Stream of consciousness, by question only.

What if my only way of processing is by asking questions?

What do I do if I can’t engage with artwork without persistently asking new questions? Is this just a symptom of my own anxiety?

And if I have no answers to these questions? And could only answer questions with more questions? What then?

(I've compiled a lot of questions that I ask to myself, so I am going to write them all here, and ask you to read the question to yourself, engage with the footnote associated, and then move onto the next question... is that ok with you?)

Let’s begin. (this will hopefully be the only non-question in this list...)

This train of thinking begins with a question stemming from my way of anxious artmaking: Am I exceptionally anxious about the state of the world? Am I overly concerned with climate change? And how we’re destroying the planet?

Is it generational? Are we raising a generation of anxious people?

Do studies say that we are raising anxious children (myself included)? Does this anxiety stem from the internet? Or is it from all the conflict occurring around us?[1]

[1] I am tempted to say yes (my own Gen Z identity is influencing this claim). Studies vary, and the sentiment of each generation changes as well. Was each generation just as anxious about the state of the world, but it simply wasn’t documented? American social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt has labeled Gen Z as “The Anxious Generation” as rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide have risen sharply – the global incidence of anxiety disorders of individuals aged 10-24 has increased by 52% over the past 30 years (Fengsai et al. 2024, 1; Haidt 2024). The “anxious generation” is based on the presence of social comparison, social media addiction, and sleep disruptions in childhood caused by access to the internet. Haidt addresses the argument there has always been global conflict causing social upset, and claims that global instability formally fostered a sense of social solidarity and collective hurt, which is now lost in young people today due to smartphones and social media use (McBain 2024). The incidence of mental health disorders emphasizes a type of isolation in this generation (my own generation) that formally would be felt and shared in community since there was no other option; communal suffering is now felt superficially through online communities. This disconnection seems to have created an “othering” of Gen Z, which makes them all simultaneously connected through their shared anxiety, while also suffering alone in it. 

Bie, Fengsai., Yan Xiaoling, Jie Xing, et al. 2024 “Rising Global Burden of Anxiety Disorders among Adolescents and Young Adults: Trends, Risk Factors, and the Impact of Socioeconomic Disparities and COVID-19 from 1990 to 2021.” Frontiers in Psychiatry: 1489427. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1489427.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.

McBain, Sophie. “The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – a Pocket Full of Poison.” Books. The Guardian, March 21, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/21/the-anxious-generation-by-jonathan-haidt-a-pocket-full-of-poison.

There has always been conflict, so surely previous generations struggled with anxiety too…? So what’s different here? Is it because we have access to all the information about our worlds unrest that makes us more anxious? Therefore, is it the internet?

In other words... are we all too aware of how fucked up everything is? [2]

So now I ask… are we prioritizing the wrong things? Climate crisis feels like the most pressing issue to me, so why are we so focused on making new algorithms for tiktok? [3]

With climate change looming, will we destroy the planet, or will the planet destroy us? [4]

[2] Again, I am tempted to say yes. We are overloaded with information and constantly exposed to things we were never meant to process all at once. Our friends send us a video, we scroll, and we are now watching someone witness a genocide, give us a recipe, or show us an AI generated video of a lion morphed with a baby. We didn’t ask for this much information. Or did we? If so, who did we ask? What signals did we give off that this is the reality we desire? Could we have predicted that this is how things would progress… or regress?

Who did ‘we’ give this power to? Who did ‘we’ let change our world so drastically? This ‘we’ is important to note. The ‘we’ I am using here are average citizens engaged in a neoliberal system which has individualized and isolated them from direct power. The “we” is separate from “them”, which are the people in power – the CEO’s and the politicians and oil drillers causing neoliberalism’s “proliferating walls” to concretize climate change denial (Nixon 2011, 20). Neoliberal capitalism perpetuates the division not only between the “we” and “them,” but also further divides the “we” by attributing individualized guilt and responsibility for how the world is changing through a predominant focus on the individual and against the collective. In other words, neoliberalism is reinforcing the divide not only between ‘we’ and ‘them,’ but within the ‘we’ itself by framing systemic problems as matters of individual responsibility. This is further exacerbated by the individualism inherent to the technological era, plagued with isolation from social media.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbsgw.

