“Deep inside me, I feel a permanent anxiety linked to climate change”

Phy put the world on the couch? Because its condition weighs, whether we are aware of it or not, on us who live there. Provoking, in all of us (that is to say not only in some of us, who would be particularly fragile), suffering as numerous as it is complex. And who can make us go wrong when nothing in our personal life would justify it.

A reader, moreover, writes: “I am in good health, I have a professional situation that allows me to live comfortably, (…) my romantic relationship is going very well, yet, deep inside me, I feel a permanent anxiety linked to climate change. »

This reader is 35 years old, her testimony is one of the 270 who, following a call, arrived in three days at the newspaper. And which show that, in this new school year, the most widespread anxieties, and the most serious, are linked to climate change.

How to explain climate change anxieties

They arise from reality, which is terrifying: monstrous storms, fires that devour entire territories, uprooted trees that fall on roads, cars, buildings, campers thrown out of their tents, and inhabitants out of their homes. With, on all the screens, the despair of those who, on their return, find their homes destroyed (as well as all the objects, photos that link them to their past, and documents that attest to their social life), and, brutally realizing their total destitution, tell how they ” lost everything “.

And this ” everything “ which, against a background of fields of ruins, speaks of the absolute of a loss, brings to the surface in the observer – how can one be surprised? – fantasies of the end of the world. One reader reported the question of her 12-year-old son as follows: “When I grow up, will today’s world still exist? » And he is far from the only one to ask these kinds of questions.

How to explain doomsday fantasies, even in children

They are explained, here again, by the real gravity of the phenomena, by their repercussions in our imaginations (as in a horror film, the elements panic: the water becomes scarce, the fire gains in power) and, above all, by their repetition. Disasters follow one another, over shorter and shorter times and many people come to no longer wonder “When is this going to stop? »but “Where is it going to stop? », with the impression that the devastation could be limitless, and endless. From then on, to the fantasies of the end of the world of the youngest respond, among those who wonder if all this will one day stop, the fantasies of a world whose future would already be too mortgaged for giving birth to children there still makes sense. This keeps coming up in testimonials.

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