Don’t Drop Out: There is a Future

On the edge of campus, scrawled across the brickwork, is an instruction: ‘Drop out of uni: there is no future’. This is a lot to take in on a Monday morning. I think it’s bad advice, but I also feel defensive.

As I walk across campus, the ominous warning sits upon my shoulders and whispers in my ears. I wonder if there’s any truth to the message—is there no future to work towards?

I understand the sentiment. What’s the point of a first-year grammar class when there is so much pain and injustice in the world? Sometimes, the nihilism sweeps in and settles like dust. Faced daily with the avoidable suffering of the world’s people and the denial and inaction of decision-makers, feeling helpless is inevitable. As we navigate the everyday alongside social, political, and ecological crises, we increasingly experience a sort of anticipatory grief. Feeling not just frustration and disappointment, but dread, we risk the mundane movements of our day-to-day becoming pointless. Why pour coffees, make art, support local? Why do anything in a world that’s burning?

To continue on as usual, to weather the helplessness, I withdraw myself from news media, and steer conversation towards gentler topics. I neglect my own values by lapsing into denial.

In the waves of information and misinformation, the exertion of wading through the torrent of terrible events, there is comfort in disengaging. It’s a thorny task to find a balance between pretending things are okay and acknowledging that they aren’t—to decide whether to flee or fight. The contradictory nature of my struggle to mediate action with inaction reflects the time-weary effort to find an individual response to systemic problems. Surely mediating the two for the sake of sanity has to be okay.

However, to carry on as usual in the face of great injustice is to be pacified. This is not the result of a moral failing by individuals trying to cope, but a reaction to a flood of information too overwhelming to be meaningfully engaged with. The term ‘flooding the zone’ refers to the contamination of an information zone with disinformation, bias, and an excess of information. A flooded information zone becomes unnavigable. It’s easier to disengage than to wade through in search of reliable information, and disengaging makes people passive.

But by moving forward disengaged or in denial, complex feelings of grief manifest as a gnawing anxiety—a feeling of doom. Like maybe there is no future.

The capacity to self-protect via denial and inaction is a temporary privilege afforded to some but not others. A crisis out of sight and mind does not exist until it encroaches on the comforts of our own communities. I don’t want to be a person who only cares about the flames once they appear on my doorstep.

Standing in line for coffee under the sparkling, fairy-light lit tree in the Great Court, I feel the gnawing.

Psychologist Carly Dober said that when treating complex responses to climate grief, she asks her clients to ‘envision a world that is fair’. It is difficult to envision how that world might look in a time when reproductive rights are under threat, trans kids are targets, white supremacists salute to large crowds, genocide is a ‘complicated issue’, First Nations people face disproportionate incarceration rates, and the natural environment is being pillaged.

But by envisioning a world that is fair, we uncover the things in our unfair world that are worth persevering for.

At the coffee counter, the best and worst types of people congregate every day. In a single queue wait people who will leave bad reviews because the sun is too hot and their ice water too cold, people who open their homes to strangers in need and give up their seats even though they’re tired, people consumed by fear and people still hopeful. In the most ordinary moments, there are signs of compassion, community, and care. Adults revert to children as they pause to watch a line of ducklings in formation behind their mother. We kneel to speak to dogs, take joy in the clouds turning pink at the end of the day, and call old friends and tell them we miss them. In the mundane of the everyday, there remains hope.

To disengage from a problematic system in response to an uncertain future is to be pacified. Faced with injustice and crises, our resignation emboldens those in positions of power to continue failing us.

In a flooded information zone the path into the future feels fixed, but it isn’t.

In a system built on further disadvantaging the disadvantaged, keeping the poor poor, and making the rich richer, disengagement—no matter how protective—will only empower those already in power. To shift our path, we must first engage in a system that is unjust and problematic. We cannot fight for a fairer future while disengaged from the present.

I can go to university and study and write and read and sip coffee and pretend the world is well and ignore the gnawing.

Or I can go to university and study and write and read and sip coffee knowing that the world isn’t well. I can be there because it isn’t well.

If all of us who acknowledge the uncertainty of the future, who feel the grief, or the gnawing, give up now, then who’s left to strive toward something better? If we want to change the outlook for the future we need all demographics represented in education, in labour, in politics, in media. If we want to find new ways forward, those who can envision a better future must not withdraw. Let the future reflect the action and persistence of people who chose to fight for a world that is fair.

Niamh Wood is a writer and researcher based in Meanjin Brisbane. Niamh's work is published with Island (upcoming), Baby Teeth, Voiceworks, and others. In 2024, Niamh was writer in residence at BRAZZA artist residency in France. She is a creative writing PhD student at the University of New England, Australia. Find Niamh on Instagram @niamhwood12