, a name. It's called Climate Anxiety."

Dr. Ray emphasizes that traditional therapeutic approaches may not suffice in addressing this unique form of anxiety, as it intertwines deeply with existential fears about the planet's future.

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The Impact on Younger Generations

Yasmin Tayag shares poignant insights about her concerns for her son Jaime, highlighting how the constant exposure to climate fears from a young age shapes a more pessimistic outlook on the future.

Natalie Brennan (02:41): "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."

This segment underscores the generational burden of climate change, where youth grapple with a future that seems increasingly uncertain and bleak.

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Comparing Climate Dread to Past Generational Traumas

A significant portion of the discussion contrasts climate anxiety with historical generational fears such as nuclear threats and wartime dread. Dr. Ray elucidates that while there are parallels, climate change poses a qualitatively different problem due to its pervasive and existential threat.

Dr. Sarah Ray (07:23): "It is a qualitatively different problem. And the reason why I would say so is because the very functioning of the entire biosphere is at stake."

Unlike discrete events like nuclear war, climate change is an ongoing, cumulative crisis that continuously erodes the foundational systems humans rely on.

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Coping Mechanisms and Solutions

Addressing climate anxiety requires innovative coping strategies. Dr. Ray introduces the concept of feeding what you want to grow, advocating for redirecting attention towards what one loves to counteract feelings of helplessness.

Dr. Sarah Ray (20:48): "It's very micro scale. This is not about taking shorter showers. This is about what am I paying attention to."

She suggests that nurturing personal passions and fostering community connections can sustain mental resilience and empower individuals to take collective action.

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The Role of Individual vs Collective Action

A recurring theme is the distinction between individualism and collective action. The hosts and Dr. Ray argue that while individual efforts are meaningful, collective action is paramount in combating climate change effectively.

Natalie Brennan (11:17): "The anxiety and anger that comes with feeling like society has decided that we're okay with our own destruction."

They highlight that joining groups and being part of larger movements not only amplifies impact but also alleviates feelings of isolation and inefficacy.

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Community and Social Engagement as a Solution

Building strong community ties emerges as a pivotal strategy. Dr. Ray shares examples of how fostering neighborly relationships can enhance resilience and create supportive networks essential for addressing large-scale issues like climate change.

Dr. Sarah Ray (31:58): "There's all kinds of ways that people are trying to create alternative models for how they would live."

Such engagements not only serve practical purposes during crises but also reinforce a sense of belonging and shared purpose.

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Economic Precarity and Climate Change

Dr. Ray points out that economic instability often takes precedence over climate concerns among younger individuals, exacerbating existing inequalities and making the climate crisis even more daunting.

Dr. Sarah Ray (29:00): "The number one thing is economic precarity. Number one. In fact, I would say that even overrides climate."

This intersectionality illustrates how climate change amplifies other societal issues, making comprehensive solutions even more critical.

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Alternative Perspectives and Escapism

The conversation also touches on escapism as a response to climate anxiety, such as the fascination with colonizing other planets. Dr. Ray critiques this mindset, arguing that it diverts attention from necessary actions on Earth.

Dr. Sarah Ray (35:49): "It's the opposite of what we need."

Such perspectives, while offering temporary solace, ultimately hinder collective efforts to mitigate climate change.

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Conclusion

The episode "How to Age Up on a Warming Planet" offers a nuanced exploration of the psychological toll of climate change and emphasizes the necessity of community, collective action, and redefining personal agency. By addressing climate anxiety head-on and fostering supportive networks, individuals can navigate the challenges of aging in an uncertain world more resiliently.

Yasmin Tayag (39:49): "It starts when you say we and know who you mean. And each day you mean one more."

This season of "How to Age Up" underscores that the path to a sustainable and psychologically healthy future lies in solidarity, mutual support, and proactive engagement with the pressing issues of our time.

Transcript

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

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[Natalie Brennan]

What did you want to be when you grew up?

