Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I have more than one friend who wrote every single piece of coursework using ChatGPT. I think about that a lot. It changes everything in terms of learning, education, purpose. If my friends can do that already, what will the landscape of school, and university, look like for the next generation? What’s the point of anything? But of course, AI is not my only, or even necessarily biggest, concern. It’s a time of existential threat pick’n’mix.

Climate dread is growing amid gen Z especially. Our world is quite literally on fire and yet the conversations we have with older people about what we want to be when we grow up are almost laughable. Alive. That’s what young people aspire to be. Living in a world where catastrophic fires and storms and tsunamis are not causing the biggest refugee crisis in our living history. We would rather not be extinct, thanks. Meanwhile, I was meant to attend my tap-dancing class?

Instead, like many teenagers now, I stopped eating, sleeping and going to lessons. My friends and I smoked a lot of weed in the woods next to school…

I didn’t have the words. It was hard to articulate that paralysis I felt. I spent my whole time and energy trying not to think about killing myself. Every time someone would subtly remind me of apparently all I had to live for, a list would appear in my head: war, or climate, or AI, and slavery, colonialism, past and present genocide. The big things. And that was without the idea of joblessness, cost of living and the prospect of never being able to own my own house in my lifetime. I tried to focus on my breathing, or distract myself with TikTok, or Grey’s Anatomy. But suicidal thoughts swirled around my head, until my brain was a washing machine full of dread…

The world is no better, but I got better anyway. Many things helped me with healing. My friends. Time. Growing up. And my mum. She didn’t help at first, but after I started helping myself, she was essential. She didn’t understand, but even then, she always loved me despite that. Constant love is a powerful force. Something shifted as time went on. I started to take in the world once again, the good and the bad.

I turned to anger. It is far easier, it turns out, to work with anger than apathy. I used to think that my voice was so small there was no point using it. But I began to follow activists such as Mikaela Loach and Greta Thunberg, and think about movements like 4B, which originated in South Korea after the #MeToo movement and rejected sex and marriage with men. I found a community on social media that was not, this time, exploring darkness but searching for light.’ (from the Guardian)