How to love a dying world

Reclaiming our love of life in a time of collapse.

Black Rock City, 2014

Does anyone else feel like we’ve all gone through some weird portal and stumbled into a parallel reality? (Or is it just me?) 2025 looks a lot like the world we knew—except distorted, like some uncanny valley version of itself. Everything feels upside down, backwards, and inside out. Anything seems to be possible now—and not in a good way.

Chaos is the new order. Systems are collapsing, cities are burning, the government is being dismantled before our eyes, and even our basic sense of shared reality is breaking down. It’s a strange time to be alive… to put it lightly.

As someone who writes about things like death and Buddhism and human psychology, I’ve been searching for the right words to describe this moment of collective existential crisis. I can’t say I’ve found them yet, but I’ve spent the past few weeks deeply contemplating the rapid and sweeping disruption we’re all witnessing.

While there’s so much I’m still trying to wrap my head around (and I know I’m not alone in that), what I do know is this: We are in a time of dying.

This moment is one of collapse, ecological and societal. Our way of life, built on the ideology of global capitalism, is unraveling. So too are our democracy, our shared ideals, and the fragile balance of our planetary ecosystems. And it’s happening fast.

Of course, these changes have been coming down the pipeline for quite some time. The writing has been on the wall for years. Many of us have felt deeply in our bodies, in our nervous systems: the slow creep of Big Tech, the rise of authoritarianism, and the accelerating destruction of the natural world.

But in the past few months, we seem to have reached a tipping point. The hostile takeover of an oligarchic regime intent on tearing it all down has made it clear: The world that we’ve been living in doesn’t exist anymore.

There’s no question in my mind that the current wave of Y2K nostalgia in pop culture seems to be a mourning of a simpler world.

We’re homesick for a time when we didn’t carry around addictive pocket-sized rectangles with us everywhere we go, spend hours a day scrolling and swiping, and pay luxury prices for the basic necessities of life. Maybe we’re all listening to Return of Saturn and wearing Uggs to soothe our longing to return to a time when life, though flawed, made more sense, and felt more rooted in what actually matters.

A time of dying and a time of birthing

As I contemplate this moment, and search for the path forward in my own life (especially as a mother to a young child), I have fallen into doom and despair more often than I care to admit. But as I gather my own strength and resolve, I keep coming back to the words of one of my personal heroes, Joanna Macy, the beloved Buddhist teacher, scholar of systems thinking, and environmental activist. Her perspective on the times we’re living through is wise, profound and deeply heartening.

Two years ago, I met Macy when I was working for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and organizing a summit on Buddhism and climate change, which brought together leading dharma teachers and environmentalists like Tara Brach, Roshi Joan Halifax, Paul Hawken and Terry Tempest Williams (you can watch all the talks here for free).

At 93 years old, Macy gave a beautiful and galvanizing keynote on waking up to the truth of interdependence.

At the end of her talk, someone asked how she was “honestly feeling” about this time of destruction and collapse. Her response? I wouldn’t want to miss it.

Here’s her full answer:

“If I had ever known [beforehand] that we’d be faced by this terrible situation for our planet, I would want to be here. I wouldn’t want to miss it. I know you probably weren’t expecting to hear that, but that’s my main feeling. It doesn’t mean that I think I have an answer. I think it’s very important to feel baffled and overwhelmed. But this is my world. I love it deeply… and I wouldn’t ever want to miss this, what we’re facing now.

As we come to the limits of how our training and our self-definitions have enclosed and blocked us, we’re going to find that we’re growing new capacities. I feel from my own experience that a more intense love for life and a readiness to risk everything for the sake of life will be born to us. Powers of valor, self-discipline, and passionate attention to life itself will be born in us in new ways. So don’t isolate yourself and don’t subscribe to thinking like, ‘Of course it looks bleak.’ It always looks bleak before you have to grow something—a new capacity. This is a birthing time as well as a dying time. Forces and capacities are ready to birth inside each one of us if we keep our spunk and courage.”

Macy has spoken for years about this critical time of dying and birthing, which she calls “the Great Turning.” She defines the Great Turning as the movement from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society. In this transition, she says, we will see the breakdown of global capitalism and the gradual emergence of a regenerative culture. Right now, as we watch the richest man in the world bulldoze the federal government, eliminate public services and cut off life-saving aid to the world’s poorest people, that breakdown is not a future possibility—it’s happening right now, in real time.

This treacherous passage from the old world to a new one can be likened to a bardo, the liminal states between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetan teachings describe the journey of our consciousness through the bardos as we make our way from one the end of one life to the beginning of another. The bardos are a place of great uncertainty and trials, but they also hold tremendous creative and transformational potential.

“The bardo occurs not just when you die; it also can be a huge change in the conditions of your existence,” Macy explained last year in an essay for Tricycle. “But we’re entering this bardo together.”

How do we tap into the creative potential of this transitional time? It starts, I think, with simply holding the possibility of something new. We can remember that death and birth are two sides of a coin, and that Winter is always followed by Spring. We can focus our gaze on the signs of new life that are emerging, and the good things might become possible with the breakdown of the old ways. We can retrain our gaze towards what preserves and honors life, rather than what destroys it. We can, in the words of Mr. Rogers, “find the helpers”—and when we’re ready, when we’re able, we can become the helpers.

In her newsletter The Pause, journalist and On Being host Krista Tippet beautifully described the great challenge and possibility of this bardo moment.

“This is an age of devastating tumult. It is an age of magnificent possibility,” she wrote. “Much is breaking. Much is being born. The two go hand in hand, and that is one of the deepest and strangest, most terrible and most redemptive truths of human reality.”

