What We Grieve

We grieve for when hot weather was something to fully enjoy, not carrying the dread of accelerating environmental change.

We grieve for the time when talking about the weather was our way to connect with one another, not to trigger anxieties, or invite a political debate.

We grieve for when we could enjoy a beautiful landscape and not wonder about the suffering and loss of its wildlife.

We grieve for the time when allergies, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cancers, were unusual conditions and we would be unlucky to be affected by them.

We grieve for when we didn’t know that microplastics and toxic chemicals are circulating in our blood, accelerating our aging and foretelling of future illness, as well as that of future generations.

We grieve for when humanity was small enough for this Planet Earth to tolerate the financiers’ demand for exponential growth.

We grieve our loss of faith in sacrificial action and mass mobilisation as a way of triggering politicians and society to change in significant and lasting ways.

We grieve the assumption that most of our friends, relatives, and neighbours would eventually recognise the seriousness of what we see and organise together at scale.

We grieve our own wasted years on strategies for change that did not work, and the solace we once found in the idea that small changes would, in time, become sufficient.

We grieve our past deference to those more conservative scientists and experts and the assumption that their interpretations and recommendations on climate change would eventually lead to an adequate response.

We grieve the lost hope that environmental politics could succeed within established ways of thinking about problems and pathways to change.

We grieve for when young and principled activists felt they had peaceful pathways to social change, rather than being attracted to violent ideation that would, in any case, ultimately serve repressive forces in society.

We grieve the deadening of passions for truth, care, and change, amongst many professionals, as their work degrades into a performance for income and status.

We grieve the possibility of a materially better future that we once assumed was within reach.

We grieve for when we thought pop stars were imaginative when they sang about an “emergency on planet earth” or of “praying for time.”

We grieve for when falling in love could lead to wanting children without also confronting fears about the kind of world into which they are being born.

We grieve that we can no longer assume that we will live longer than our parents, and our children longer than us – with the opposite of that even becoming likely.

We grieve for the time when having a job, working hard, and behaving responsibly, seemed sufficient to build a decent life.

We grieve for when our communities had enough spare capacity and time so people could help one another without becoming indebted, overworked, or exhausted.

We grieve for the time when young people did not think they had to leave the country, become digital nomads, dabble in crypto, or await a windfall from a dying relative, simply to have a chance of an economically viable future.

We grieve for the loss of national sovereignty to global technology companies, global financial institutions, global media corporations, and the institutions that advance the agendas of global corporations in general.

We grieve for the time when our hard-earned savings were not being managed by algorithms that encourage the most destructive business activities.

We grieve that it is no longer normal for people to take their time to read and reflect, so that they can weigh up ideas and formulate their intentions, rather than impatiently reacting to stimulus on a screen.

We grieve for the time when large business owners and executives were just rich people with boring jobs, rather than people who steer public conversations, ideologies and politics in their commercial favour, or according to their psychoses.

We grieve the decline of a public sphere in which questions of truth, rights, and fairness, could be discussed with nuance, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to learn.

We grieve the replacement of that curiosity with desires for righteousness—a culture of demonstrating correctness rather than exploring uncertainty, complexity, and the possibility of changing our minds.

We grieve for the time when attention-seeking halfwits, whose ideas momentarily align with the schemes of elites to distract everyone, did not dominate our feeds and conversations.

We grieve for the time when politicians promising us a better tomorrow for our country if we voted for them had any credibility whatsoever.

We grieve for the time when we could regard international law and international organisations, however distant and ineffective, as at least providing some kind of check on the aggressive use of power and the worst forms of crime against humanity.

We grieve for the time when we believed that the war criminals who started the Iraq War on the basis of lies would end up in jail, rather than running major foundations or presenting leading podcasts.

We grieve for the time when, despite their ridiculous cost and dangerousness, we had some confidence that the existence of nuclear arsenals would sober up the leaders of the great powers, to make full-scale war unlikely.

We grieve the loss of the assumption that, despite its drawbacks, having the USA as the world’s dominant superpower is better than the alternatives.

We grieve the loss of our remaining hope that our government would become accountable for their actions, responsive to citizens, and capable of leading responses to collective challenges.

We grieve for the loss of the enthusiasm that the internet would connect humanity so that we would have greater empathy and understanding, and thereby achieve more rights, wellbeing and opportunities for all.

We grieve for the time when we thought the revelations by Edward Snowden would curb the emergence of a surveillance society, where our privacy is compromised and our emotions are targeted for manipulation.

We grieve for the time when we could use the software services of companies without wondering whether that makes us complicit in war crimes that are enabled by those same companies.

We grieve for how a concern for people who are economically disadvantaged partly because of their identity, was then developed into a pretentious distraction from true struggles for economic fairness, which then triggered identity-related backlashes, while economic unfairness and inequality intensified to the worst levels ever.

We grieve for the time when anyone who said they were anti-racist actually meant it, rather than using claims to be anti-racism to show off or to weaponise it against someone.

We grieve as we discover how people we love can succumb to distraction, misinformation and grievance politics—to ideas that give their anxiety somewhere to go rather than helping them understand the deeper issues and the wholesome ways to adapt.

We grieve our lost closeness to some friends and relatives, as our common personal anxiety about wider changes and perceived threats has generated aggravated disagreements in our private lives.

We grieve the loss of many elders from meaningful community life, as social isolation leaves them increasingly vulnerable to the grievance politics that is communicated to them by powerful forces.

We grieve for the loss of the reverence we felt for a generation of elderly due to their fortitude through youthful suffering and their request that we never forget the costs of war.

We grieve that we can no longer be confident that medical professionals will never promote drugs to healthy people and children, without primary attention to personal safety, secondary attention to public health, and zero attention to profits or politics.

We grieve for the time when we thought it was utterly ridiculous to imagine that networks of paedophiles could exercise power behind the scenes at national and international levels.

We grieve that we can no longer dismiss as outlandish the theories that there was secret service facilitation of some of the perpetrators of massive tragedies, including 9/11.

We grieve our past assumption that it would be ludicrous to think that national or global elites have a ‘considered’ disregard, or even death wish, for some of humanity, including many of us.

We grieve for when we could think of our deceased loved ones and wish they were still alive to see our accomplishments and what is happening in the world.

We grieve for when anxiety and dread were not the background tone of our daily lives.

We grieve that we cannot make the old hopes normal again.

We grieve for when it did not require such effort or privilege to escape our forethoughts of grief.

We grieve for that time when we thought that incantations of our common grief, such as the fifty listed here, could help liberate people who imprison themselves in the routines of their executive positions.

Yes, we grieve and relinquish all of that: the loss of the future we thought we were working towards, the society we thought would recognise what is happening, the peoples we thought would remain capable of appreciating one another, and the political institutions we thought would eventually respond to reality.

And yes, we also wonder whether moving from anxiety into grief, for all that has been lost, and is being lost, in so many ways, can now open our hearts and minds to something different. Because we know that the final stage of grief is to re-focus on the living.

Written by Jem Bendell on September 11th, 2026.