I used to be able to write through the anger, to find something to say that would process it. I spent three years with a column at my college newspaper, and a once-a-week space to let it all out was almost too little space for all the words that bubbled back at the world. There is too much now. So, I’m writing here again to try and figure out if I have anything worth saying at all. This post has been a more than six-month journey of watching a world on fire. But someone in my internet world quoted Robert MacFarlane asserting “Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline” – so I guess it is time to find the discipline I once had, once again.

I started writing this watching the January 2025 LA fires from a world away; I’ve struggled since then to put down any coherent thoughts as it just seemed like the world continues to burn in more and more and more ways. Bear with me… this one is a bit of a journey. But if you stick with it, I think we’ll get somewhere together by its end.

In the year before I was born, Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” with lyrics detailing and naming major world events, famous people, and cultural phenomena punctuated by the lines “We didn’t start the fire/It was always burning, since the worlds been turning/We didn’t start the fire/No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.” Close to the end that refrain is slightly altered on one of its iterations with a change to the lyrics: “We didn’t start the fire/It was always burning, since the world’s been turning/We didn’t start the fire/But when we are gone/It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on”

It could almost be taken as a moment of late 80s apathy in the face of the flow of history – the idea that people who are alive are caught up in the flow of history which will continue beyond their time on earth regardless of what anyone tries to do to turn or stem that flow. It is a discomforting thought: to inherit great events and their aftermaths and feel like there is nothing that anyone can do in the face of them, that there is no impact that might be made, that the fires might never be put out. Worse, the fires just keep coming: Fall Out Boy updates the song in 2023 and it becomes a lesson in just how much has slipped from the mind in the interim, while also a bit of a shock at what didn’t manage to make it into the several minutes accounting of modern history. But the refrain remains: we didn’t start this; we tried to fight it, but it continues. It is catchy as hell, but it still feels a bit like a lyric shrug set against a musical expression that almost obscures the existence of the lyrics altogether.

To be honest that claim that we tried to fight it sticks in my throat a little bit; which “we”? – Americans? the West? people who on the global scale of things live in relative ease, luxury, and comfort? If we are being honest, what “we” are not good at, if we look at the past several decades of my life, is fighting for change if it risks our immediate sense of normalcy and even participation in a wider cultural norm. The fact that we have collectively erased the idea of organization and training as part of protest movements and have laundered all historical change into stories of plucky individualism sort of proves it. And I would say that there are three areas of life that I would point to, to illustrate that: continued existence of cruises, fireworks, and widespread unregulated AI adoption. Three things that we know have net negative ecological and even social and cultural impacts, and yet, we don’t fight them in any level of meaningful way.

Worse, perhaps, is these are three things that people find continuous ways to justify their use and even enjoyment of – it is easier after all to turn a blind eye to all the ways our actions are connected and ignore any thoughts of what we might owe to each other when at the same time pleasures feel harder and harder to come by. I’m not unsympathetic to this; I’m just unsupportive of me-first, I think, in more and more stringent ways.

Me-first living, the idea of being owed things for simply existing (I don’t mean survival and comfort, I mean straight up entitlement here) is a type of generational betrayal. I remember sitting in school assemblies as a child, these big shows where we were taught the importance of the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) to save the planet because if our generation did not do something, all of the whales would die and it would be our fault. Not that of the people who came before us or were raising us, but ours, the 6-10 year olds sitting crisscross apple sauce on mats on the floor. It was a really heavy charge to lay on children. It was also my first cognizant sense of generational betrayal. Didn’t we all still live on the planet together? There were so many posters up in classrooms and hallways bearing some variation of “you don’t inherent the earth from your parents, you borrow it from your grandchildren” – surely the children at the time who were being browbeaten about their future custodianship were the ones being borrowed from? So why was all this idea of changing our ways a future tense problem? It never made sense. It made less sense as I aged and I realized that the generation that gave me existential nightmares about a dying planet also doubled and tripled down on their right to travel in the most exploitative ways. That cruise ships still exist at all as our understanding of the limited nature of natural resources, the undeniable effects of climate change, and the problems of overconsumption have increased, is mind-boggling.

I will never forget giving a lecture somewhere about generational conflicts, bringing up that a European city I had lived in was actually quite opposed to the expansion of the cruise industry there because of how it would ruin the local economy and destroy opportunities for youth, and having someone with at least three decades of years on me insist that it was too bad, people who were retired were entitled to enjoy their free time. Now add the compounding effects of exoticizing neo-colonialism to that attitude. Think about how many travel influencers and travelers leaving reviews complain when the beaches in Caribbean islands that are under-resourced, usually paying European colonizers some legacy payments for the end of chattel slavery and plantations, and are at the front lines of rising oceans, large storm fronts, and the infinite trash-stream generated by the Global North’s overconsumption, are less than pristine. Why is there still so much of the world that thinks that everywhere that is not their immediate local exists for their own entertainment and amusement? (Let’s be honest, we know why.) But this is an industry that is specifically advertising to largely people of retirement age, which is now that generation that laid responsibility for stopping the end of the world due to global warming at the feet of children. The hypocrisy and entitlement is astounding; the idea that, well, the greenwashing is enough, that if so many people are doing it, it can’t be that bad, and also the simple idea that someone’s individual wants trump the needs of the many that are still to come because it would be fun, because it scratches an itch or grants a wish…it is, truthfully, the same logic that allowed so many people to benefit from the byproducts of enslavement and plantation culture, thinking that just because they were not the owners, the demand they continued to create for the products was somehow unrelated to the overall problem.

