"Though much is taken, much abides; and though \\ We are not now that strength which in old days \\ Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; \\ One equal temper of heroic hearts, \\ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will \\ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
We hear you and we care. We have met so many other wonderful ordinary people who also hold on and keeping shining that beautiful light where ever they are , no matter the circumstances. Each one a strand in that rope.
Rachel I’m moved by your words and your expression of existential rage as an animal was briillant and powerful. I want to bite and swarm and capsize a boat with my body too. And howl. And screech from the skies. To protect, to grieve, to bear witness, to resist, to fight. Thank you 🙏
This is a loud war cry. I hear it well. I hear you beating your chest, not at intruders - they’re already here and perhaps can’t ever be dislodged - but as a drum beat, as a calling for others. As a marching signal. Perhaps we can’t stop the violence but we can say No, not on my watch. We can be the voice you’re looking for, for the innocent, for the silenced. We can gather other voices.
Consider, whatever I write you will get angry at me, you will want to "resist". Resist what? What makes you right and me wrong? Are you nicer to people in real life than your readers? How should we be ranked in your definition of what is right or wrong?
Generally, my experience is the more someone talks about being "nice" the less they are, and the more callous, the more generous. I didn't always think that way. I too, once believed I clearly saw the problems of the world, as you see them. I once truly believed we can all get along. That everyone can share and be happy. All we need to do is communicate understanding! If everyone understood what I knew, saw what I saw, they would recognize the right path.
But I failed.
Let's take beauty. To a woman who wants to look like you what can you do to make things even? It doesn't matter how hard you try, how virtuous you are, you will be resented. If they can take something from you they will. If you talk to them they might even agree they are being petty. We can't help our paleolithic emotions.
You resent callous people. When someone says, "that's just the way all animals are, including people" you want to "fix" them. You want to put them in their place. You want to explain humans can be happy.
Are you happy? Why does everyone have to be happy the way you are? Can we all be happy in the same way?
As I've said in other posts, stick to climate change. The science of it. Trying to fix people through words will break you before you can fix them. And what good is that to the very world you have accomplished much in trying to help?
Someone just left a comment (which they deleted) "Wow, you're a dick. No wonder why people don't like you." Explain how we fix such a world where someone is treated that way for just expressing their experience? The comment begs the question above, who said people don't like me? Who says someone who made that comment treats everyone well?
If you do want to save the planet, Rachel. You must be KIND to everyone. Including me? Right?
A woman rages at the multifaceted awfulness of the modern world and, sure as day follows night, there comes along a middle-aged white man to lecture her.
Isn't that the fundamental problem of climate change? That people don't understand? Or are they just greedy and want to rape the planet killing others? Which one is it? If they don't understand then certainly no reason to get mad at them (any more than a child). If they are greedy, then Rachel needs to say that. Or is she? Is that what I don't understand?
What do I need to understand? Please tell me. I'm asking sincerely.
I think another issue here is perhaps you telling Rachel to stick to the climate science. Whereas, Rachel is a) quite allowed to write about whatever she wants on her substack; b) she interviews people and is interested in various aspects of the polycrisis; and c) even if she wrote only about climate, this inevitably blurs into multiple aspects of the human condition (biology, economics, resources, emotion, politics). So while you might prefer the climate science material, it comes across as a bit dogmatic or "dickish" to tell her to stick to the climate (although that may not have been your intent).
I write too and I want every opinion whether or not I like them. That's just me. Yes, it is not my intent to tell her what to write. I am only pointing out that she is going places that, in my experience as a writer, lead to the "Heart of Darkness" and a kind of insanity.
To answer your sincere question, I don't know what you need to understand, but your comment seems to indicate that you missed what Rachel is saying. Maybe read the post again. Her post is not a lecture or an attempt to fix or change people. I see a raw expression of pain, sorrow and righteous anger from a life spent grappling with deep injustice, alongside a story that attempt to make sense of it all. It is a first-person expression of one's own experience, and one that I (and many others, maybe you too) happen to recognize as similar to our own life and struggles.
Rachel wrote, "Show me a hand I can bite. I don’t want to feel powerless and futile and lost in the incomprehensibility of the sheer scale of it all."
My answer is the hand is also your own.
She's expressing more than "pain, sorrow." If you think it "righteous anger" okay, but what exactly is "righteous" anger? My comment is that there is no such thing. You are either in one group or the other and "righteous" is just your judgment that the other is not virtuous.
I called BS.