[3] Climate change is slow moving (we know this), making it easy to defer, deny, and overlook. But, climate disasters gain power over time, growing exponentially. This is slow violence, an impact of climate change that eventually sheds its “slow” preface and ultimately becomes straight up violence. “Slow violence” is the violence of delayed destruction, incremental and affective in a range of ways (Nixon 2011, 2). This type of persistent violence is the subconscious, silent cause of ecological anxiety that haunts us each day; woven into our algorithms, pasted on street signs, and tentatively referenced in casual conversation about the weather. It’s understandable that we defer climate discussion because of it’s looming, disheartening and anxiety-inducing quality; slow violence permeates our lives yet feels so inactionable.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbsgw.

[4] Neoliberal capitalism is not the singular cause of earth's changing patterns, but it is certainly an accelerating force. Capitalism alone perpetuates the consistent pursuit of growth, founded in carbon-driven economies and producing vast amounts of CO2, which we know is altering natural ecosystems. All humans are thus affected and forced to adapt to new ecological impacts (increased food prices, disease, drought, etc).

There is a distinction to be made within capitalism between the people creating these problems and the people who are made to believe they created them. This is the ‘we’ versus ‘them’ stated prior. How can ‘we’ be expected to solve climate change and reduce our individual impact when it’s ‘them’ who started the problem? Neoliberalism encourages spatial, disconnected individualism that places collective blame on the “we,” contributing to the eco-anxiety permeating my own daily life as I, and many others, feel individually responsible for slowing the climate crisis.

Now, to more directly answer the question prompting this response, I would say both. We are in symbiosis with the planet even though capitalism makes it feel parasitic. We change the earth, the earth changes us. The cycle will continue as climate patterns escalate and we continue to operate individualistically under a system that perpetuates disaster. We will only become truly parasitic if we keep framing it as such, instead of mutualistically. Breaking down capitalist norms allows room for us to rebuild our relationship with the environment and eliminate the distinctions we have created both within ourselves and with the planet.

Are ‘we’ excusing ourselves from responsibility for the destruction we have caused? [5]

(Maybe we can absolve ourselves of guilt for changing the geological state of the planet, since we know that the earth changes every few million years anyways? Maybe the earth would’ve fucked itself over naturally, with some crazy huge ice age?)

I guess I should be asking: is this the Anthropocene? Is this what we should call “our” time period? [6] 

[5] To expand on this, I am fearful that by making claims about who or what is to “blame,” that I am creating a sense of hopelessness in my own thinking, in my artwork, and subsequently amongst my peers. But, I am also fearful of completely absolving ourselves from guilt and turning a blind eye to the potential ways guilt can motivate us, specifically to deconstruct and reconstruct our way of existing under capitalism. Even further, I am fearful that if I choose to point a finger at neoliberal capitalism as a major player in the climate crisis, I am simply deflecting away from the power I hold as an artist and activist (if I hold any power at all).

American writer Roy Scranton has metabolized the guilt that comes with accepting the way we have changed the planet – emphasizing that we need to learn how to die as a civilization (Scranton, 2015). Scranton argues that we need to learn how to let go of our particular way of life – to abandon freedom and progress as undeniably given (Scranton, 2015, p.24). In some ways, it sounds like Scranton is making a grand claim, but realistically he is advocating for a new way of thinking to accept and adapt to what we have changed, to slow further disappointment and continuous damage. In a way, this perspective feels very human – and adaptive. We embrace and adapt to technological advancement, so why can’t we adapt in the other direction, adapt to a new way of thinking that can counter the developmentalist capital growth?

Scranton embodies the dilemma over individualized guilt by reframing it as constructive collective change, which I find particularly mobilizing. This guilt is what paralyzes me in my practice, and I find it difficult to decipher how much influence or power I can have. The reframe here is that there is power in the collective, not the individual, and by working through these ideas and employing them in my artwork, I can contribute to a collective change in dialogue.

Scranton, R. Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilization. San Francisco, Ca: City Lights Books. 2015.