[Yasmin Tayag]

Honestly? Tomb Raider.

[Natalie Brennan]

Oh. I have to admit, I have no idea what that is.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Natalie. The iconic video game Lara Tomb Raider?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

No.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Angelina Jolie's best movie role.

[Natalie Brennan]

Mm. Mm.

[Yasmin Tayag]

She's a hot archaeologist who travels around the world searching for lost artifacts and fighting off enemies.

[Natalie Brennan]

I'm obsessed. It's actually perfect for you. The next logical step in your science reporting journey.

[Yasmin Tayag]

It's still kind of my dream job.

[Natalie Brennan]

Hey, I believe in you.

[Yasmin Tayag]

I'm Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer with the Atlantic.

[Natalie Brennan]

And I'm Natalie Brennan, producer at the Atlantic.

[Yasmin Tayag]

This is how to age up. Natalie, what was your dream job?

[Natalie Brennan]

I don't know that growing up, I had a dream job.

[Yasmin Tayag]

That's very Gen Z of you.

[Natalie Brennan]

What do you mean? Like in a I don't dream of labor way? No.

[Yasmin Tayag]

I've just been thinking a lot about how your generation struggles to imagine the future.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yeah. I mean, can you blame us?

[Yasmin Tayag]

No. But it's something I think about with younger generations, too. Like, I worry about the future of my son Jaime a lot.

[Natalie 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.

[Yasmin Tayag]

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

[Natalie Brennan]

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

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah.

[Natalie Brennan]

Oh, awful. Like, frozen.

[Yasmin 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.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Because I'm that weird person who's like, no, we don't need action, we just need better thoughts. Like, it's not about how 10 things you can do to save the planet. There's 100 million books out there. This is like, 10 things you can think about to save the planet.

[Yasmin 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.

[Dr. Sarah 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. Like, this is going to be a little weird. You got to just go with me on this. And I had them kind of close their eyes and visualize a future that they would desire, a future that 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 visualize 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.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Oh.

[Natalie Brennan]

And.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

And so they turned to me and they said, sarah, we couldn't really imagine a future.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

We don't have any tools for imagining what we would desire. And all we could imagine was 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. News, right.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

And so that was a real moment, a wake up call for me that I thought, how can we expect these, 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? They don't even desire anything about that future.

[Yasmin Tayag]

It's just so grim.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

It's really depressing.

[Yasmin Tayag]

It's really depressing.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

And yeah, I cried. That was the first moment I thought, this is really bad.

[Yasmin Tayag]

So what happened next?

[Dr. Sarah 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 maybe 10 or 12 years ago. And the real shift towards all of us getting our news through social media and the real shift to making the algorithms reinforce negativity was really just beginning at that time. So that was the first step of trying to peel apart the layers of the onion. Are they gonna be able to live on a planet and grow food and breathe air and drink water? You know, and why would they have children in this world? And are they gonna retire? Can they have a job that doesn't just add to the problem? How will they pay the bills? Why even go to college in this kind of world? And that's something that, like, Greta Thunberg really brought to the fore when she was like, I'm not gonna go to school. Cause five years hence, when I get my degree, when I'm qualified to do anything about it, our planet will be radically different. And I don't wanna wait around for that. That kind of impatience was something that I was really starting to detect in them.

[Yasmin Tayag]

