What to Do When the World Feels Relentless

And then perhaps your child needs breakfast.

You have a meeting at nine.

Your mother is unwell.

Your rent has gone up.

You are trying to find work.

Your relationship is struggling.

You are tired and exhausted and tired.

The world does not stop being on fire because your own life requires your attention.

And I think that is a tension that has increasingly become important today.

There are people trying extraordinarily hard to make things better, not just for themselves or for their communities, but for the world at large.

I see them everywhere, you know, in organizations, in communities, in movements, in classrooms, in hospitals.

And families, people giving up their time, their money, their expertise, their labor, their thinking ability, and sometimes their bodies to make something more just.

And still, power continues to organize reality.

Power continues to determine whose suffering becomes breaking news and whose become background noise.

whose account of events receives a platform, which prices gets described as urgent, which one gets described as complicated, and which one barely gets described at all.

It influences whose death becomes politically consequential, whose displacement becomes a statistics, and whose anger is considered reasonable, or whose is actually considered threatening.