Making our way through this bardo increasingly feels to me like the essential work of our times. As Macy says: “It will be messy, but this is our work right now: to see the Great Turning, even as things are falling apart.”

We might start by contemplating: What do we want for this new world? How can we be a part of creating that? This is something that will take some conscious effort, a clearing of mental space from the constant barrage of horrific news. The disruptions are happening so fast that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with what’s happening, let alone our emotional reactions to it. (And of course, overwhelming us is the point.) It’s a LOT to process. It’s a lot on our already-frayed nervous systems.

Creating space for contemplation isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity for moving forward with strength and intention. It helps us to both conserve and replenish our energy, and also to begin envisioning the future we’d like to see.

Transforming despair

So how do we deal with the heartbreak of living in a world that is crumbling before our eyes?

Macy teaches that it’s about finding our way through despair to rediscover our innate love for the world; our love of life.

Facing and transforming despair is the heart of Joanna Macy’s work. In confronting our pain for the state of the world and finding the love that underlies it, our pain becomes powerful fuel for compassionate action (upaya in Buddhism)—choosing to act in service of the dynamic, interconnected system of life of which we are a part.

We can’t just skip over the pain to get to the love and compassion, because in fact they are inextricable. Macy reminds us that the reason we feel pain is because we care. After all, if we didn’t care about the world, then it wouldn’t hurt us to see what’s happening to it. We care about the beauty of the natural world, and we want to protect it. We care about other people, and we want to protect their rights and freedoms and human dignity. We care about children, and we want them to grow up in a world where they have the opportunity to live a good life.

The depth of this care is what creates pain, and pain is uncomfortable. Most of the time, we respond to that pain by either turning away and ignoring what’s happening, or by giving into doom, despair and nihilism. But if we can simply be present with the pain, and stay with the discomfort, we will eventually find the love that is underneath it.

To love something that is dying—that is being destroyed—is not an easy thing to do. But it is perhaps our most urgent human task: to love, to create, to find joy in an impermanent world that will break our hearts again and again. We must build our castles in the sand, knowing it won’t be long before they are washed out with the tide.

“In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world,” says Macy. “It is courage born of the ever-unexpected discovery that acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being.”

It’s important that we don’t harden our hearts. Our unshakable love for the world doesn’t make us vulnerable. In fact, it is the greatest support we have to lean on as we face the loss of what we once knew and cherished.

Seeing the moon

Death contemplation, in my humble opinion, is one of the best things we can do to not only process what is happening and whatever may come, but to live a meaningful, vibrant and joyful life amidst the collapse.

So this is my practice right now, my contemplation: To witness both what is dying and also what is being born. To resist the temptation to turn away and tune out. And to expand myself to hold both the despair and the love.

But this isn’t just work that we do alone. We need to come together to hold the possibility that with the breakdown of what was, something new—something more beautiful and life-giving—can emerge. In the words of 17th-century haiku poet Mizuta Masahide, “My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”

And in the meantime, we chop wood and carry water, as the Zen proverb goes, and do what we can to take care of ourselves. I certainly don’t have the answers about the best way to do that, but I have been reflecting on what I need right now and what’s been most supportive for me.

Here’s a short, running list of some things I think we can do that are helpful:

• Contemplate mortality. Remembering that our time here is finite puts everything in perspective, and helps us to live fully right now. My go-to is the Buddhist practice of the Five Remembrances, which is a simple, beginner-friendly way to begin exploring death contemplation. (Or check out Death Archetypes, which Maura and I designed as a fun, interactive tool for pondering life’s bigger questions.)

• Connect with community. We need each other, now more than ever. Being with the people we love lifts our spirits, strengthens our resilience, and reanchors us in what really matters. We’ll need to deepen our capacity to support others, and be supported, as things continue to be uncertain and unstable.

• Stop the scroll. For the love of God, get off the screen and spend more time in the real world, with other humans, in your physical body moving through 3D reality (saying this to myself, too). There’s so much beauty and goodness happening in the real world that we lose sight of when we’re glued to a screen.

• Ground in nature. Being in nature reminds me of the incredible intelligence of life, which is so much greater than our human minds can possibly comprehend. Even a short walk or a few minutes gazing at the sky has a way of reorienting us, calming the nervous system, quieting the mind and bringing us back to center.

• Dip in and out. Rather than going into overwhelm and dissociation, do what you can to exercise conscious control over your consumption and processing of information. When it feels like time to inform yourself, and to process that information, do so. When you need a break from what’s happening in the world, take a break.

• Remember your power of choice. Existentialist philosophy emphasizes our basic human freedom to determine the meaning of our own lives, and our basic responsibility of choice and action. We are never powerless, and our choices—how we spend our time, how we spend our money, how we treat others—can make a bigger difference than we might think.

• Embrace creation > consumption. Creativity is the great alchemizer: I truly believe that anything can be transformed through the creative process. Finding creative expression in whatever way feels nourishing is also a great way to resist the algorithmic takeover and endless consumption of content that hijacks our energy, attention and time. Making things rather than consuming them connects us to our agency and capacity to create change. Plus, it’s a great way to move energy, process emotions and find clarity.

• Go local. I’m convinced that our best hope for the future is a return to hyper-local communities and economies (midcoast Maine, where I live for half the year, is an incredible example of this). I’m seeing a lot of great writing on Substack on this topic, and I am a big fan of the important work that the nonprofit Local Futures is doing to support this vision.

What a time to be alive! If you’re interested in exploring how a practice of death contemplation can bring greater meaning, vitality and courage at this time of great change, we hope you’ll join us.

We’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking and how you’re meeting this moment. Feel free to reply to this email or share in the comments—we read every one ❤️

— Carolyn