Life After College: Am I Okay? Is Anyone?

Life After College is a column that updates the comings and goings of some of UC Berkeley’s newest graduates. This article was written by Kira Barsten, a former Leaflet editor and UC Berkeley graduate from the class of 2019.

Content warning: mental health, suicide

“I am blissful - but I don’t feel that way,” Nils says as he orders a smoothie via affirmation at Café Gratitude in Venice, where he’s agreed to get overpriced vegan brunch with me. We snicker at the affirmation menu, then wonder if we’re assholes for it. In some ways, it’s representative of our time at Cal: criticizing everything, but also trying to be mindful.

It’s the beginning of August 2019, a little over two months since Nils and I walked one right after another at the College of Natural Resources graduation ceremony in May. Nils is about to start his new job at the Los Angeles Metro, where he’ll be paid several times more than me, and I’m about to start a ten-month fellowship working on sustainability projects in Mountain View’s city government. We talk about becoming deradicalized, the 2020 political candidates, and compare stomach issues we’ve had after our summer travels.

Nils and I at the LA Climate Strike in September.

At some point during brunch, Nils hands me a book and says, “Here, I hated this book. You might like it though.” It’s a copy of The Overstory by Richard Powers, a novel with a pretty vague description on the back cover, but one that seems to touch on humans and their relation to natural ecosystems. At this point I’m still working through Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and I can’t really imagine ever picking up a work of fiction again. But I trust Nils and his off-putting recommendations, so I promised to read it and compare notes afterwards. We pay for breakfast, hug goodbye, and promise to stay in touch.

Fast forward a month. I finally finish The Shock Doctrine, and am left absolutely reeling. My heart can’t take any heavy reading for a bit. I try out a short, fun book about one man’s trip to Australia, but soon enough am itching to put my brain power towards reading something meaningful. I pivot to what I thought would be a good, middle-of-the-road choice: The Overstory. Still meaningful, but fiction. A good break from the horrors of neoliberal capitalism.

While I am reading The Overstory, I am settling into my new job as a Sustainability Fellow and navigating what it means to be fighting climate change in a professional setting. The biggest thing that I have learned so far is that I have no idea what I want to do, or what my place is in the fight for our future.

First day of my new job!

I am constantly completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of what needs to be done and the incredibly slow rate at which change is taking place. There are days when my climate-related anxiety is so bad at work that I struggle to even do my climate-related work. Shouldn’t working as a Sustainability Fellow help me to feel like I’m doing something useful? Why do I feel more helpless than ever before? Will it always be this way? Is there a better job for me? Am I wasting precious time? These are the questions I wrestle with every day.

This weekend, I finished The Overstory. One character has a worldview that I very much share: humans are destroying this planet, and we won’t turn the ship around unless seemingly-impossible steps are taken. To be frank, I don’t think these steps will be taken, or at least not until indescribable suffering has occurred. I have cried about this in Lyfts (fuck Uber), lamented to friends at parties, and curled up in an anxious ball because of this perspective. It’s an unshakable thing I believe to my core, no matter how many times I bring my own bag to the grocery store or email my representatives or rebel against capitalism or walk instead of drive. We’re fucked, and everything I do to stave off the imminent suffering is purely a coping mechanism for my own mental health. Lately, however, even my best environmental coping mechanisms have been failing. 

In The Overstory, this character is asked what the best thing is that humans can do to save ourselves and the planet. She’s surrounded by people who want to technofix our way out of this mess, who want to replace extractive oil with extractive mining for solar panels, who want to continue on with current consumption patterns. Her response is to poison herself and die. 

Before anyone reads into this, I want to make a BIG disclaimer here: the entire idea of overpopulation being an issue in regards to environmental degradation is racist and has been debunked time and time again. The narrative has been twisted to be more palatable to folks today, but it’s the same shit: rich people should survive, too bad for the rest. The only things there are too much of is corporate greed and political resistance.

Me and The Leaflet’s editors last spring.

But that wasn’t what the character meant when she killed herself. She meant that the best thing for the planet is for there to be no more humans, and she made a choice to follow through with that idea. I’m not advocating for or endorsing this. I don’t want us to all poison ourselves. Being alive is an incredible gift. Yet, this struck an unnerving and concerning chord with me.

I have been playing off my anxiety as a symptom of climate change, my dark thoughts as an expression of being hyper-aware of everything wrong with the world, my reluctance to call a therapist as a side effect of millennial burnout. But maybe I’m not okay. Maybe I haven’t been okay for a while, but it’s hard to see that while you’re in college and surrounded by other incredible people who also understand how horrible things are. Many of your peers in college are driven, hard-working individuals who are probably working on one inspiring project or another. Studying such depressing things but being surrounded by such a dense concentration of driven people gave me hope. Students have different passions, but nevertheless they have PASSIONS. Now, surrounded by older adults, those passions feel like a distant memory. All that’s left is Microsoft Outlook and chatting by the printer. 

Nils and I walking into CNR graduation together.

Some days, I don’t know if I’m crazy for caring so much, or if others are crazy for continuing on with their lives like everything will be fine. In college, you could balance both of those things. You could rant about neoliberalism at a party and then go play a round of beer pong. You could live with the opposing forces, the knowing that everything is going to shit, but reassured by the fact that you’re still in college, and can only do so much at once. That doesn’t exist in the “real” world. There is just you, banging your head against a wall, and everyone else, smiling and walking around you.

What I’ve taken away as I’ve reflected on The Overstory is that we don’t need to be as extreme as the character that poisons herself. I really don’t think we should be. The last thing the environmental movement needs is a page out of Scientology’s playbook. But we do need to be more radical with the actions we take as a society. Today, for the second time, I heard a Chevron ad while listening to “The Daily.” Like how the FUCK is that okay?

This fight is a long fight, but we don’t have the time we’re taking. I am working on harnessing my fear and anxiety and anger into something useful; I just don’t know what that is yet. Heck, maybe writing. 

Me walking across the stage, with Nils about to walk behind me (notice the tongue out!).

Mental health issues surrounding environmental degradation and social inequality are very real! This is something that I have been ignoring for a very long time, but it’s too much to shrug off as just being empathetic. The world is not okay, and it’s very reasonable for us to not be okay. Most environmental lectures or articles end with something upbeat and hopeful, because we know piling on the doom and gloom will leave people too paralyzed to act. If that optimism is what you need to keep fighting, more power to you. I, however, am past the point of hearing about what person X is doing to advance thing Y, and then feeling like maybe it’ll all be okay. It’s going to take some pretty radical changes in the way the world operates for me to feel like maybe it’ll be okay. The challenge now is what do I do, knowing that things will worsen a lot before they ever get better? I am continuing to fight for our future because I have to, because the alternative is unthinkable. That is what I’m drawing on these days. That is what will help me make it through each day. And maybe seeing a therapist too.

For those that will be graduating soon, focus on your community. The people around you will give you more strength than you know for the life you’ll live after you walk across a stage and hold a fake diploma for a photo. It can feel like a very isolating and discouraging world to be a part of, but talking to each other helps. Our society lives and breathes by stories. I am just one human, and you are just one human, and Nils is just one human, but all of us together makes for many people fighting for our future. If we don’t keep fighting, we may end up like the character in The Overstory, and I’m sure as hell not ready for us to go there yet.