Years ago, at the University of Illinois, where I teach creative writing, I attended a talk given by a prominent climate journalist. The room was filled with high-achieving academics, most from STEM fields, whose questions during the Q&A drilled into the minutiae of the data predicting the coming climate apocalypse. The mood in the room was stoic.
Then, from the back, a graduate student asked a devastating question: “How am I supposed to build a life in the face of this news? Where do I find hope?”
I find myself thinking of her as the headlines once again turn apocalyptic, with a new threat looming. The public resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former researcher with Anthropic, over his fears about AI’s fast-growing genocidal superpowers, has sparked a much-needed call for an industry-wide slowdown.
It’s past time for more robust regulation of AI companies, and I applaud the whistleblowers calling for it. Meanwhile, we average citizens are left reeling. How are we to live in the face of these novel apocalyptic visions? How do we make our grocery lists and take our kids to school while knowing that AI could be planning a highly-coordinated global drone attack or designing a lethal infectious virus within the decade? Where do we find hope?
Back in 1982, during the thick of the Cold War, when the apocalyptic flavor of the day was the threat of nuclear annihilation, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published a seminal paper: “Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness.” In it, he named the human tendency to numb out in the face of absurdity. We repress our knowledge that everyone we love might imminently be bombed into radioactive rubble so that we can tend to the dinner, the tantrum, the deadline. This is practical and necessary and sensible. It is also spiritually corrosive, not to mention politically ineffectual. The existential threat still exists; we have simply turned away.
I raise this not to cast any blame. I myself behave this way, every day. I, too, have exigencies: classes to prep, papers to grade, dinners to make, bills to pay. I have a whole repertoire of numbing strategies, many of them at my literal fingertips. (I’m looking at you, iPhone.) I raise it because I want to become more aware of how I tend to numb out, so that I can resist it. And, crucially, because I need your help.
Yes, you, dear reader. You there, phone in hand, perched, just like me, on the dizzying spin of this aching earth. I need you to help me imagine this latest existential threat, to feel the way it quickens my blood, prickles my skin, and swells tidally within me. I need you to help me sit with the feeling, to keep me from numbing it away.
Why? Because it is this willingness to fully imagine the threat—to feel it in our bodies—that allows us to connect with one another in our shared feeling, and through that connection, to act.
Lifton concludes his paper by calling the cultural moment “desperate but hopeful.” Awareness of the nuclear threat was blossoming, and with it a movement toward disarmament. Energized by Dr. Randall Forsberg’s “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” and goaded by authors like Jonathan Schell, who published a series of urgent essays in the New Yorker, people spoke out in city councils, places of worship, public housing, labor unions, and town meetings. And they organized. A million people demonstrated at the UN’s Special Session on Disarmament just a few months before Lifton’s article published—the largest disarmament protest in U.S. history. It took a groundswell—a wave of action spurred by deep human feeling—to pull the U.S. and the Soviet Union back from the brink.
We are at a similar moment now, only the deadlocked powers are the U.S. and China. But awareness is alive and growing. People are pushing back against the massive data center build-out. As of May 2026, at least 430 local opposition groups across 40 states had sprouted up—a sevenfold increase since December. And this activism is already producing results: since 2024, more than 170 billion dollars in data center investment across 20 U.S. states has been blocked, stalled, or canceled. Even more encouraging: data center opposition bridges political divides. A recent Pew Research survey found concern about AI outranks excitement among most Americans.
Awareness is rising, and with it, hope. The AI-pocalypse is not inevitable. Not if we speak out, organize, and—soon—vote. We the people still have the power to elect representatives who believe in AI regulation, and to hold them accountable for instituting change. We can still pull back from this particular brink. But to do it, we need to resist numbness’ siren call and allow ourselves to really imagine, in a physical, bone-and-blood way, the disaster we want to avoid. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But enough of the time to keep ourselves from looking away.
“This issue,” concluded Lifton in 1982, referring to nuclear proliferation, “is deadly serious, but our call is not a grim one. It is a call to life.” A call, in other words, to the fullness of fellow human feeling. It’s emotional and spiritual work, as much as it is political. And it requires support—from loved ones, friends, communities.
I’ll do it if you will, dear reader. Let’s live fully, together.
Thanks Amy! An important call to all of us. Kathy Hassinger