One thing I hear so much in conversations about youth and climate dread is that, you know, older people always say, oh, well, every generation had something to worry about. We had the nuclear threat, we had the wartime dread, and so on. Is climate dread different from those past experiences?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah, I think that there's a yes and no answer to that. The yes part of that answer is it is just the same as all those other really difficult generational traumas. In that the lessons that those folks learned by going through those experiences are things that young people need to get caught up on pretty quick. So I think about civil rights, or I think about, you know, the Holocaust, Vietnam War, all kinds of things that are. That in the last few generations we've heard a lot about. And these people who have. Who have been sort of activists or involved in resistance movements in these spaces, have had to overcome an incredible amount of stuff. They've had to sacrifice a lot. They've had to do the work without any evidence that it was gonna come out the way it did. The collective organizing skills, the kind of resilience and grit to do the work, the sense that the little things that you do, do matter a lot. Those kinds of things are what I call climate wisdom. They're like wisdom that we get from the elders. You know, we should take these tools from our elders who have gone through this stuff and ask them how they. How do they get through? How do they keep going? On the other hand, it is a qualitatively different problem. And the reason why I would say so is because the very functioning of the entire biosphere is at stake. And so all of the systems that humans rely on are going to be challenged and might, in fact, fall apart. Nuclear war might be something similar, like the annihilation of all life in one fell swoop. Feels scarier in a way than climate change, but it has the same kind of existential. The ability to grow food, to work, the ability to get water in our bodies. All of these things will be challenged, right? Yeah. Because the very capacity of the Earth to produce the materials on which human civilization relies to function is. Could be undermined. Is being undermined. It's happening. It's happening. It's already on its path.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Natalie, when I was talking with Professor Ray, that song I Melt with youh by Modern English was totally in my head. Do you know that one?

[Natalie Brennan]

Remind me I'll stop the world and.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Melt with you of course.

[Natalie Brennan]

I just wanted to make you say.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Well, it's actually about having sex. When a nuclear bomb drops.

[Natalie Brennan]

Oh, whoa.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. That's why they melt. And so the song came out in 1982 during the Cold War, and I imagine that the band grew up being bombarded with all this messaging about the nuclear threat. And so when I hear the song, it sounds to me like they just accepted total annihilation as a very real possibility.

[Natalie Brennan]

I don't want to downplay in any way the threat of nuclear war, but I do think that it's different. It's the threat of a possibility. It's something that could happen.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Whereas climate change is something that is.

[Natalie Brennan]

Happening, is happening every day, and feels like we're all walking around going about our days as the red button gets pushed with no alarm.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Right. And you think that the psychological impact is different.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yes. What is so different to me about the emotions of this moment is that people are trying to make sense of what we rationally know to be true about climate change. And then there's anger and confusion about why we aren't doing more to stop it.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Right. The anxiety and anger that comes with feeling like society has decided that we're okay with our own destruction.

[Natalie Brennan]

Exactly. And it feels sometimes like even if we were to do something, it would not be enough.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. That, in part, is climate anxiety in action. There are things that people can do, have been doing to limit that cognitive dissonance, to feel like their actions align with their beliefs. And it's something Professor Ray and I spoke a lot about.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Well, as you can, you maybe experience, as I was describing, why this was qualitatively a unique threat, it doesn't really land well with one's nervous system. Right. Like, you take that information in, whether or not that's the first time you've ever heard that stuff or you've been hearing it for a long time, the nervous system, in order to keep homeostasis and to feel like it can function and keep going in the day, doesn't take that in very well. And we have particular patterns in our bodies about what we wanna do about that. The obvious ones that you're probably most familiar with are like fight, flight or freeze. And I think that when young people are taking in this information, have been doing it for a long time, they figure out how to move from the kind of shock of it to integrating it, to figuring out how to do something about it. And that is a whole series of things that they have maybe gone through by the time they were 15 or 16. And then they try to translate this to somebody who maybe has never thought about it. And I think that that's where the stress of that amygdala of those people they're talking to, there's some empathy there, there's some grace there around. If this person's taking this in at all, that's taking a lot of courage. There's nothing about this information cognitively, in terms of our neuroscience, of our wiring in our brains, that can handle this. So it is actually far more natural for our brains to disavow, deny, put our heads in the sand. Because if you square this information with your daily life, there's a big cognitive dissonance, as they call it.

