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Utopia

April 15, 2026 / Mascha Schädlich

How do we get out of here?

On anxieties about the future and a constructive approach to multiple crises

Written by

Mascha Schädlich

(she)

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As I sleepily stir my coffee in the morning, listening to Deutschlandfunk radio, I'm overcome with fear: more drone attacks, rearmament plans, and the dismantling of the welfare state. I finish my coffee – and I'm so tired.
Like me, many of us feel increasingly anxious about the seemingly ever-worsening state of the world. Maintaining hope for a livable future is becoming more and more difficult. In addition to the political and economic crises, we are also facing personal crises – often seemingly interconnected: job hunting, existential questions, heartbreak, loneliness, exhaustion, rising living costs, insomnia, and yet another cold. In my circle, the demand for therapy far exceeds the supply.

Knowledge alone is not enough
The worst part for me is that the concepts for a sustainable way of life and economy have been on the table for a long time. We don't need to have our brightest minds produce ever more detailed studies for another fifty years – instead, we should have started implementing them fifty years ago: circular economy, wealth tax, rent control, collective reduction of working hours, energy transition, mobility transition, agricultural transition, and so on and so forth. The knowledge is there, but it's becoming clear that knowledge alone isn't enough. You also need social and political power to initiate change. But those who possess the sustainable concepts are not in positions of socially relevant power – and are unlikely to achieve them within the existing capitalist system.
Instead, we are experiencing German society as a society of repression par excellence. Those parties that perform best are those that tell appealing stories about the possibility of returning to an imagined past in which everything was "better": the economy flourished, minorities and women knew their place, and in geopolitics, it was easy to distinguish between good and evil. The future was primarily seen as an extension of the present. However, climate change, at the very latest, shattered this vision of the future. But this does not lead to climate change being addressed as a problem; instead, it is repressed, and there is a yearning for backward-looking narratives or promises of technological salvation.

Allowing grief
The repression of the suffering we in the Global North generate worldwide through our imperial lifestyle is a fundamental condition for enabling this suffering in the first place. One way to counter this development—alongside building grassroots counter-power and expanding spaces for freedom—is therefore for us as a society to break free from repression and confront the pain of all the present suffering, as well as the manifold losses and catastrophes that await us in the future as a result of our way of life. Only when we find a societal way of dealing with these challenging emotions will people be able to break free from repression and open themselves to visions of the future that are fundamentally different from what they know.
It will probably be some time before we find ourselves weeping in the arms of CDU or AfD voters. Within the climate movement, however, initial steps are already being taken to collectively confront grief. And, as always, we must first test new things on a small scale before they (hopefully!) spread to mainstream society.
At the collapse camp last summer, the collective processing of emotions took up a surprisingly large amount of space for me. Other movements have gone even further: Black people in the US face an enormous amount of racist (police) violence and often have to mourn the loss of murdered friends and family members. Their collective way of dealing with pain and loss, conveyed through books like Cindy Milstein's *Rebellious Mourning*, can inspire us. Likewise, the survivors of the AIDS epidemic are a role model for me. They have gone down in history with the motto "Bury your friends in the morning, protest in the afternoon, and dance all night."
This also makes clear how closely grief and joy are intertwined. The American psychotherapist and author Francis Weller says: "Most of our aliveness is caught up in the suppression of sorrow." For me, this means that turning towards grief would also allow us to feel more alive again. Grief is one of the basic emotions, and if we constantly suppress it, we are also unable to fully experience other emotions.

It can only work together.
In Western societies, however, grief is often individualized and primarily takes place at night, under the covers. During the day, people try to appear strong and controlled. Legitimate reasons for mourning include the death of a close relative or heartbreak—but even then, only for a few weeks. In contrast, I learned from Camille Sapara Barton's book *Tending Grief* that the Dagara community, based in present-day Burkina Faso, conducts monthly mourning rituals that are mandatory for all members of the community. It is taboo not to participate in these monthly rituals because the unprocessed grief of individuals can negatively impact the community through violence or illness. According to the Dagara, grief is not an exception or even an expression of failure, but a normal part of life. Therefore, mourning must be done regularly and collectively. This approach to grief, which the renowned grief counselor Sobonfu Somé shared with author Camille Sapara Barton in one of her workshops, has profoundly shaped my understanding of how we, in capitalist societies, have reached the point where we are now. We must learn to give grief more space. And we must learn to authentically express our grief to others.
Generally speaking, I would say that we can only constructively address current and future crises if we collectively develop a competent way of dealing with our emotions—all of our emotions. If we learn to grieve together, to be angry together, and to celebrate together, it can unleash an enormous power that we can also harness politically. I hope for a time when we no longer stay at home, overwhelmed by world events and battling depression, but have learned to accept our feelings and take them out into the streets. “What you are feeling is not your own grief, what you are feeling is the soul of the world suffering,” says Francis Weller, and something inside me vibrates.
Weller speaks of primary and secondary gratification mechanisms and believes that we would need fewer of the secondary gratification mechanisms, such as status, wealth, and material goods, if we gave more space to the primary ones (like eating together, dancing, dreaming, and grieving). He even believes that turning to the primary gratification mechanisms could cause our capitalist economic system to collapse. I'd love to try that! So I'm already starting: I'm moving into a community, eating dinner with lots of people every evening, sharing the difficult moments, figuring out what I need to be able to hold and share grief, consciously celebrating the beautiful moments, and constantly inviting others to dream of a better world. I'm also meeting regularly with my book group for *Hospicing Modernity* and joining a grief support group with people I barely know. And what are you doing?

For further reading and listening:

This article was published as part of the column “Future for all” in the philosophical economics magazine Agora42.