My mother is an addict. Every day, she consumes more than four hours of news. It begins with radio in the morning, tuning into the BBC World Service and national broadcasts. Then she catches an hour or more of analysis from a wide variety of podcasts. Throughout the day she'll read half a dozen articles online and rip through a national newspaper. Finally, in the evening, she watches the 1800, 1830, 1900 and 2200 national news bulletins. In between the 1900 and 2200 bulletins, she often puts on a documentary. This has been her routine for well over 45 years; my childhood mornings always began with the three loud beeps announcing the 0600 Today programme.

She has good reason for her addiction—she is a retired journalist. My mother was in the thick of it during the oil crisis, the Yugoslav war, the first Sudan genocide, the Lockerbie bombing and the Dunblane massacre. She covered many more tragedies, and burned into her retina are images that will haunt her til her deathbed. She interviewed dictators and psychopaths and even had a war stopped for 15 minutes so she could helicopter her wounded correspondent to safety. She investigated horrendous child sex abuse campaigns, rampant political corruption, and once chased a murderer with a microphone down the street for so long that he ran into a police station for cover.

Journalists do not have the bliss of ignorance to soothe living in a violent world. They reckon with the world as it is, and are forced to live with what they uncover. My mother knew the intimate details of war and the horrors that human beings can inflict on one another. She understood how quickly power corrupts and how fragile most people are under its influence. She knew that things don't get better unless people push for justice. But she still believed, then, that justice was possible.

Her outlook is different now. Today, my mother is very worried about the state of the world.

Things are not going as she assumed they would when she marched for civil rights and women's rights as a student. What felt like a turning point of history, when the democratically-liberated masses finally had their say and they said "never again", has been revealed as a fluke. The years spent narrowing the gaps in education, employment, wealth have become nothing more than a heady memory, and the stories once told about benevolent Western influence have been revealed as propaganda. The luxuries promoted as evidence of a high quality of life have turned out to be ecologically harmful, and the individual liberation promised by liberalism has evaporated on a lonely horizon. Her career was a commitment to truth, a word now devoid of all meaning in the age of misinformation. Progress was not an inevitability—it was a myth.

We often talk about her career in London, working at the centre of British journalism. I ask her how they missed the stories about climate change, or the CIA-backed coup of Indonesia, or the fossil fuel industry burying evidence of the harms it causes. I have even asked where they all thought the rubbish was going before recycling bins were introduced. She is a perfect interrogee for such questions because her career demanded she know the ins and outs of how the world functioned. Sometimes she reminds me of the concurrent historical crises that diverted everyone's attention. Sometimes her answer is as simple as an apology.

My mother has been worried for some time. But something has shifted recently, creating a new sense of urgency in her. She is aware that the rate of decline is accelerating, and no longer believes her generation will simply be dead when the worst of it hits. Like her own mother, who took a brick-laying course in her sixties because she wanted some work done in her garden, mine decided the future we're hurtling towards will demand new skills. She wanted to volunteer with the Territorial Army, but was told at 68 she's too old.

My mother no longer asks me if I'm paying into my pension—now she thinks gold bars might be the way to go for when currencies collapse. We used to sit and hash out the differences in our analyses of the global situation, now we scheme about how to navigate a world without commercial planes, without NATO, without food imports. Our one disagreement recently has been on the efficacy of nuclear bunkers. She thinks it worth surviving WW3; I think that if we were to emerge into landscapes of ash there is little left to survive for.

I feel very fortunate to have a mother fierce enough to confront the nature of the world head-on. She has always been brave, but overhauling your world view in your late sixties is an altogether different task. It demands enormous humility, curiosity and determination. It gives us common ground upon which we can talk about our lives and future—it makes planning for that future somewhat feasible. Up until very recently, she could not have imagined leaving Scotland. But the sands are shifting beneath her feet—and she is ready to shift with them.

My mother is very worried about the state of the world; I am less worried for her because of it.