[Yasmin Tayag]

So what are the ways that we should be teaching young people to acknowledge their feelings of dread and fear in a healthy way?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

One of the things that's happening is that there's a whole movement of climate aware therapists to figure out new tools that they didn't have before. Because it's one thing to say uncertainty in your family, it's another thing to bring uncertainty of the planet into the therapy. I think a lot of my students, for example, will tell me that they brought this up in therapy and had their therapist tell them to stop consuming the news and to not worry about it. So that's not helpful. No. Right. Like, oh, that's just being told that your feelings are irrational. Right. And that's never a good technique.

[Yasmin Tayag]

And also that you have to completely detach from literally everything that's not exactly feasible.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

If the therapists themselves haven't figured out how to face this kind of stuff, you can see why that would be happening. But there is an alternative, right? And that alternative is let's look clear eyed about how bad things are and let's have that be a call to action. Because it turns out that the kind of debilitating effects of climate anxiety are assuaged most effectively not when we do an action that solves the problem, which is really what you'd think it would be like. This is a problem that can't be solved by any one person's actions. So why should I even do anything? That's what most young people feel, right? Like I'm not even gonna try. That particular assumption rests on the idea that if we did the action, our climate anxiety would be assuaged by fixing it. It turns out that the psychologists have studied this, show that this is not true. And the act of being in a group is actually the thing that alleviates anxiety and makes us feel efficacious, which is really an interesting and important tool, especially I think in a culture that's so individualistic. So Bill McKibben is sort of famous for saying, people constantly ask me all the time, you know, what's the one most important effective thing I can do as an individual? He always says the one most important thing you can do is not be an individual, not think of individualism as the mechanism by which this is gonna get accomplished. And it turns out from a psychology perspective, that's not just good for the planet, that's actually good for our mental health. So that's really, I think the key is how can we solve climate anxiety? Well, yeah, it'd be great to solve climate, that would be the main way, sure. But the fact that that feels impossible actually causes that depression loop to get. So I think when we're talking about how to teach young people or how to bring this up to young people. It's always with showing the models of how people are solving the problem. Always, always, always, because we're social creatures, psychologically, if we see other people doing things, we're way more likely to do something. And actually, it's an interesting piece of data that psychologists have also proved that the vast majority of Americans think that only like 30 or 40% of other Americans care about climate change when the number is more like 70 or 80%. So that right there accounts for a lot of our in. If we just think other people around us and our neighbors don't care, we're less likely to do stuff.

[Yasmin Tayag]

So I want to go back a tiny bit because I wanted to tease out a bit more, you know, the consequences of not correcting or not teaching people how to deal with their climate feelings. So what exactly happens from a psychological perspective when a person feels that an issue is just too big to conquer and, you know, how can we make that feel smaller?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Psychologists often call this concept pseudoinefficacy. And the definition of it is basically this. The negative feeling of not being able to solve the whole problem outweighs the positive feeling of being able to solve just a little part of it. With climate change, we're talking about this big, humongous, intractable problem that no one person could possibly touch. It's too big. I can't even face it. I'm going to go and binge Netflix. Right? I mean, that's. That's how climate change is being addressed right now. So there are sort of two solutions to this, right? One is to frame the problem in smaller chunks. How do we break it up into small chunks that any one person can feel like, oh, I can get up in the morning and have that sense of accomplishment that I finished a task by the end of the day? Because, as we know from nudge psychology that that creates a feedback loop of positive reinforcement. We're more likely to get up the next morning and do it again, do some more. It feels good. And sometimes that means that the work that we're doing has nothing to do with climate change. It has to do with getting to know our neighbors. It has to do with building community trust. It has to do with all kinds of things that are going to cumulatively add up to building more resilience for what's coming.

