The world has entered an era of water bankruptcy, the ocean currents are slowing down, insect populations are collapsing, and the whales are falling silent. The worst El Niño event in recorded history is strengthening over the Pacific Ocean, fuel shortages are cascading into food shortages, terrorism is surging in the motherland, and we are all accumulating microplastics in our brains. Like that Simpsons’ meme, this is only the worst news I will probably consume so far, and I am haunted by a world that could have been.

I am a millennial. Born in the early 90s, I was raised on a syllabus of environmental management and global warming mitigation media, both as parts of my formal and informal education. An education that began with early schooling in Saudi Arabia and then finished with a BSc. in Physics, and an Mphil in Microelectronics in Pakistan. Growing up, I was surrounded by English television, movies, and books, mostly the library classics and secondhand paperbacks from the golden age of sci-fi. The hole in the ozone layer and the spectre of climate change loomed large in my school and university textbooks, as well as the stuff I watched on television, especially the children’s shows. News of the approaching doom was imparted by fluffy puppets and actors singing songs, and every thrilling crisis had a control room of breathless scientists and engineers busy saving the day. When I recently read a Tweet wondering why we don’t see much climate change education in children’s shows anymore, I couldn’t help thinking of Animal Show with Stinky and Jake, Captain Planet, Ferngully, and Day After Tomorrow.

My works-in-progress are all short stories about billionaire bunkers, face mapping tech, forgetting what birds look like, and an alien race deathly afraid of being discovered

There was a small vein of optimism in it all. People talked about reducing carbon footprints and recycling plastic, and every year the science section of the newspapers reported new discoveries and advances – in solar and wind power, electric cars, plastic made of algae or mushrooms – which would surely change the course of things.

The 90s were still a hopeful age. Everyone seemed to be traveling more, technology was becoming shinier, more compact, more accessible, more futuristic-appearing, and the internet was opening up the world in new and exciting ways. Even the sci-fi movies that my father rented for us to watch over the weekends (Titan AE, Treasure Planet, Star Wars, Men in Black, Independence Day) were packed with themes of galactic expansion, global cooperation, and endless technological expansion for the benefit of mankind. Surely, surely the adults in charge would figure things out in time?

It is painful to see that the 2020s, which might be one of our last chances to preserve life as we know it on earth, is the decade with generative AI, hyper-surveillance, gamified drone warfare, annual wildfires and megafloods, and every single climate change metric lying smashed at our feet. That shiny bright future curdled into a present with enshittification, brain rot, corporate hegemony, constant ads, predatory subscriptions and paywalls everywhere, and corporations trying to use a slop extruder to replace all their workers.

It’s a bleak time to be a part of the workforce, let alone a creative. The hopes that had blossomed in my chest like stars are slowly being snuffed out. My childhood and teenage belief in things like the UN, the International Court of Justice, and the international media feels almost whimsically childish today. Earnestly believing in fairies might have been more productive. Or perhaps not – the small literary career that I’d hoped to build, Asimov-like, alongside my academic one might be just as dead with the advent of LLMs. In my development sector job, I realized that most of the work was simply swirling money and prestige among the same group of people, another example of the  ineffectiveness of the international systems that my education raised me to idealize.

One must participate to be part of the group of active dissenters and be deemed trustworthy

Today, as poisonous black clouds rise over the gardens of Persia, and the effects of war begin to reverberate through our economy, I lie on my bed each night to deal with a nervous system that has been shot to pieces with three years of watching a genocide on my phone. Mass graves, bodies visible from space, starvation, kamikaze drones chasing desperate targets, human flesh torn apart as though it were put through a meat grinder.

Inside my head, things have sped up and ground down to a halt, simultaneously.

My works-in-progress are all short stories about billionaire bunkers, face mapping tech, forgetting what birds look like, and an alien race deathly afraid of being discovered. All of them are stuck in limbo; half-completed first drafts that I cannot muster the energy to finish. I am unable to escape the patterns that I see around me – I can’t stop imagining a bleak future, and I can’t stop imagining my own powerlessness. The stories that have nothing to do with dystopia are all set in the far past, with problems that have little to do with me. These are stories before airplanes or the Internet, stories about women navigating relationships with some speculative elements thrown in. Most importantly, in those stories, no one uses apps or worries about glacial melt.

