“Kids these days are such snowflakes! So flaccid and self-involved, so doomy and anxious. If it’s not the drugs, it’s the screen time, right? I mean, what’s their problem?”
I try to sidestep conversations like these. Engaging saps so much time and energy. But avoiding them leaves me feeling dirty. Not because I’ve forgone an opportunity to win an argument, but because I know I’ve failed to defend those who need and deserve my solidarity.
The awkward truth is that the mature-aged complainers offering such judgments are not imagining things. The dejection of young people is palpable. But the mistake many of their elders make is assuming that every instance of slumped posture and downcast mien is an expression of choice, a pose being struck for social effect, because, often as not, what they’re observing is a logical response to the world around them and their prospects within it.
And this air of sadness is hardly confined to hipster cafes, shopping malls and the bedrooms of adolescents. Have you looked in the mirror lately? Have you noticed the glassy stares and heard the listless tones of your middle-aged neighbours and thirtysomething colleagues? Have you considered how we entertain ourselves, the warm bath of false cheer and cheap consolation we wallow in? Trauma specialist Thomas Hübl calls it “collective numbness”, an affect that masks the underworld of stultifying compulsions, addictions and evasions we prefer not to discuss.
This is a form of communal anguish. If it seems more evident in young people it may be because they have fewer layers of insulation and camouflage. The corrosive burn of their distress is not as easily dampened by the comforts and diversions that blind their elders.
A 2020 survey in the UK found that 70% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported experiencing helplessness, anger, insomnia, panic and guilt about climate breakdown. So, yes, younger people are being noticed but they’re not really being seen. And their situation, as inheritors of the whirlwind, is not being acknowledged.
These kids have arrived at an uncanny moment, for the ground underfoot feels unsafe. The air they breathe is suspect and the people they should be able to rely upon to act in their best interests have demonstrated time and again they cannot be trusted.
The certainties enjoyed by previous generations are so far from reach as to be cruelly mythical.
I think it’s the duty of older citizens to face this. The most stupid thing we can do right now is to persist in the lie we tell ourselves – that their sense of feeling forsaken has nothing to do with us.
The name for what ails us has been a matter of debate for years – “climate anxiety”, “eco-grief”, “solastalgia” – but none of these labels sound strong enough to capture the enervating creep of loss and dread that torments so many.
What prosperous, educated westerners are experiencing is a form of paralysis, a shutting down and closing off. Frantz Fanon described something similar in Algeria in the 1950s when he observed “the tense immobility of the dominated society”.
***
The terms with which the old now dismiss the “lethargy” of the young reminds me of the ways the French discounted the puzzling ailments of their colonial subjects in Algeria. The morose passivity of native Algerians was inexplicable to them. Colonial officials recorded widespread “malingering”, a general, almost pandemic level of melancholia, and constant complaints of “phantom pain” usually associated with amputees. French doctors coined a racist term for it – the “North African syndrome”.
Of course, there was a logical explanation for what mystified French occupiers. What they witnessed but never quite saw was the misery of subjugation, what happens to people when they’re robbed, scorned and humiliated every day of their lives.
The “lassitude, weakness and asthenia” colonial doctors described eerily mirrors “solastalgia”, with its melancholy, distress and enervation. I think this correlation is telling and important. Both “conditions” are chronic, disabling and suffered communally. But they are masking responses, manifestations of moral injury. Their underlying causes are invisible to those who generate them and profit from them. Those in power cannot acknowledge what’s right before their eyes because to do so would not only undermine their status but threaten their very conception of reality.
It was Fanon, of course, who dubbed colonial peoples “the wretched of the earth”. He was one of the psychiatrists who ripped the mask off “North African syndrome”. He called it for what it was and focused on the malevolent injustices that caused it.
Fanon fought against the Nazi occupation of France. The disgrace of the Vichy regime taught him that “exploitation cannot be built on force alone”, for the secret weapon of every occupier is the collaborating functionary within the subjugated population.
***
Fanon saw that the terrible hardships of the struggle for liberation could be endured because the promise of freedom kept hope alive in the people. Seventy years later, in the grip of a global emergency whose tribulations are being visited upon the poorest of us already, few of our leaders inspire the hope and solidarity that could help us fight, endure and survive. Liberation doesn’t interest them. Many are devoted servants of the status quo. Which is a polite way of saying they’re collaborators.
They’re so ensnared in webs of patronage and co-option they can neither see nor acknowledge our real predicament, which is a state of global subjugation to fossil capitalism. What they offer us – young and old – is business as usual, and for all their deluded airs of respectability and legitimacy, our leaders are largely agents of desolation.
Deep down we know it. This is the source of our communal dread. Few of us want to admit it, but what we’re experiencing is the horror of resignation, the humiliation of captivity and the shame of collaboration.
Some may balk at the analogy, but I think it’s fair and apt. The lassitude that distinguishes our moment is born of sorrow and buried rage. We, the richest and most mobile cohort in history, are pitifully poor in spirit, suffering pains and terrors we cannot express. We act like colonial subjects. Because, in effect, that’s what we are.