[Yasmin Tayag]

So frame things in smaller pieces. And you said there were two solutions.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah. The second dimension of solving this pseudo inefficacy puzzle is to see ourselves as much bigger than we actually are. And so a lot of what happens, sort of the way young people are raised is that the vast majority of what they're consuming is telling them that they don't have any power, that they don't have political power. And for the most part, unless they have a lot of money, they don't even have economic power. And so the sense of powerlessness, some people talk about this as learned powerlessness or manufactured powerlessness, which is basically saying we give up our power before we've even tried to exert it. And so what I try to do with young people is to show all the places that they do already have a lot of power. And it's not just economics. It's not even just politics. There's all kinds of social places and cultural places that they have power. They have power in being kind. They have power in being a role model. They have a power in throwing in their even the tiniest little bit of energy into a larger movement. When we are part of a larger movement, as part of a collective, we are magnified way more than just individual people. If you're feeling despair, you might be suffering from individualism, because really, the cure is seeing yourself as part of a larger group.

[Yasmin Tayag]

So, you know, once people feel like they have a little more agency, a little more power, what's a tool for people to use when they're ready to start thinking about how to get involved, what's a small step we can take?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

People often think of action as like, oh, I'm gonna ride my bike to work, or I'm gonna join this march, or I'm gonna call my representatives. These are all really important things, and I'm not dismissing that, But I am trying to break it down to even. How do you even get to the place where you could do that? For me, my favorite one, the have as my lifeline is as I'm consuming all this news, as I'm trying to understand the lay of the land, which is happening at a quick clip right now, I get really overwhelmed by the monster in the room, and I. I think of all of the fear I have, and my amygdala and my nervous system is just really agitated. And I will say that I'm in that state even talking to you right now. And so it's helpful for me to redirect my attention. And it's also what neuroscientists will tell you to do in cognitive behavioral therapy.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Okay.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Which is redirect my attention to the thing that I love. Because it turns out the fear and the anger that I feel are secondary emotions for My love. Right. They are signposts that are helping me figure out what I love. And usually it's like, I love nature, I love my children, I love my students. I love justice and health. And the monster in the room is so upsetting to me because it's threatening those things that I love. Okay. So instead of just fighting the monster, which I feel I do not have any power to do, what I do have power to do is tend and nurture the things that I love so they grow. So Adrienne Maree Brown says, feed what you want to grow. And this is a beautiful mantra for me that I hold onto when I'm feeling really overwhelmed. And that is very much about attention, really at the scale of attention. This is not about taking shorter showers. This is about what am I paying attention to. It's very micro scale.

[Yasmin Tayag]

And it's a reframing in itself, Right?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Absolutely.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Let's not focus on the monster. Let's focus on tending the garden. The garden. Right. And in doing so, it, I guess, motivates you to fight the monster so you can continue to tend the garden. Yeah.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

And maybe you titrate. Maybe sometimes you have energy for fighting the monster. And maybe when you're feeling the most depleted and you don't even know how to what to put the next foot forward at, you think, okay, I know I can nurture the thing I love. Okay. So how do I do that? And then the emotion of love turns out to be way more sustaining in terms of our energy and our resilience. That means that we can generate that energy that we need to go back and fight the monster.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Can you give me an example of turning your attention towards something you love? Maybe something from your own experience?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

So I stupidly have a terrible daily practice of looking at the news first thing in the morning. It's a terrible practice. But the way that I solve that practice or the way that I heal around that practice is that I immediately know that it's going to leave me feeling really bad. So I need to have a rescue thing. And that thing is to turn right directly towards what I love. So I always have, once I put my phone down, I always have 15 things in front of me that I love. I've got my dogs, I've got my children, I've got my house, I've got my husband. I got all this stuff that I know that if I let the bad news get to me, I will actually feel like not giving them love. I will feel like withdrawing. And the real problem with living in a Story of apocalypse is that if we are not thoughtful about it, it will make us want to withdraw even more. And so we really have to actively intervene. In my work life, this happens all the time as well. I often look to administration or the people in charge and get despairing. No shade on them. They're just in their structure, doing the things they have to do. And I get despairing, and I think, I can't control that thing. I cannot get into the president's head and have them think differently. And then I immediately think, why am I in this job? I should just quit. I hate this. Right? This gives me. Sends me in just in the scale of my job. Sends me into cynicism and burnout.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Despair loop.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