I think I recognize her struggles, better than most (long story). She is making mistakes I made. A few cured me of my mistakes with tough talk. Who knows, maybe they just unleashed the real me, the bad one, the one who doesn't get it. Everything is provisional. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow. Until then, I don't read her story as one of pain, but as misplaced blame-game.
Fair enough. If you don't believe such a thing as true righteousness could exist, then any expression of righteousness can be dismissed as confusion. I do happen to believe such a thing exists, not as an absolute and static universal, but a real provisional, in the quite ordinary sense of the justice and kindness we wish for our children. And these are extreme times, and Rachel is privileged to an inside look at the worst of systemic injustice.
I don't think Rachel's "show me a hand I can bite" is a call to violence. She has spoken out against violence as a response, for example condemning the United Healthcare killer. I interpreted it as a poetic expression of primal feeling, one that I think mamy of us have felt. There is tremendous value in uncovering and feeling one's feelings deeply. It integrates the psyche and when held in a proper container, primal anger transmutes into more skillful expressions of courage and clarity. The tantric Buddhist teachings are quite clear on this. Most people simply don't have the ethical and social grounding to properly contain powerful emotions, so they spill out into unskillful action.
"Most people simply don't have the ethical and social grounding to properly contain powerful emotions, so they spill out into unskillful action."
That's pretty much my point--unskillful action (she's on a road to a mental breakdown), except I don't believe there is an "ethical or social grounding" which can contain the pain she is experiencing.
Her approach, so far, is to divide the world into those who experience the pain of others and those who don't. We are all callous to someone. There isn't enough time and space. I'm sure there are many viewers of Rachel who want to talk to her more and she ignores them. She doesn't want to ignore them. Not enough hours in the day. Sure, I get it that it isn't her choice to not help some people, that she would if she had unlimited time and energy.
I don't have the answers. What I write here I say to myself I might be wrong. I'd love a world view where I don't come off as an a-hole.
I have had nights and days like you describe. They leave me raw and exposed.
I hesitate to share something i wrote last November, but perhaps this is the right place to post it. It is angry and raw and clearly comes from a deep pain about human activity. I hope it can offer you some kind of solidarity and a hand/claw/paw/fin/wing to hold while we scream out to the universe a primal wail of grief.
Being new to substack i have no idea what kind of reaction i will get.
The following explains itself. I wrote it on Thanksgiving. It has not been edited or given a proper rewrite:
My name is Ishi. I’m not actually the last of my kind, but I feel like I am. I am an orangoutang. I am known by the images of me being pulled from the last tree of the forest i lived in by a logger. And my message is simple. “All of you should fucking die!”
To be honest. I’m actually human, imagining myself to be, Ishi the last of my kind. So when I’m in character, I must say, “all you humans should fucking die.” I mean it.
But as a human, the narrator of this story, I’m gonna call myself a version of Ksitigarbha. Normally pronounced ‘schittigarba’. I like this pronunciation as it works well for this story. So i will make the English spelling Shittigarbage, not out of disrespect for the Bhodisattva Ksitigarbha, but as my statement about how Ishi feels about humanity. “All of you should fucking die!”
As the narrator, i do not want to pretend i am a bodhisattva. I am not. But I do think invoking the image of this bodhisattva is useful. So i offer humble apologies to those who venerate Ksitigarba, the bodhisattva that dedicates himself to live in hell until the last soul in hell is redeemed. A most beautiful and moving human. I humbly invoke Ksitigarbha to be witness to this story. As he is far more compassionate than i, as when i tell this story of Ishi, i will put forth the message “all you fuckers should die!” And i mean it most sincerely.
As a human from a western English speaking nation, you might ask “why not call yourself Jude? Or Rita of Cascia?” Are they not saints of lost causes? Mostly because as Ishi, my message is fuck you. Especially fuck you privileged western pieces of shit who forced the indigenous peoples of Borneo or Sumatra into such poverty that they were forced to cut down the forests in which my people lived. Fuck you. All you fuckers should die.
Even worse, i am a white male from a Christian background. What right do i have to speak on behalf of the people of Ishi. In truth, none. I do not have the right. So i call myself Shittigarbage. Not the patron saint of lost causes, or the bodhisattva of the deepest compassion, but a spirit of spite and misery as i live in one of the buddhist hells for the crimes of my peoples. All you fuckers should die!
