‘Functional denial’ is a way of describing what it’s like to live with the knowledge and emotions of the climate crisis and at the same time, to have to participate in everyday life – which largely carries on as if nothing extraordinary was happening.
The denial part is what we all have. It is incredibly hard to look the realities we have created in the eye. The functional part is that we have to keep going regardless. On a daily basis, I have to get up in the morning, I have to pay my bills, I have to do my work. I function as if the world were just the regular old world in which everything stays the same and I don’t have to worry too much about anything. If you look at my daily life, it would look like that.
If you look more carefully, you might see changes or choices I’ve made to try to avoid adding to the problem. But by and large, I get out of bed, I drink my tea, I do my life as if nothing else was going on.
And at the same time, every single day, I face what we have created. If you ask me to stop for a minute and say, How do you feel about that? it can paralyze me. I have so much grief about it. I have such anger about it. It’s all one big morass of emotions that I have about what we, humans, had the audacity to create out of blindness, and then out of greed and whatever.
So it’s that simultaneity of being fully aware and conscious and not denying the gravity of what we’re creating, and also having to get up in the morning and provide for my family and fulfil my obligations in my work.
Susan Moser speaking to Laurie Mazur 2019
Reading
Mazur. ‘Despairing about the Climate Crisis? Read This.’, 2019. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/despairing-about-climate-crisis/.