You despair loop, right? And I'm like, I'm in it. I'm in it, I'm in it. So how do I then use the mantra, feed what you want to grow to get out of that? I immediately think, what gives me pleasure here? If I really touch into that and I spend some time thinking about it, I know that it is a great, incredible vocation. And calling, I feel, to have an effect on my students. Okay. So what I'm afraid of is that this scary monster in the room is gonna destroy my students capacities and experiences. How can I turn and use the position that I have, the relative power that I do have to have an effect in that space? And so I often have this turn to my students moment where I'm like, remember that I'm here for the students. Okay, let's go back to that. Cause once I go back to that, my cup is always full. I come away from my classes always feeling like, oh, this is what I'm here for. This is the juice.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yasmin, this conversation is so helpful because I feel so much shame whenever I get that feeling that this is all too overwhelming. And I just want to run away to our lavender farm.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Same. But even the lavender farm will be affected by climate change.

[Natalie Brennan]

It's true.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Sorry.

[Natalie Brennan]

But this instinct to want to run away or to isolate when there's a threat is real, right?

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah.

[Natalie Brennan]

I try to at least remind myself that that's just how evolutionarily we're wired to react to danger.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. That reminds me of one review paper I read on the threat of nuclear war that found that it made adults prone to fantasy and make believe, like, as a way to respond to the danger. I just finished a fantasy book called Legends and Lattes. That was a really nice temporary escape.

[Natalie Brennan]

You really are such a nerd. I think fantasy is a great way to recharge. I mean, it's okay to take a break to get you back into the game. That feels very different from avoidance or denial. Because the only way to truly push through the overwhelm and paralysis is to figure out what you need in order to be able to take action after you've had that rest.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Exactly. If it wasn't for legends and lattes, I wouldn't have had the will or brain power to read that review paper I mentioned. But yes, addressing these issues head on is how to move through them. The nuclear war study even actually said that parents shouldn't ignore their kids anxieties and misrepresent reality. To them, kids who were more aware of the situation actually tended to be the most optimistic.

[Natalie Brennan]

I think that's definitely something we need to focus on now with climate change too. I saw a survey that most teens learn about climate change from the Internet. And so when we're thinking about how an entire generation is aging up and learning about such a huge and existential issue, we want to figure out how to facilitate those conversations. Right. The same way we do when we talk to children about death or divorce or illness. Learning about this alone on your own on the Internet can make the problem a lot bigger and lonelier.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. I actually think the turning your attention toward love to break out of overwhelming thoughts or paralysis is a practice that would be so helpful to teach children and teens to help them with so many aspects of aging. Like not just climate change, right?

[Natalie Brennan]

Yeah. Like with first heartbreak or puberty.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. Applying to college. Adolescence is just such an overwhelming part of aging and the earlier you work on these habits, the better prepared you are for them when the overwhelm pops up in bigger ways. We are going to take a short break, but when we come back, you.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Guys want to go there?

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. Hey, aging up is complicated and we're willing to get into it.

[Natalie Brennan]

If you're enjoying this podcast, you should know that you can get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe to the Atlantic. A subscription gives you access to all our award winning journalism and you can listen to as many articles as you want online or in the Atlantic app. Your subscription helps fuel our journalism online, in the magazine and on our podcasts. So subscribe [e-mail] Podsub.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

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[Yasmin Tayag]

So, Professor Ray, I'm curious, among your students, you know, what else are you noticing that affects them or that they're thinking about when it comes to aging up in a very uncertain world?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Absolutely. The number one thing is economic precarity. Number one. In fact, I would say that even overrides climate. And then the climate stuff might come into focus more through college classes or like the intersection of climate and how climate change is going to exacerbate existing inequalities and problems in the world. So climate change is often called the great magnifier. Right. Like all the inequalities that exist and all the places where people are already suffering are just going to get much worse. So the, you know, main thing that they've been taught as they're growing up is economics. Right. That going to college is really expensive. This has really got to be worth it, right?