A note on my name when i am in character as the orangutan, Ishi. It is the name of the last known member of the Yahi people of northern California. The Yahi being part of a larger culture remembered as the Yana who were victims of genocide. In this case, i will say the word Ishi means Orangutan. I have given myself this name as i cannot give you my true name. Being true to the indigenous Californian, being the last of his tribe said of himself, i will say of myself if asked my name, “I have none, because there were no people to name me.”
In the Yana culture one could not speak one’s name unless another member of their tribe introduced them. As there is no one left of my tribe to introduce me, i will simple take the name Ishi. And in the same spirit as the real human with the name Ishi, asking to be called ‘man’ i shall take his name to myself, meaning ‘orangutan’. But unlike him, i will spit with all my heart the words, “all of you fuckers should die!”
I as Ishi the Orangutan, wish I could have made Ota Benga my friend. But we lived nearly a century apart. And like him, if i could have, i would have shot myself in the heart. But i am an Orangutan and not a human. No one would have loaned me a pistol. Probably for the best. I might have taken a few of you out with me. Ota Benga died five days before Ishi, my name sake died. There just are not enough tears. All of you fuckers should die!
Oh, you don’t know Ishi’s story? Nor Ota Benga? Just google them. Should be plenty good enough to put my story in perspective. Take your time. Their stories are more than worth the time spent reading them. I can wait. After all, the human channeling my story is rotting in hell, as are you, if you had any perspective, but keep on believing the progress narrative of western civilization. In time you will wake up. All of you should fucking die.
This story, like my namesake, starts on the day i wish i had died. The day, i was pulled from a tree by a logger who had demolished my homeland and drove my people deeper into the jungle or into starvation. I don’t know what happened to my children, my sisters, my brothers or any of my kin. I was tied to the back of a truck and taken into the city of humans. All you fuckers should die!
…..
I could not finish this. I wrote it out from years of returning to the image of an orangutan in the last tree standing in a clear cut forest being pulled from the tree by a logger. I can still see this photo in my mind. I have cried often thinking about it.
I won’t finish the above rant. It was cathartic at that moment I can’t stay that angry all the time. But the pain of the scope of human activity and taking everything for themselves breaks my heart nearly every day.
When i was young i looked at a map of the US and wondered where all the wild animals lived. That young boy never stopped being sad they have so little space left.
Rachel, here is another hand to hold when the primal scream erupts from the depth of your soul in anger and sorrow about the pain of it all. There are many of us in this world desperately trying to understand why our fellow humans can be so heartless.
Your article reminds me of a very small, sad, frightened child I saw in Gaza who pleaded the world for help, and desperately and questioningly wondered why all the people of the world would not help them.
Maybe it's just a convenient placebo, but what helps me when I'm feeling the same is knowing (thinking?) that humans are a product of nature, all of this is, no matter how cold, artificial or fucked up it may seem. In the end, life is running it's course; things will only ever go as they need to. We can only to urge it in a sustainable direction.
It seems ultimately a human arrogance to assume we are so mighty as to have broken the natural order... It is also only on human timescales that we impact anything. The suffering is unthinkable, and the loss of biodiversity hurts me more than anything, but I/you/anyone are not "responsible", we are simply in a position where we must act, and so do... You're not Atlas, Rachel. You'll only put your back out trying to be. You're doing a great job at being Rachel though :)
This landed with my thinned out conscious, your bear fingers pointing at the moon. Sent me out to catch a view of the high wide moon and sky, after exhausting my fatty tissue for 3 years , one of my last remaining ideas was like that shiteposter up there I was going to recommend giving to all ideas their "head". But it was never what I felt , more the story in your post. Take a stab at understanding, 2condly to be wary of spinning your wheels, and 3rdly to let fly some words.
Dear Rachel,
I do no not know if this will help you, but:
1) you are a source of inspiration and many people (me including) are extremely grateful for the work you do.
2) I do see some light at the end of the tunnel, and it is not the train :-).
3) We need to talk, because I have and idea. I will present it in two lectures close to Zurich this month and then I would need some help to spread it worldwide. (https://nordborg.ch/2024/11/29/die-klimakrise-stehen-wir-am-abgrund-oder-sind-wir-schon-einen-schritt-weiter)
"Though much is taken, much abides; and though \\ We are not now that strength which in old days \\ Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; \\ One equal temper of heroic hearts, \\ Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will \\ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Speaking of, can you take a look at my idea if you have the time? https://open.substack.com/pub/adamcheklat/p/green-thumb-with-imperial-gold?r=4m50jk&utm_medium=ios
We hear you and we care. We have met so many other wonderful ordinary people who also hold on and keeping shining that beautiful light where ever they are , no matter the circumstances. Each one a strand in that rope.
