House Calls Podcast

Why Is Hope So Powerful?

With guest Rebecca Solnit,

Writer

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I'm Vivek Murthy and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I'd like to introduce you to Rebecca Solnit, writer, storyteller and activist. Today, we'll be talking about the importance of hope and community in the face of an ever changing world. What is hope? Is it a feeling, an action, an orientation to the world? And how do we sustain hope in the face of hardship? Many of us react to uncertainty with anxiety and worry, especially in the face of climate change and conflict around the world. But for writer, storyteller and activist Rebecca Solnit, hope is not an emotion. Rather, it's a commitment to embrace unpredictability and uncertainty. Rebecca sees uncertainty as evidence of possibility, the possibility for people to take action and to come together to create change. While we may not know what shape the future will take, facing uncertainty or disaster can actually help bring us together. It can also bring out the best in our humanity, our generosity, a desire to help one another, a sense of purpose through serving the collective good. This is what Rebecca teaches us. These threads run through her books. A prolific writer, she has authored more than 20 books on a wide range of topics feminism, Western and urban history, social change, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Hope in the Dark and A Paradise Built in Hell. She writes regularly for The Guardian. Serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late. Here's one thing I'm taking away from this conversation: If you're uncertain about the future rather than despair through a sense of powerlessness, our discussion is a reminder that there's room to act. And sometimes we can make the best case scenario happen if we join together and throw ourselves into action. Rebecca, I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today. Thanks so much for joining House Calls.

It's wonderful to be here. I love your work on loneliness and community and I'm just thrilled and honored to be here.

Well, thank you. Well, I have to tell you, long before we actually met, when I was thinking about writing a book myself years ago on the subject of loneliness, I was writing a book proposal, and I remember I gave it to someone to read. They said to me, you know what? You absolutely need to put in a quote from Rebecca Solnit in your book proposal, You absolutely need to put in a quote from Rebecca Solnit in your book, in proposal, because that'll make it much more attractive to publishers. Then I dug into it and I was just so thrilled by what I found and by just, you've written such beautiful books and I’ve listened to so many of your interviews. So I'm just really excited to have you here on the podcast today, so.

Thank you, thank you. Who knew I had market value like that? Not me.

A lot of market value turned out. People actually, publishers would, once I was shopping my book around, I remember they often would reference the quote from you. So thank you, you know, well after the fact for your help there. But part of the reason I'm excited to talk to you today is because Rebecca, I think you have been prescient in many ways and incredibly thoughtful in talking about the power and importance of community. and how we need that now more than ever. And I think in your writings, you've talked about disasters in particular and how there's a lot that we can learn about the power and importance of community and about how community forms by looking at disasters. And I wanted to start there. When I first read your writings about this, it resonated with me as somebody who grew up in Miami in the 1980s and 90s and lived through Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, which largely leveled a huge portion of South Florida. We didn't have phones for six weeks. We didn't have power for three weeks. We couldn't recognize our neighborhoods because everything had been uprooted and flooded. But there was this incredible sense of community that developed in the days and weeks that followed that terrible hurricane. And that's actually become my lasting memory, is there were a lot of hard times, but I just remember people looking out for each other and helping each other, neighbors helping clear each other's yards and helping patch together people's houses and it felt like we were all in it together. So why do you think it is that disasters are so powerful when it comes to the experience of community?