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah. I mean, a lot of younger people feel like they're worse off than their parents generation. I mean, I definitely do. Even if statistically it still isn't clear if we actually are. But I can see how that would play into questions about whether college is worth it, you know, if it doesn't guarantee them a job.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah. In that sense of maybe I can escape that problem individually myself. Right. With my own merit or my own hard work and my own degree. And so there's the scarcity politics of that perpetuates that individualism perpetuates that fear perpetuates the cycle that you just talked about, the doom loop.

[Yasmin Tayag]

You know, so much of our conversation today has touched on this theme of individual versus collective action, which is a theme that's come up a lot this season.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah. If we rely on a sense of being able to do this ourselves, we will always fall short. We will always feel like we're failing. And the feeling of failing, as we just discussed doesn't generate more engagement. So that's a model that just can't work. That can't work for where we're going. There's all kinds of ways that people are trying to create alternative models for how they would live. There's research out there that says that the best investment you can make in making your home or yourself be safe in a natural disaster is to have good neighborly trust, have good relationships with your neighbors. That makes intuitive sense. These are the people who, like when all communication breaks down, are going to be the people you rely on to run across the yard, Run across the yard, help you with some extra water or whatever. And so it makes sense, but it's not. It's not something that people are spending every day thinking about. How do I build trust with my neighbors today? You know, but one of my neighbors in the last couple of months has decided once a month to have a bunch of people she likes in the neighborhood over for tea on Sunday. And she did this because she just felt desperate and alone. And then when I started to bring some of this research in, she was like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize I was doing this political action by like attending to my aloneness in this particular way. That's actually very functional, very utilitarian, but also has a side effect of just feeling good.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah, I mean, bringing together neighbors, especially if they're from different backgrounds or life experiences or ages, to discuss climate, that's totally a political action. There's a lot of intersectionality at play in the groups who are most active in the climate movement. It's not just about young people and their climate anxiety. Can you tell me more about the people who are showing up?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

So there's all kinds of reasons that depending on your relative vulnerability, you might care more about climate change. Queer communities care more about climate change than straight communities. And so there's data also that shows that Latinx people care about climate change more than white people by doubles digits and like in sort of hierarchy of order, Latinx communities, then black communities and then white communities are like the bottom of the list.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Interesting.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

The theory there is that the more vulnerable a community is to climate change itself and the less faith they have that the government will help them because of historical structural oppression, the more worried they'll be about it. Right. The vast majority of times when especially people with power experience fear around environmental problems, what often happens is not that they go about creating more, just str and distributing wealth more equally and making sure people who are vulnerable are supported. In fact, the opposite usually happens with people who are already in positions of power. Generally speaking, when they hear about climate change threats, they tend to hoard resources more. They tend to actually enact violence against people who they think of as threatening those resources or who are causing the problems in the first place. So there's all this language around immigrants coming to America and having a greater ecological footprint when they get to America, and therefore that's why we shouldn't allow immigrants into America. This kind of argument, which is often called eco fascism, can lead to some pretty well racist ideas underwritten by climate change falsely and even violence.

[Yasmin Tayag]

That's really concerning the tendency by some to find scapegoats to try and just evade personal responsibility. That, that actually makes me think of another pretty extreme way of evading the climate crisis. It's this idea that we should just escape Earth entirely. Like Earth is screwed, so let's just move to Mars.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah.

[Yasmin Tayag]

It's obviously still a very moonshot idea, but it does come up and it gets a lot of investment from really wealthy billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. They've both put a lot of money into exploring space. What do you make of that? Is that a valid way to be dealing with climate anxiety?

