Today’s youth have become experts at imagining the end of the world. We feel more  powerless, lonely and hopeless with every scroll through social media where we see yet another prediction of collapse, another headline urging us that our lives are doomed before they have even started. Of course, social media algorithms incessantly perpetuate the same catastrophizing narratives; as such, it’s no surprise that despair has given way to apathy. Relentless catastrophe has a way of numbing even the most well-intentioned among us, trading urgency for resignation, asking not “What can I do?” but “Why try?” 

If fear alone could inspire climate action, it would have done so by now. Perhaps what our generation needs isn’t another warning that the world is ending, but a new reason to believe that we are capable of saving it. 

This is not the first time humans have gone through periods of fear and uncertainty, and nor will it be the last. But we’ve somehow always found ways to overcome it. If there were a moment in history that captured chaos and misery, it was Athens more than 2,000 years ago. The Peloponnesian War dragged on for years, democracy was under strain and the ambition of self-interested politicians took precedence over the needs of their citizens. Yet, it was precisely because of that chaos that tragicomedy emerged. Rather than surrendering to apathy, playwright Aristophanes wrote “Peace,” pairing stories grounded in the politics of his day with humour and resolution to remind communities that a better future remained worth imagining. 

Our history reveals something beautiful about human nature: we are a resilient species and resiliency is not born from despair alone. Positive psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and climate behavioral scientist Jiaying Zhao build on this idea in........

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