Keep shining Rachel and friends.
Kindest regards,
From
Two more strands.
❤️🌎Jim and Joan Canada
I see you, Rachel. I hear you. I feel you. Thank you for speaking so eloquently for those who don't speak our languages. I feel similarly. Hugs.
Rachel I’m moved by your words and your expression of existential rage as an animal was briillant and powerful. I want to bite and swarm and capsize a boat with my body too. And howl. And screech from the skies. To protect, to grieve, to bear witness, to resist, to fight. Thank you 🙏
You are speaking my mind and heart. Thank you. Take care.
This is a loud war cry. I hear it well. I hear you beating your chest, not at intruders - they’re already here and perhaps can’t ever be dislodged - but as a drum beat, as a calling for others. As a marching signal. Perhaps we can’t stop the violence but we can say No, not on my watch. We can be the voice you’re looking for, for the innocent, for the silenced. We can gather other voices.
So real and powerful. Thank you
would that i could hurt for you.
Well said. In an exploitative culture and socio-economic regime the weak are the first casualties
Consider, whatever I write you will get angry at me, you will want to "resist". Resist what? What makes you right and me wrong? Are you nicer to people in real life than your readers? How should we be ranked in your definition of what is right or wrong?
Generally, my experience is the more someone talks about being "nice" the less they are, and the more callous, the more generous. I didn't always think that way. I too, once believed I clearly saw the problems of the world, as you see them. I once truly believed we can all get along. That everyone can share and be happy. All we need to do is communicate understanding! If everyone understood what I knew, saw what I saw, they would recognize the right path.
But I failed.
Let's take beauty. To a woman who wants to look like you what can you do to make things even? It doesn't matter how hard you try, how virtuous you are, you will be resented. If they can take something from you they will. If you talk to them they might even agree they are being petty. We can't help our paleolithic emotions.
You resent callous people. When someone says, "that's just the way all animals are, including people" you want to "fix" them. You want to put them in their place. You want to explain humans can be happy.
Are you happy? Why does everyone have to be happy the way you are? Can we all be happy in the same way?
As I've said in other posts, stick to climate change. The science of it. Trying to fix people through words will break you before you can fix them. And what good is that to the very world you have accomplished much in trying to help?
Someone just left a comment (which they deleted) "Wow, you're a dick. No wonder why people don't like you." Explain how we fix such a world where someone is treated that way for just expressing their experience? The comment begs the question above, who said people don't like me? Who says someone who made that comment treats everyone well?
If you do want to save the planet, Rachel. You must be KIND to everyone. Including me? Right?
A woman rages at the multifaceted awfulness of the modern world and, sure as day follows night, there comes along a middle-aged white man to lecture her.
Jesus fucking christ.
She's a woman. I'm an old man. Not sure what "white" has to do with it. She lectures people about climate change. I lecture about human nature.
Is it at all possible that the author is expressing something that you don't understand?
Isn't that the fundamental problem of climate change? That people don't understand? Or are they just greedy and want to rape the planet killing others? Which one is it? If they don't understand then certainly no reason to get mad at them (any more than a child). If they are greedy, then Rachel needs to say that. Or is she? Is that what I don't understand?
What do I need to understand? Please tell me. I'm asking sincerely.
I think another issue here is perhaps you telling Rachel to stick to the climate science. Whereas, Rachel is a) quite allowed to write about whatever she wants on her substack; b) she interviews people and is interested in various aspects of the polycrisis; and c) even if she wrote only about climate, this inevitably blurs into multiple aspects of the human condition (biology, economics, resources, emotion, politics). So while you might prefer the climate science material, it comes across as a bit dogmatic or "dickish" to tell her to stick to the climate (although that may not have been your intent).
I write too and I want every opinion whether or not I like them. That's just me. Yes, it is not my intent to tell her what to write. I am only pointing out that she is going places that, in my experience as a writer, lead to the "Heart of Darkness" and a kind of insanity.
To answer your sincere question, I don't know what you need to understand, but your comment seems to indicate that you missed what Rachel is saying. Maybe read the post again. Her post is not a lecture or an attempt to fix or change people. I see a raw expression of pain, sorrow and righteous anger from a life spent grappling with deep injustice, alongside a story that attempt to make sense of it all. It is a first-person expression of one's own experience, and one that I (and many others, maybe you too) happen to recognize as similar to our own life and struggles.
