June 9, 2022
There is no distinction at all between the everyday world (samsara) and freedom (nirvana). There is no distinction between freedom and the everyday world.
—Nagarjuna
Futurephobia is not a word that we come across very frequently considering its potential impact. You’ll find only a few hits on your favorite search engine, and a search on News on the Web Corpus (which contains billions of words of data from web-based media from 2010 to the present) shows one occurrence in the last twelve years (17 May 2021 in The Guardian). As of this writing (May 2022), Climate anxiety has come up 697 times in the media (though sometimes more than once in the same article). This doesn’t in itself mean that climate anxiety is on the rise: the media have a tendency to latch onto certain terms and give them momentum. The media and the public feed off each other: momentum becomes a function of the mass of press coverage times the velocity of public conversations. Futurephobia has, however, eluded press coverage and public conversation even though its implications are at least as impactful as climate anxiety.
According to one study, a majority…