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

So the idea that we might be able to escape the limitations of capitalism, of the planet's limits, of resource limitations, that's really the fantasy here. Right. So when we hear about economists or fossil fuel folks saying the goal of the future is not to get rid of climate change, it's to separate humans dependence on the planet systems, that's what they explicitly say is the goal. So the next obvious conclusion to that, if you're one of those kind of tech bros who's into that kind of stuff, is to think, well, the best way to do that is to find other planets, right? Yeah. And there's a fantasy of transcendence there, of transcending the messiness of human life, using money to transcend the planet's limits, using money to transcend the muckiness of inequality and the social movements that might arise from that. We're seeing so much evidence of, of wanting that just to go away, all that stuff, to just go away.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Yeah, it's, you know, the escape plan, that's a withdrawal in itself. It puts the focus back on the individual and ensuring your own survival. And I think that's the opposite of what we need.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Yeah, absolutely. It's the opposite of what we need. And I think that the nervous system solution there. Right. Like, if you think about when we perceive big threats. If we don't train our nervous system culturally or individually, we don't have a process by which we train our nervous system to respond to threats through social engagement. It's very possible that our response might be flight or fight or freeze or some of these other maybe less constructive or less healing responses that actually don't get to the root cause of the problem at all. Escape is a real nervous system response. It's legitimate, but it's not medicine for the planet's woes. Yeah.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Well, Professor Ray, thank you so much for being here today.

[Dr. Sarah Ray]

Thanks so much.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yasmin. I feel like I am going to have Professor Ray's voice in my head reminding me that if you're not thoughtful about it, apocalyptic living will lead you to withdraw for quite some time.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Apocalyptic living begets more apocalyptic living.

[Natalie Brennan]

No, truly. I mean, we're now about five years out from the start of the pandemic, and I only now feel like I'm at a place where I'm ready to start unlearning a lot of the habits that I developed during that time, which led to a lot of isolation. I find that I withdraw as default now.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Have you read Derek Thompson's Atlantic piece, the Antisocial Century?

[Natalie Brennan]

You know, I really could have used hearing your interview with Professor Wray before I read that piece because it definitely led to a lot of overwhelm. The piece does a beautiful job of outlining how American society is on an antisocial streak and how solitude has almost been marketed to us as luxury.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Me time.

[Natalie Brennan]

Right? Me time. Ordering takeout, meditating, going to workout, Headphones in. I've really bought into the idea that to recharge is to be alone. And what we've been hearing throughout this season, again and again, is that to live a healthy, long life is to instead find our way back to a social society.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Right. We set out to answer the question how to age up. And we heard a lot from experts in vastly different fields about how to connect totally.

[Natalie Brennan]

It's funny the lengths we'll go to try and figure out the secret to living longer, when the answer, if there's to be any one singular answer, is to think less about yourself as the main part of the equation.

[Yasmin Tayag]

I read something recently that really captures this sentiment on the vulnerability of being an individual and the possibility and power in teaming up. It acknowledged what so many of our experts have been saying. Our ability to age up relies on pushing back against forces as huge as climate change, ageism, housing insecurity. But you just can't do it alone.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yeah.

[Yasmin Tayag]

It says the more you band together with others, first with one, then two, then even more people, the better chances you have at succeeding.

[Natalie Brennan]

Yasmin, are you quoting a poem to me?

[Yasmin Tayag]

The tables have turned to end the season. I'd love to read you part of a poem. Is that okay?

[Natalie Brennan]

Welcome, Divan.

[Yasmin Tayag]

This is a passage from the poem the Low Road by Marge Piercy. With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds and hold a fundraising party. A dozen make a demonstration, 100 fill a hall. And the poem goes on to drive home the point that there's power in those numbers. It goes on one at a time. It starts when you care to act. It starts when you do it again and they said no. It starts when you say we and know who you mean. And each day you mean one more. That's all for this season of how to Age Up. How to Age up was hosted by me, Yasmin Tayag, and co hosted and.

[Natalie Brennan]

Produced by me, Natalie Brennan.

[Yasmin Tayag]

Our editors are Claudina Baid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Enna Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smerziak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show.

[Natalie Brennan]

Show.

[Yasmin Tayag]

The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

[Natalie Brennan]

How to will be back with a new season very soon.