How Do You Move Forward When the World Feels Unlivable?
By Natalie McCarty
2025 was an awful year for our world.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes from living in a moment where every headline feels, genuinely, like a moral emergency. Authoritarian rhetoric resurfaces without shame. Climate collapse is no longer theoretical—it is measurable, visible, and devastating. What is sanitized as “immigration policy” is enforced through intimidation and state violence, with ICE operating in ways that place American civilians directly in harm’s way. Violence now exists on multiple registers at once: physical, rhetorical, bureaucratic, and constant.
In this climate, the question is no longer what is happening, but how we are supposed to live while it is happening?
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Hope, as it is often sold to us, feels inadequate. It suggests that believing things will improve is a moral virtue in itself. But for many of us, blind hope feels dishonest—almost irresponsible—when the stakes are this high. So, perhaps the work is not about optimism at all. Perhaps it is about endurance and choosing to stay human in a system that increasingly rewards detachment.
One of the large dangers of this era is emotional shutdown. When violence becomes routine and catastrophe becomes cyclical, numbness can feel like self‑preservation. But disengagement is exactly what oppressive systems rely on! To continue caring—to stay porous to grief, anger, and fear—is not weakness, rather it is proof that something in you has not been conquered.
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Feeling overwhelmed does not mean you are uninformed or fragile. It means you are paying attention.
Hope is assembled, slowly, through action. It looks like mutual aid. It looks like showing up to vote even when the system feels broken. It looks like supporting journalists, organizers, artists, and educators who refuse to dilute the truth for comfort.
In a world shaped by structural violence, hope is participation. You build it! You do not wait for it to appear; you generate it through what you choose to do with your time, money, voice, and care.
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One of the cruel tricks of the modern news cycle is convincing individuals that they must emotionally carry the weight of the entire world. No nervous system was designed for this level of constant catastrophe.
You are allowed to think locally. You are allowed to focus on what is within reach: your community, your relationships, your work, your body. This is not apathy, it is sustainability. Movements are not built by people who burn out in despair, but by people who learn how to rest without disconnecting.
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Moving forward means deciding that your life is still worth tending to, even in collapse. Creating beauty, seeking pleasure, building intimacy—these are what make the work worth doing.
If there is hope to be found, it lives here: in the refusal to surrender curiosity, tenderness, and moral imagination. In choosing to remain engaged without becoming consumed. In continuing, not because the future is guaranteed, but because giving up would mean letting the worst forces win twice.
Hope, then, is not faith in the outcome.
It is faith in the act of continuing.