The entities that enclose and occupy our lands and waters, exploit our fossil fuel resources and distort our polities, are largely foreign. Most of the resources they exploit are the common property of sovereign peoples. The resultant products are exported, the profits siphoned offshore. Like the imperial powers of old, these corporations cultivate vassal governments and rely on local functionaries to maintain control. They have a massively disproportionate influence on public policy. No group of citizens, however large, wields such power over their own government.
This is how fossil capitalism shapes your world. And while it continues to cow your lawmakers and dominate your newsfeed, it determines the conditions under which your children live and how their children will live in the future. What we are all dealing with are shapeshifting imperial powers with a geographical and political reach beyond the scope of any that existed before. The consequences of this century-long imperium have been dire. On current trends, it promises to be catastrophic for life on Earth.
So, the anguish we suffer together is not a mysterious syndrome without physical roots. It’s not a vibe or a mood. It’s an expression of physics supercharged by a uniquely sociopathic form of commerce.
If young people feel they’ve been conspired against, it’s because that’s exactly what’s happened. The numbers are in. A child born now will experience 24 times the number of extreme climate events as a politician born in the 1960s. Here, then, are the wretched, those damned for the sins of others. The burden of that legacy is being expressed physically and mentally right now in every time zone and culture. But while its might is terrible, it is not insurmountable. And neither is the occupying force that exerts it.
***
The scientific consensus on the emergency could not be clearer. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we’re already overshooting the targets of livability. Its latest report states emphatically that to spare the worst effects of climate breakdown there should be no new fossil fuel development.
While it’s now too late to “solve” climate change, we still have time to defend ourselves from the worst of it. It’s only in fighting back that we regain our agency and self-respect.
While many fossil fuel players sense the end of empire approaching, and some have begun to divest or diversify, many have begun to dig in and double down in to buy time to gouge out more profits, regardless of the deadly consequences. Such is the monstrous corporate nihilism under which we live. But sadness will not arm us in the fight against it. To defeat a force of such malevolence, we need to be angry, to own our buried rage, and then act on it, with cool discipline, common cause, decency and valour.
Fanon observed that the moment Algerians began to fight their colonial oppressors, their lassitude evaporated, as if the very act of resistance restored people’s agency, dignity and health.
I don’t believe in his notion of the redemptive and restorative power of violence. But it’s naive to imagine the defeat of fossil capital will come gently. It is likely to be prolonged, brutal and chaotic. Securing a just and sustainable future will require many things to be smashed and cleared away. Not reformed incrementally but removed entirely. The opportunity for ameliorative tinkering has already been squandered.
But here’s the thing: the fossil powers and principalities are afraid. They know the tide has turned against them. Within the younger generations their social licence is in terminal decline. In both hemispheres, young people are educating themselves for struggle. They’re not just finding new cadres of solidarity and resistance – they’re developing sophisticated communications campaigns to expose the occupation and to unpick its layers of deceit. And they’re mounting electoral drives to unseat the quislings of oil and gas who stand in the way of serious climate action in parliaments and congresses everywhere.
Committed resisters are actively doing technical, legal and strategic work in government, finance and education to expose and root out the colonial underpinnings of business as usual, while others maintain insurgencies of civil disobedience to disrupt what hasn’t been stopped by more “respectable” means. All of them deserve our moral and material support.
Meanwhile, politicians are drafting laws to constrain peaceful protest, limit legal recourse and smooth the way for many new fossil fuel developments, despite the science.
***
Some governments have become especially obliging in their deployment of assets of law and order. In Western Australia, a young mother who chalks the slogan – NO NEW GAS – on a public bridge will have her home raided by terrorist police in the wee hours. In the Kimberley and the Northern Territory, the resistance of Indigenous custodians to fracking wells or pipelines on traditional lands and waters now provokes threats of legal shock and awe from the chief executives of oil and gas companies.
Fossil capital understands the toxic legacy it’s leaving. It has known for 50 years. Exxon and others paid for the science, then buried it, lest a little education should stir up trouble in the colonies. And when whistleblowers and resisters emerged in the 80s, the 90s and 00s, what did they call them? Idiots. Scaremongers. Dirty loafers. Hysterics. Climate alarmism was a “syndrome” straight from the imperial handbook.
That’s what we’re up against. This is the occupying force we must disrupt, disarm, divest from and destroy by the most civilised means possible – while these options remain open to us.
So, while we continue to scoff at each other’s generational follies and insecurities, we remain harmless colonial subjects, not potent, patriotic actors. Bitching about snowflakes and hating on old folks prevents us from becoming a united force of potent citizens.
What we need is the courage to liberate ourselves from these merchants of desolation. It’s a battle being fought on many fronts. But in joining it, and to sustain it, we must foster new alliances, more creativity and deeper empathy. That means decolonising ourselves, resetting our outlook, so we can adapt to new conditions, and hold each other up in the struggle.
But the first order of business is to cease “shopping in despair’s boutiques”, as Les Murray once put it. Only then can we rise and fight together. For our dignity. For our home. And for the liberty of our children.
• Tim Winton’s new novel Juice is out on 1 October through Penguin Random House ($49.99)
