Rational hope or paralysing fear? Let’s strive to be CCHAMPs in 2022
2020 and 2021 have been tough years. The adaptations required to live our daily lives have affected us all, not to mention the suffering caused by isolation, ill health, and death on a global scale. The increasingly obvious effects of climate breakdown create a sense of helplessness, and the threat to modern democracies exacerbated by those unwilling to explore alternative economic models in response to these crises is genuinely terrifying.
It’s enough to make you not get out of bed in the morning. Or, if you can get up, spend large parts of your day paralysed by inaction or doom-scrolling further into a cycle of despair.
Reading during the festive break, slowing down, thinking and processing ideas (each, micro-acts of change that we must commit to more consistently) reminded us of the importance of rational hope as an antidote to, and perhaps our best defence against, these massive scary forces, and the inertia they often prompt.
Recent research across 23 countries[1] has shown that the pandemic has increased empathy at local and global scales. The virus has helped people to think about and understand the universality of suffering; physical, mental, and material. Likewise, the climate crisis is increasingly showing us that as humans we are all connected and that our immediate local choices and actions can have far reaching global consequences (and vice versa)[2].
Drawing on these shifts, and rather than coming up with new year resolutions that will take up more of that elusive ‘time’ we are always searching for, we think this moment in January 2022 gives us an opportunity to commit to values that may help us retain and grow rational hope and convert it into action whenever and however we can. Let’s strive to be CCHAMPs in 2022:
Compassionate – remembering that most people are trying their best, have the same worries as we do, and don’t always have access to the emotional or material resources to articulate or resolve these worries in socially positive ways.
Creative – if we seek to create rather than destroy in most of our daily choices, individually and collectively, we are more likely to produce a positive impact at scale.
Humanistic – recognising that as humans we all feel pain, suffering, joy, and general wellness in pretty much the same psychological and biological ways, despite cultural or political differences between groups.
Adaptable – acknowledging that plans will inevitably change (and in some cases, should), but that our solutions in response can have different and even greater positive impacts.
Mindful – Rosi Braidotti recently said ‘slowing down is a political act’ - this is simple and powerful enough advice for all of us.
Patient – with each other, and with those who are struggling in so many different ways. Despite the huge global challenges described, and the often frustratingly slow response from our political institutions and corporate entities, if we keep chipping away, connecting and acting when we can, we will see positive progress.
One of the reasons we started tialt in 2021 is an aspiration to help create what social psychologist Erich Fromm calls a ‘Sane Society’. One where our individual responses to our social conditions create positive mental health and wellbeing at a population level globally. He wrote this in 1955, but the meaning and application feels more relevant than ever in January 2022:
“Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterised by the ability to love and to create […] by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason. The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the universe – and at the same time not more important than a fly or a blade of grass. To be able to love life, and yet to accept death without terror; to tolerate uncertainty about the most important questions with which life confronts us – and yet to have faith in our thought and feeling, in as much as they are truly ours. To be able to be alone, and at the same time one with a loved person, with every person on this earth, with all that is alive; to follow the voice of our conscience, the voice that calls us to ourselves, yet not to indulge in self-hate when the voice of conscience was not loud enough to be heard and followed.”
(Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955)
Wishing all CCHAMPS (and chumps) a safe, healthy, and happy 2022 as much as possible from all of us at tialt.
[1] Butovskaya, M.L., Burkova, V.N., Randall, A.K., Donato, S., Fedenok, J.N., Hocker, L., Kline, K.M., Ahmadi, K., Alghraibeh, A.M., Allami, F.B.M. and Alpaslan, F.S., 2021. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Role of Empathy during COVID-19’s First Wave. Sustainability, 13(13), p.7431.
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/09/14/in-response-to-climate-change-citizens-in-advanced-economies-are-willing-to-alter-how-they-live-and-work/
