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Friends, Are you seeing a terrible future ahead? So many of us are catastrophising – a gesture that has become exacerbated in the post-pandemic landscape. When we have a fear, rather than allowing it to rise and fall in time, it consumes more time than it should, it becomes a fantasy of the future.

We come up with scenarios in which something we thought could be stable is now laid to waste. Whether you do this by catastrophising the environment, imagining landmasses underwater, feeling a tightness over your thoughts of fascism overrunning all governments, or seeing your own beloved social movements fall to pieces…

or maybe it’s more personal? You feel a pain that you begin to conceive of as a terminal disease; your partner’s phone binging with texts signals cheating, lies, and the end of the relationship; you notice your social media posts aren’t getting likes which must mean no one is interested in what you have to share anymore.

In all of these motions, we create an image of the future and feel its resonance in the present. Catastrophising can be paralyzing, terrible, and it doesn’t help that we’re all preyed upon by various catastrophe industries, not to mention the fact that we are facing real challenges!

To talk us away from catastrophe and towards a healthier world, I asked my friend Una Mullally on to the show. Una is my closest collaborator in Ireland and has been on the show multiple times, most recently in conversation with me and author Sara Gran on AEWCH 200, pt 2.

We talk about catastrophe first, and then take apart four of the biggest challenges of our time:

• fascism
• climate change
• AI
• “groomer” moral panics

considering how we might see them differently.

This is a transformative conversation. I hope it reinvigorates your knowledge that you can change things.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
AEWCH 83 with Franco “Bifo” Berardi on how to breathe in an apocalypse – which we recorded in Bologna just a few months before the pandemic began. It is one of my very favorite episodes.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
I think, to go along with AEWCH 83, a great book to prefigure our moment is Bifo’s Breathing: Chaos and Poetry.

MORE ON UNA
Una has a weekly, challenging, column in the Irish Times. Some of Una’a other great appearances on AEWCH include AEWCH 151 on how the world is changing (slowly!) for the better, and AEWCH 192 which featured us speaking about my novel Hawk Mountain and fiction more broadly.