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  • If I don't think the future is worth anything then I'm not going to have children.

  • If I think it is worth something, I will have children.

  • We've already seen coastal city flooding, we've already seen forest fires, we've already seen flash floods, we've seen tornadoes.

  • When big ecological disasters happen around the world, I feel a sense of anxiety.

  • I feel a sense of sadness and a sense of loss.

  • So imagine you go outside and you look up in the sky, and there's a comet there.

  • And you know you've just been told by scientists that that comet is racing toward the Earth and it's going to kill everybody and everything in a big fiery storm.

  • And nobody else notices the comet.

  • And you say: "Hey look, there's a comet and it's going to kill all of us."

  • And people just don't seem to care.

  • Climate change anxiety as a term is a relatively new term.

  • By no way a new phenomenon.

  • It's an anxiety that is about the future.

  • And a trauma that we haven't experienced yet, but that we know is going to come our way.

  • We're facing a very existential fear.

  • This is not a fear about "how does my body look" or "am I popular enough".

  • This is a fear about our survival.

  • What is it that makes you anxious?

  • What are the thoughts or what are the details that when you go there, that's when you touch your anxiety.

  • In other parts of the world, they'll be more affected by climate change than the cities that we currently live in.

  • That's when I feel like...we're not doing enough.

  • One of the most sort of potent anxieties, is the fear of people mistreating each other out of panic and fear.

  • And, you know...it's more maybe how people respond to that.

  • I just keep thinking about a small child.

  • Probably myself.

  • And I just think about how innocent my... god, I'm emotional already.

  • That memory I have of being a child, that is so valuable.

  • And I just think about all the people that aren't... that don't have that.

  • That preciousness about the world and I think that's really...

  • That's a privilege that is just disappearing.

  • I get emotional when I think about the effects that climate change and its related issues will have.

  • I get very angry about those, I feel very powerless.

  • I feel very frustrated.

  • I think we need more and more people to wake up to this and anxiety is part of the way of digesting the information, there's no way around that.

  • What is the part that you can play in stretching out and mending the part of the world that is within your reach?

  • In the face of constant defeat, just stubbornness and tenacity.

  • Understand what your impact as a human being is on the planet.

  • I feel so helpless but... but so empowered by that helplessness that I then want to try and do everything and so...

  • We see an unprecedented amount of people who present with anxiety that they can't even locate.

  • And I'm wondering whether this is that people are actually picking up that something is not right.

  • I don't think it's all...

  • I have to believe it's not all bad.

  • Maybe things will be fixed by the time they're an adult, and it will be all good.

  • I feel the most hopeful when I remind myself how bad humans have always been at predicting the future.

  • Thanks for watching!

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If I don't think the future is worth anything then I'm not going to have children.

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