Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill-equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems. But suddenly we live in a moment when problems are speeding and piling up.
The climate crisis now consists of walls of water sweeping down Nepali rivers, obliterating entire towns in the blink of an eye, and wildfires that wipe out California neighborhoods in hours. And we’re confronting the birth and Bunyanesque growth of a new technology, artificial intelligence, that, according to some of its creators, is fairly likely to kill us all in the near future. We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.
We definitely weren’t designed to cope with all this — our bodies, our nervous systems, our brains. Among all the other dangers these developments represent, they’re simply wearing us out. A lot of us would like politicians to offer, alongside their promises of affordability, even a glimpse of serenity.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released in early September found that in 2024, 71.5 percent of adults reported that at least some of the time in the past three months they felt fatigued, defined as “physical or mental tiredness or exhaustion that does not improve with additional sleep or rest.” As the survey’s lead author, Natalie A.E. Young, told NBC, fatigue has become “one of the most frequently reported health concerns in primary care visits in the U.S.,” and sufferers — which, again, includes a vast majority of us — are “at higher risk of activity limitations and disability, including permanent work disability.” The most recent Stress in America report from the American Psychological Association found that a majority of adults reported feeling isolated and more anxious about the future than they used to be, and that much of the trouble could be laid at the door of our impossible politics: Almost two-thirds of respondents cited “societal divisions” as a significant stressor.
A kind of overwhelming weariness and even sadness is increasingly the default state of what, in living memory, were optimistic, get-up-and-go-ish fellow Americans. I think if we had some way of surveying Americans at 3 a.m., we’d find huge numbers of people awake, wondering what new strain might be in store come morning. I don’t think it’s fragility at work — how are we supposed to respond to the now almost daily news that roving bands of A.I. agents are up to mayhem, or that the onrushing El Niño will take temperatures to heights no human has ever experienced?
I arrive at this point with an unfair advantage, having spent the past four decades facing down the steady and so far implacable rise in the planet’s temperature. Over the years I’ve worked out remedies that keep me mentally healthy enough to keep fighting. I’ve helped build big movements in no small part so that I’ll have others to lean on, and I’ve learned that I need an hour or two of exercising in the natural world most days to reset my soul. Yet even those strategies increasingly come up short; the level of pressure that an even somewhat engaged American feels at the moment is very nearly debilitating.
In past periods of pervasive crisis, Americans at least had some institutions on which to lean. We’ve traditionally thought of the president as a kind of national father figure. It helped a Depression-haunted nation when Franklin D. Roosevelt told us the only thing we had to fear was fear itself (and then backed it up with wave after wave of programs designed to make it so).
President Trump’s main response to our A.I. fear is to rename it “superintelligence,” while the country’s chief health authority, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has decided it’s time to go to work on chemtrails from airplanes. The tech chieftains wring their hands a bit about the trouble they’ve caused (remember, their creations have broken into companies and government agencies) and then get back to making their fortunes. Very few people feel like placing their trust in these powerful figures, young Americans most of all: Recent polling shows that roughly seven in 10 people ages 18 to 34 distrust Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the other would-be wizards leading the big A.I. companies.
A not irrational response to all this would be to try to ignore it. Lots of people are doing so. Yet this kind of avoidance will just get us in deeper trouble by ceding control to those who profit from it, so I hope we won’t choose quietism or escape. I’m hard at work volunteering in this fall’s midterm elections, for instance; we simply can’t tune out.
If we elect serious leaders who can take control of Congress and the presidency, they’ll have to work hard — we need all kinds of reforms to prevent a relapse of the sickness to which we’ve fallen prey. None of it will be low stress.
But it would be nice if those leaders could at least have, as one goal, a country and a world where we could occasionally ignore them, where we didn’t have to live under constant tension. A greatly underappreciated virtue of other presidents was that you could forget about them for weeks at a time. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York doesn’t issue hourly tirades. Instead, he offers occasional videos of him and his crew cheerfully filling potholes; by most measures, his popularity has surged and the city’s mood seems to have improved.
I’d be happy to listen to Jon Ossoff or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for half an hour every Thursday if either of them runs for and is elected president. And then I’d be happy to think about something else that weekend; civic participation should be a part of life, not something that keeps you up at night.
Restoring some kind of calm is easier said than done, and will require hard choices. If A.I. represents a mortal threat, then it should be wrestled to the ground and stuck in a cage. Whatever its putative benefits, they aren’t worth any of us having to contemplate human extinction. The climate crisis is almost easy by comparison; we have inexpensive solar, wind and battery technology that can replace the fossil fuels driving temperatures ever higher, though of course getting to that point would require standing up to Big Oil. These hopes and fears will animate the next presidential election. Someone who figures out how to talk straightforwardly with Americans about the trade-offs will win the votes of a grateful nation.
Because if human survival and economic resilience are important goals, so is a world calm enough to meet the needs of the human nervous system. We can’t keep on like this — it’s simply inhuman. We’re creating a world that’s only fit for something artificial.
Bill McKibben is a professor at Middlebury College, the founder of Third Act and the author most recently of “Here Comes the Sun.”
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