Entertainment and amusement and comfort: these are the bywords. So, the cruise (and resort) industry is deeply-rooted and very manipulative, preying on the relative lack of comfort and convenience that one might experience on a daily basis by selling a dream of being “special”, of being cared for and catered to. It is a seductive campaign. But what about other entertaining things that we can’t seem to let go of as a society. We know we need to cut carbon use; we know lighting the atmosphere on fire constantly is probably not going to help reduce net carbon release; we know that neither the billionaires set on escaping the planet’s decline to live in space nor the governments that could stop dropping tons and tons of ordinance on innocent people are going to do so as it is too lucrative for them to keep destroying things. However, we could stop lighting the skies on fire for fun. We could stop fireworks, not because it would be anything compared to the bombing and the rockets, truthfully, it would be a drop in the ocean in net effects. But in terms of signaling change, in terms of saying that we need a new normal, that there can be other ways to celebrate things rather than explosions – light shows, drone shows, more direct communal engagement of different sorts – we could stop. But hey, the colors are pretty. It does not matter that it traumatizes all sorts of creatures, from wildlife to humans of all walks that have reason to fear loud noises and flashing lights. It is tradition. And the world is on fire anyways, right?

Cruises and fireworks have become my two futile fights, I fear. They have rooted in my mind as sign and symbol of the cultural apathy that sits upon us all in the west as we grapple with the steady march of late stage capitalism to the fascism it was always destined to bring into power. Apathy, the refusal to act, to find it worth acting because the forces the rule the world will always be too great and powerful, is the force we must struggle against before we can start to build a better world. I worry, as I look at the widespread forcing of so-called AI on everyone in every sphere, a step beyond the automation that was meant to mark the end of society as we knew it, that it is already too late for many to learn to choose to live life differently.

In 2024 I spent four days and I’m not sure how many hours across phone calls and chat help lines to try to remove Microsoft Copilot from my subscription of Microsoft Office. Of course, I was never asked if I wanted this; I was merely told my annual subscription (another thing to rail against) was going to increase and the price of this would of course be that I was allowing Microsoft access to all of my intellectual property so long as I continued to use their products with this add-on activated. There was no easy way to remove it. Worse, the utter lack of understanding from customer service as to why I would want it gone, why I might have a problem with what was essentially spyware on my laptop in service of a corporation that is openly mining creative work to build tools that are meant to replace skilled labor. It goes beyond my fear for my work; my job is to teach thinking, to convince people to examine the stories in their lives they take for granted and reconsider how the world is constructed through such narratives, and if we have better stories waiting to be told. That job is made so much harder in the face of my own students’ existential dread, but the global climate crisis and resource crisis around access to clean water and clean air that the push to AI is going to bring upon us is really just too much. And yet, I talk to people who should know better, who should be able to see the harm and the damage, and there is always a “but it is convenient” that is supposed to justify their buy-in. Not even literal reports of brain damage and neural decline from using it is stopping people. I read M. T. Anderson’s Feed in middle school. I didn’t want to live in that world then. I still don’t want to live in that world now. And I won’t lie. I do despair.

But, as we established, “Despair is a luxury” and it is one that I can’t afford. We can’t afford. Fear will always be present, so will dread, but what we cannot do is give in to the idea that there is no hope for a better world. And we need a better world; we need to believe a better world can be built, not in the future, but now.

And people are trying, despite the oppression. People do tend to form community; they do tend to try to keep each other cared for; it’s in our DNA. I actually contend that part of the reason humanities courses and departments are so under threat is because it is our anthropology, our sociology, our literature classes, and our history classes, that ultimately teach us that the earliest signs of civilization are not technology of dominance. The earliest signs of civilization are born on the body in healed bones. In signs of care for someone regardless of their utility. And that is the most important thing we need to remember and to hold on to. That when the world is burning, that when disaster strikes, when it seems like destruction is imminent, our most human nature is not to abandon each other, but to turn toward each other and care for each other. This is a deep truth that many in power would like us to forget, just like they would like us to forget that the problems of technology and progress and over consumption are not new, either.

The internet helpfully reminded me of the show Dinosaurs recently, a sitcom I barely remember from my own childhood outside of clips and memes, but one that is very much worth revisiting for media scholars, I think. But I do remember the finale, which aired in 1995, and its climate message, the father’s apology to his children for not taking better care of the world. Of course, as humans, we know the dinosaurs no longer walk the earth. We know they go extinct. Their future, in this show, is ours. It is our world we’re destroying now, and really have destroyed for so many children in so many parts of the world already. If we live in the West, we just don’t see it on a daily basis.

This sitcom brought this commentary to its television audience in the 1990s; it is now three decades later. Surely we can start to see where just continuing in our current path is not going to suffice. If we want the world to stop burning, we have to stop lighting the sky on fire – yes, in the big ways, but also in the small ways. If we want beaches to stop being dirty, we have to stop overconsuming to the point where our trash washes up on them, and we also have to stop thinking it is okay to drop several thousand people on under resourced areas that struggle with the effects of the West’s over consumption before the entitled people even start to realize something is wrong. And we have to stop buying into every little thing the tech world pushes at us. They are not gods. They are not even good at what they do. They just have the money to buy us. And we need to refuse to be sold.

Nil desperandum.