Rachel wrote, "Show me a hand I can bite. I don’t want to feel powerless and futile and lost in the incomprehensibility of the sheer scale of it all."
My answer is the hand is also your own.
She's expressing more than "pain, sorrow." If you think it "righteous anger" okay, but what exactly is "righteous" anger? My comment is that there is no such thing. You are either in one group or the other and "righteous" is just your judgment that the other is not virtuous.
I called BS.
I think I recognize her struggles, better than most (long story). She is making mistakes I made. A few cured me of my mistakes with tough talk. Who knows, maybe they just unleashed the real me, the bad one, the one who doesn't get it. Everything is provisional. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow. Until then, I don't read her story as one of pain, but as misplaced blame-game.
Fair enough. If you don't believe such a thing as true righteousness could exist, then any expression of righteousness can be dismissed as confusion. I do happen to believe such a thing exists, not as an absolute and static universal, but a real provisional, in the quite ordinary sense of the justice and kindness we wish for our children. And these are extreme times, and Rachel is privileged to an inside look at the worst of systemic injustice.
I don't think Rachel's "show me a hand I can bite" is a call to violence. She has spoken out against violence as a response, for example condemning the United Healthcare killer. I interpreted it as a poetic expression of primal feeling, one that I think mamy of us have felt. There is tremendous value in uncovering and feeling one's feelings deeply. It integrates the psyche and when held in a proper container, primal anger transmutes into more skillful expressions of courage and clarity. The tantric Buddhist teachings are quite clear on this. Most people simply don't have the ethical and social grounding to properly contain powerful emotions, so they spill out into unskillful action.
"Most people simply don't have the ethical and social grounding to properly contain powerful emotions, so they spill out into unskillful action."
That's pretty much my point--unskillful action (she's on a road to a mental breakdown), except I don't believe there is an "ethical or social grounding" which can contain the pain she is experiencing.
Her approach, so far, is to divide the world into those who experience the pain of others and those who don't. We are all callous to someone. There isn't enough time and space. I'm sure there are many viewers of Rachel who want to talk to her more and she ignores them. She doesn't want to ignore them. Not enough hours in the day. Sure, I get it that it isn't her choice to not help some people, that she would if she had unlimited time and energy.
I don't have the answers. What I write here I say to myself I might be wrong. I'd love a world view where I don't come off as an a-hole.
Wow, you're a dick. No wonder why people don't like you.
Max rot man
I know! But rotten logs have as much a right to the forest as anything else ;)
🦁😡✊
Plastic straws will negatively impact sea turtles.🐢
I have had nights and days like you describe. They leave me raw and exposed.
I hesitate to share something i wrote last November, but perhaps this is the right place to post it. It is angry and raw and clearly comes from a deep pain about human activity. I hope it can offer you some kind of solidarity and a hand/claw/paw/fin/wing to hold while we scream out to the universe a primal wail of grief.
Being new to substack i have no idea what kind of reaction i will get.
The following explains itself. I wrote it on Thanksgiving. It has not been edited or given a proper rewrite:
My name is Ishi. I’m not actually the last of my kind, but I feel like I am. I am an orangoutang. I am known by the images of me being pulled from the last tree of the forest i lived in by a logger. And my message is simple. “All of you should fucking die!”
To be honest. I’m actually human, imagining myself to be, Ishi the last of my kind. So when I’m in character, I must say, “all you humans should fucking die.” I mean it.
But as a human, the narrator of this story, I’m gonna call myself a version of Ksitigarbha. Normally pronounced ‘schittigarba’. I like this pronunciation as it works well for this story. So i will make the English spelling Shittigarbage, not out of disrespect for the Bhodisattva Ksitigarbha, but as my statement about how Ishi feels about humanity. “All of you should fucking die!”
As the narrator, i do not want to pretend i am a bodhisattva. I am not. But I do think invoking the image of this bodhisattva is useful. So i offer humble apologies to those who venerate Ksitigarba, the bodhisattva that dedicates himself to live in hell until the last soul in hell is redeemed. A most beautiful and moving human. I humbly invoke Ksitigarbha to be witness to this story. As he is far more compassionate than i, as when i tell this story of Ishi, i will put forth the message “all you fuckers should die!” And i mean it most sincerely.