My anxiety manifests in other ways as well. I have lived all my life in households that revolve around the elderly, and medicine shortages are a regular occurrence. I remember, after the birth of my first child, being very resistant to the idea of bottles and formula because I was terrified of shortages, of my child becoming dependent on a particular kind of formula or brand, and then refusing to eat if it became unavailable. It was a fear I never articulated, even to myself, let alone to the people around me who urged me to simply make my life easier and put my child on the bottle.

Sometimes, as I go about cooking and cleaning, my imagination begins constructing scenarios where I don’t have access to running water or piped gas. My mind unspools the many steps needed to navigate daily life without the comforts of modern living. The worries soon become more specific: What if I couldn’t afford these eggs in my breakfast? What if there was no roof over my head during this spring storm? What if I had no paracetamol to soothe the baby’s fever or an antibiotic to help shorten the duration of his latest illness?

The baby, my second child, who exists because I had dreaded the thought of my first-born facing an uncertain world alone. My first born is a girl. How many of my hard won freedoms would I be able to pass on to her? As I tie her curly hair into a ponytail, my mind thinks of the words, “outdoor slave markets in Libya.” So often, I’ve read those words printed in reports, opinion pieces, and essays about western imperialism in West Asia. I think of my daughter growing up without indoor plumbing, refrigeration, running water, medicine, transport, bank accounts, laws that will protect her mind and body. I think of the orphans bombed in Gaza and Afghanistan, the children abandoned and trafficked, and my mind reels.

Perhaps it is simply a function of growing older, but every month, every week, the violence creeps closer. Everyone, everywhere keeps screaming: “Adapt or be left behind!” “Lock in or be pushed into the permanent underclass!” It has created an almost unbearable pressure to stand out and yet be like everyone else, to produce more and faster. Pressure to find the most profitable life path and then lock into it between breastfeeding sessions and breaks to cook and clean. Pressure to make every decision the correct decision for each of my children. Pressure that makes me doubt my own skills and credentials and wonder what I’m doing with myself. It makes everything that comes out of my pen (or keyboard) look like garbage. Every time I sit down to write I must struggle anew to learn that the first draft is not supposed to be perfect, that the first draft is a seed and subsequent revisions are what make it sprout, flower and bear fruit. I must resist the urges to take shortcuts, buy a course, or copy what someone else is doing.

I have lived all my life in households that revolve around the elderly, and medicine shortages are a regular occurrence

I tell myself that all this caustic anxiety needs to be redirected into creativity somehow, that I am deliberately closing my eyes to my responsibility as a creative in times of upheaval. I should be recording, writing, putting down thoughts, noting details, finding patterns and then helping others to see them. I should be using the power of storytelling to inspire hope and action. This line of thought can only be followed for as long as the ego has the upper hand. When the pendulum swings back into self doubt and imposter syndrome, my own voice feels small and pointless, my observations trite and superficial. I can barely inspire hope and action in myself let alone in others.

I wonder if my parents’ generation experienced a moment when the world seemed to crack open and reveal the worms eating at the rind from inside. Or did this realization dawn on them more slowly over a period of years? So slowly, that if they avoided looking at it directly, it wouldn’t feel too urgent? Or maybe they didn’t experience it at all? Does one try to understand the current state of the world by treating it as unprecedented?

If I took a time machine to 2016 and told my twenty-four-year old self that international law was worth less than the paper it was printed on and that the world was run by a cabal of pedophiles, then the younger me would have laughed. Now, at thirty four, it’s frightening to realize that, since half of the crazy conspiracy theories are true, the other half might be plausible as well. If the terrible crimes were actually committed, then maybe the bizarre symbolism surrounding them does have the power to alter reality as all the niche internet forums used to say? Endless money and political power in the wrong hands sounds bad enough without also adding black magic and demons into the mix.

When the rational mind is uppermost, when I tell myself there are no demons, no occult mysteries, only people too ashamed of their base urges to indulge them without a veneer of ritual and mystique. Also all the wealthy and powerful are probably filming each other for blackmail.

In an age where the default business appears to be stripping everything in sight and selling it for parts, it’s probably easier to trust someone without a moral compass.

The sacking of Troy is nothing to the man who has watched Iphigenia die in her bridal finery. The current war against Iran began with a strike on a girls’ elementary school. The worst possible crime was committed first, quickly gotten over with, and shrugged off. It further pushed the limits to what the rest of us watching will allow; other schools, hospitals, and refugee camps have been bombed one after the other in the near past. That is the playbook: shock the world and then watch it condemn itself through inaction, and make every subsequent atrocity feel commonplace in comparison. 