[6] The Anthropocene has been coined as the geological epoch in which humans had an irreversible effect on the planet. Rooted with the prefix “anthro-” to reference the human race, the term “Anthropocene” has been widely debated over it’s implications as to who and what has created this change. Unfortunately, the Anthropocene groups the human population together and misrepresents the true accelerants of global environmental change: the neoliberal global powers of the world. ‘The Global North,’ ‘The Western World,’ or whatever you’d like to refer it as, are the people who worked so hard to ‘develop’ the world in the misplaced pursuit of growth. We cannot place universal blame on our society, since climate change is not equitable (Demos, pg 12). The institutions responsible for climate change are also who will come up with solutions and new technologies to reduce it’s impact on ‘us.’ Major cities across the globe are the ones equipped with the funding and infrastructure to help protect and rebuild from major climate disasters (Wallace-Wells, 2022).

Anthropocene dialogue can sometimes be used as a mechanism of universalization, glossing over the nuance of what it actually takes to create permanent environmental change. The Anthropocene universalizes individual culpability, which deflects attention away from the primary perpetrators and the real solutions that would cause disruption to our capitalist system (Arons, 36). Neoliberal individualism therefore goes hand in hand with the universalism of the anthropocence. Together, we are made to feel individually culpable for climate change and have a collective global duty to heed our carbon footprints. 

Arons W. We Should Be Talking about the Capitalocene. TDR: The Drama Review. 2023;67(1):35-40. doi:10.1017/S1054204322000697

Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Sternberg Press, 2017.

Wallace-Wells, David. “The New World: Envisioning Life After Climate Change.” Magazine. The New York Times, October 26, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/visualization-climate-change-future.html

How do we accept the extreme damage that’s been done at the hands of our capitalist world? Damage so extreme that we must rename our geological era?

How does one process this? Should we grieve for the earth? Or should we grieve for ourselves? [7]

Should we grieve at all?

If we decide to accept what’s been done and find a new way forward, which parts do we grieve and who for? Do we grieve for the plants and animals, the things that haven’t been able to resist our damage and have fallen victim to our actions?

Or, do we grieve for future generations? For the specific populations who will actually be affected by this? How will they survive? 

[7] In my line of thinking, I tend to anthropomorphize the planet (as do many people). In reality, the earth doesn’t “care” in the way that we “care.” There is no scientific proof that the earth, or any of it’s systems, are capable of emotion in the way that we understand it. The earth is a rock that doesn’t care – it literally can’t. Should we grieve on it’s behalf, and does this benefit us at all?

The earth can’t care about us, but I still think we should care for it. Maybe it’s a helpful coping mechanism to anthropomorphize the planet. To make us feel on behalf of the planet to ensure we don’t keep working to destroy it. Whose role is it to take all this on? I question whether I should allow myself to take on this responsibility in order to encourage others to do so as well. Collectivism will only work if encouraged, and if I can continue to hold space for the environment, portraying my questions and inquiry about the climate crisis with emotion, then maybe I can foster some shared symbiosis between the “we.”

And then, how do I make work that summarizes these slow subtle shifts of our world? The slow violence that is taking place against the planet, and in turn against us? [8]

[8] Rob Nixon summarizes the dilemma emerging here – “how can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political interventions”? Frankly, I don’t know. This is the driving question in my practice, stemming from a desire to make people care, to keep climate issues in the forefront of their minds so that real change can come about.

Ultimately, what does this have to do with my art? Or with art in general? How do I make work that does justice to the vastness of this subject, whilst not making the audience too anxious and paralyzed?

Can I make art that unites people over their collective concern for the world?

I still don’t know what the correct response is. I don’t know how to resolve the contradiction of living within systems that harm the planet while still trying to care for it. Maybe that is part of what I’d like my artwork to do: make visible the quiet fears I thought I carried alone. Maybe I start to carry them collectively now…

And maybe continuing to question, witness and make work through that tension is its own form of resistance. Maybe the question is whether creating space for collective witnessing is enough?

There are many ‘maybe’s’ and ‘who’ and ‘why’s’ that remain unanswered. Maybe I try to keep answering them.

?