As a human from a western English speaking nation, you might ask “why not call yourself Jude? Or Rita of Cascia?” Are they not saints of lost causes? Mostly because as Ishi, my message is fuck you. Especially fuck you privileged western pieces of shit who forced the indigenous peoples of Borneo or Sumatra into such poverty that they were forced to cut down the forests in which my people lived. Fuck you. All you fuckers should die.
Even worse, i am a white male from a Christian background. What right do i have to speak on behalf of the people of Ishi. In truth, none. I do not have the right. So i call myself Shittigarbage. Not the patron saint of lost causes, or the bodhisattva of the deepest compassion, but a spirit of spite and misery as i live in one of the buddhist hells for the crimes of my peoples. All you fuckers should die!
A note on my name when i am in character as the orangutan, Ishi. It is the name of the last known member of the Yahi people of northern California. The Yahi being part of a larger culture remembered as the Yana who were victims of genocide. In this case, i will say the word Ishi means Orangutan. I have given myself this name as i cannot give you my true name. Being true to the indigenous Californian, being the last of his tribe said of himself, i will say of myself if asked my name, “I have none, because there were no people to name me.”
In the Yana culture one could not speak one’s name unless another member of their tribe introduced them. As there is no one left of my tribe to introduce me, i will simple take the name Ishi. And in the same spirit as the real human with the name Ishi, asking to be called ‘man’ i shall take his name to myself, meaning ‘orangutan’. But unlike him, i will spit with all my heart the words, “all of you fuckers should die!”
I as Ishi the Orangutan, wish I could have made Ota Benga my friend. But we lived nearly a century apart. And like him, if i could have, i would have shot myself in the heart. But i am an Orangutan and not a human. No one would have loaned me a pistol. Probably for the best. I might have taken a few of you out with me. Ota Benga died five days before Ishi, my name sake died. There just are not enough tears. All of you fuckers should die!
Oh, you don’t know Ishi’s story? Nor Ota Benga? Just google them. Should be plenty good enough to put my story in perspective. Take your time. Their stories are more than worth the time spent reading them. I can wait. After all, the human channeling my story is rotting in hell, as are you, if you had any perspective, but keep on believing the progress narrative of western civilization. In time you will wake up. All of you should fucking die.
This story, like my namesake, starts on the day i wish i had died. The day, i was pulled from a tree by a logger who had demolished my homeland and drove my people deeper into the jungle or into starvation. I don’t know what happened to my children, my sisters, my brothers or any of my kin. I was tied to the back of a truck and taken into the city of humans. All you fuckers should die!
…..
I could not finish this. I wrote it out from years of returning to the image of an orangutan in the last tree standing in a clear cut forest being pulled from the tree by a logger. I can still see this photo in my mind. I have cried often thinking about it.
I won’t finish the above rant. It was cathartic at that moment I can’t stay that angry all the time. But the pain of the scope of human activity and taking everything for themselves breaks my heart nearly every day.
When i was young i looked at a map of the US and wondered where all the wild animals lived. That young boy never stopped being sad they have so little space left.
Rachel, here is another hand to hold when the primal scream erupts from the depth of your soul in anger and sorrow about the pain of it all. There are many of us in this world desperately trying to understand why our fellow humans can be so heartless.
Your article reminds me of a very small, sad, frightened child I saw in Gaza who pleaded the world for help, and desperately and questioningly wondered why all the people of the world would not help them.
Maybe it's just a convenient placebo, but what helps me when I'm feeling the same is knowing (thinking?) that humans are a product of nature, all of this is, no matter how cold, artificial or fucked up it may seem. In the end, life is running it's course; things will only ever go as they need to. We can only to urge it in a sustainable direction.
It seems ultimately a human arrogance to assume we are so mighty as to have broken the natural order... It is also only on human timescales that we impact anything. The suffering is unthinkable, and the loss of biodiversity hurts me more than anything, but I/you/anyone are not "responsible", we are simply in a position where we must act, and so do... You're not Atlas, Rachel. You'll only put your back out trying to be. You're doing a great job at being Rachel though :)
This landed with my thinned out conscious, your bear fingers pointing at the moon. Sent me out to catch a view of the high wide moon and sky, after exhausting my fatty tissue for 3 years , one of my last remaining ideas was like that shiteposter up there I was going to recommend giving to all ideas their "head". But it was never what I felt , more the story in your post. Take a stab at understanding, 2condly to be wary of spinning your wheels, and 3rdly to let fly some words.