Paper Short Abstract:

This paper affectively and creatively explores climate change through a lens of depression, building on discourses of climate distress to understand how we can learn to live-with climate change—how we increase our capacity to act, moving through stagnation and resignation towards repair, care and response-ability.

Paper Abstract:

As the climate crisis deepens, scholarship is increasingly engaged with themes of climate despair and fatalism; Marxist scholar Andreas Malm writes that ‘[it is] easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight’ (Malm 2018:142). What then, of those who already want to die? This paper draws on autoethnographic and digital ethnographic research—of my own embodied and mediatised experiences—to affectively and creatively explore the climate crisis through a lens of depression and suicidality. How might this framing—of self-loathing and cynicism, exhaustion and apathy, and suicidal ideation—help us to understand stagnation, resignation, and perceived indifference in the context of the climate crisis? Building on discourses of climate distress, within which there has been little direct engagement with depression, I explore it as both a “psycho-social disability” (Stone 2018), and as manifestation of existential angst, one that can be both deeply debilitating yet also potentially transformative. Situated reflexively in my positionality as an "emergent adult" (Ojala and Anniko 2020) researching climate change in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper moves through imagined climate futures, environmental misanthropy, capitalist realism, and digital overwhelm. If, as Verlie (2022) calls for, we must learn to live-with climate change, how do you learn to want to live, particularly in a context where the future seems increasingly grim? Drawing on autoethnographic understandings of research as deeply affective and potentially reparative, the paper retraces my own pathway through learning to live in spite of and with the climate crisis, towards acceptance, care, and response-ability.