It is clearly not enough to look away from heinous acts. It is also not enough to just watch or applaud the actions of others. One must participate to be part of the group of active dissenters and be deemed trustworthy. It’s why rituals exist. There is power in being able to use action to affirm where you stand in your mind and body. Religions, the longest surviving ways in which we’ve ordered our societies, know this. God knows this. If action did not leave a mark on our destiny, if it didn’t compound towards a certain reality, then he wouldn’t have given us bodies. Take these stones, walk into the middle of the desert, and throw them with all your might at this effigy to evil. Do it again the next day. And again the day after. Cast the stone and say no. Say, “I reject you. I reject you with my body, so I can reject you with my mind and soul.”

You must walk in the tracks of those before you. Walk, then run, then walk, then run again. In the tracks of a desperate mother looking for water where there is none. You must perform the action to remember in your body how it feels to be given a miracle.

And so it goes for everything. You can pray in your head whenever you like, of course, but five times a day you must tear yourself away from work, from family, from pleasure and pray in a certain way. You must give up food and water. You must give away the wealth you’ve accumulated. Especially if you’re worried and fearful. When you don’t know what to do, then do this.

Action fights the anxiety, the feelings of hopelessness, and imposter syndrome. Time and time again, I have found that the answer to creative blocks is to tap out a little nonsense paragraph on the first thing that pops into my head. If opening up my laptop is too much, then typing out five hundred or so words on my phone while the baby nurses will help me finish a draft. Sometimes thinking itself stands in the way of what I want to say. I must get out of my own head and simply do the work. Set a small goal, one line, one hundred words. Then I can say I’m done for the day. Watch the one hundred words compound into one thousand and so on. And every time I have done something, taken action, the path has become easier, the story has been written, the article has been completed, and I have added something to the world instead of watching others take something away. The work goes deeper than just writing; it includes dismantling the admiration I used to have for Western culture and society, to look away from the setting sun and focus on what is actually around me. When I don’t write, I must read to relearn history and politics and disconnect myself from ideas that had made me look to other cultures for solace and inspiration. I must slowly unravel and then reknit my imagination anew.

If the smallness of the action makes me balk then I try to remember that the gears of this world turn via the small action; the ant moving the seed a few meters, the worm turning in the darkness, unknown and unloved, the bee working hours for a spoonful of honey.

And just like the ant, the worm and the bee, my own small actions will bear fruit because I do not do them alone.

Does one try to understand the current state of the world by treating it as unprecedented?

That is the second part of the puzzle. If there is power in doing any work then the collective multiplies that power. I remind myself that most rituals, for good or evil, must be performed collectively; we are a social species. Outside of prayers and worship, we enjoy doing things together. Spending time with our friends and loved ones does good things to our minds and bodies, releasing chemicals that make us happier and healthier. Working together doesn’t just allow us to do larger task, it gives each individual in the group a chance to step away to recharge while the collective carries the load. Like a singer taking a breath as the rest of the choir carries the note forward.  All of our scientific progress, all of our work in the arts and culture, is a result of the collective. Of people standing on the shoulders of others (they didn’t have to be giants) and then working together across time and space to be able to come into our inheritance of dominion over all things on Earth.

In my own small way I have tried to create community. I have reached out to as many writers as I can and tried to keep in touch via their work and mine. I have reached out to women in the same place in life as myself, young mothers trying to nurture as well as create, women who are pulled into a million different directions and have real and immediate stake in the future via their children. I try to use my community to keep myself accountable. I try to give back to it. I try to look for more positive news, of groups of scientists finding ways to cure cancer, of impoverished communities pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, of families and tribes reforesting barren land, of small town communities stopping the construction of data centers, of labor unions and class action lawsuits wrestling a little bit of justice away from those at the top. I remind myself of those nations that continue to resist, people who exhibit bravery despite the heavy odds stacked against them, starving countries who have still struck back, sanctioned people that the world tried to browbeat into submission, but who instead became self sufficient, even powerful.  

I tap into my collective and I try to take consistent action,  and I share what I’ve learned with whoever needs it. I send a voice note with life updates to my best friend group every Tuesday, and every night after the children are asleep, I write my five hundred words.