We need each other in ways we might not in ordinary times, but something, a couple of remarkable things happen. It often feels as though, not that I love machine metaphors, that we revert to our default settings and that no matter how much people believe in individualism and me first, they just instinctively look out for each other, take care of each other. me first, they just instinctively look out for each other, take care of each other, organize together. I wrote that book, A Paradise Built in Hell, subtitle, The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, because at the time, the myths about disaster were so pernicious and so widely believed. I believe they caused a lot of the deaths in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. If you look at the classic disaster movies, if you read the coverage, from the 1906 earthquake here in San Francisco to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, you see the assumption is that human nature is basically selfish and cowardly, that people revert to violent selfishness. Men become marauding, raping, pillaging, looting beasts. Women become hysterical, panicked sheep who need to be rescued usually by Charlton Heston. And, Ha ha ha ha ha. that justifies treating the victims of a disaster as criminals, as a threat, as restoring order in this sense of kind of top -down menace as the top priority rather than making sure that people have food, water, you know, their diabetes medicine, their hypertension medicine, et cetera. And really that was why those beliefs were so destructive. And I had done a ton of research for the 1906 centennial in 2006. And not only did I find this terrible reaction by the city authorities and the U.S. military that marched in and shot a lot of people, burned a lot of San Francisco down, but I found these stories, not just of people behaving well. down, but I found these stories, not just of people behaving well, and I often hear people tell me my book is about the fact we behave well in disaster. disaster, but I think it's something more than that. Not only do people take care of each other, form community, spontaneously organizing these very horizontal ways, not a kind of top -down authority system, but just collaboration about how do we get people out of the rubble of that house? How do we put a community kitchen together? How do we form a bucket brigade? But, the remarkable thing in story after story, whether it's people talking about 9 -11 in New York, the blitz when London was being heavily bombed by the Nazis, 1906's earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, a kind of joy that's almost luminous because people find what's missing from the alienation and anomie of everyday life. They find deep purposefulness, meaningfulness, and a deep sense of connection. Suddenly we all have something in common because we've all been displaced by the earthquake. We're all in the forest fire. We're all in the flood. And this connects so much with your work. They found a deep sense of meaning, connection, purpose, and I think also a kind of immediacy. We go through our lives, you know, fretting about the past and future. When, you know, your city's on fire, you don't worry about whether your mother loved you enough or how your pension funds are doing. You're just really in the here and now. It feels almost for me in disaster like people are shaken awake. into their kind of truest, deepest selves. And the real question for me is, what do we do when it's not, you know, when the city is not in the midst of a major disaster to protect and preserve those deepest human qualities, this default setting, and this joy that I think comes from what we yearn for most deeply, which is not what we're told we want. Mostly we're told we want material possessions, wealth, and maybe private life in terms of, you know, sex, love, family. But I think we want to be members of civil society. We want a broader sense of community and belonging. We want meaningful work, not just eternal vacation. We want purposefulness. And people find that in disasters. So I've heard from so many people where even when death, destruction was all around them. They'd lost their own homes. They had no idea what the future held. Their faces shown, the joy was in their voice. And that was astounding. And that's why the book is called A Paradise Built in Hell. The hell gets delivered as a disaster. The paradise is this human nature shining forth. And it felt so important for all times when we think about what kind of a society can we have, cynicism about human nature is often I think we can't have a better society. We can't change things for the better. We can't live differently. So it felt for me like evidence for who we really, who we really could be, that is not just useful for disasters, but useful for these larger conversations about human nature.

Your work has actually made me just expand my thinking a little bit about disasters themselves. And it made me wonder something I've been wanting to ask you, which is, are there particular characteristics of disasters, of some disasters that lend themselves more to the kind of community building and coming together versus others? I think, for example, about the hurricanes or tornadoes, experiences like we had with 9 -11. There are other, perhaps could be termed disasters like the pandemic, the experience of gun violence that happens in many communities across the country and mass shootings in particular. These constitute their own kind of disaster, yet it feels in some cases those disasters actually don't bring us together and we splinter. Is there something that has occurred to you about disasters that… perhaps make it more likely that they do have this positive sort of output. Does it have to do with how long they last or how many people they affect or geographic proximity?

I think there's two main pieces to that. One is that I wrote about disasters that happen suddenly. You don't have time to revert to, I don't like those people. Oh, what's in it for me? You know, so much, I think, in our society encourages us to be selfish, suspicious of other people, and to, you know, which looks like self -preservation, but I think also produces a lot of… isolation and division and gun violence of course because it's produced by the proliferation of guns pushed by the gun industry, you know, was almost and also produces a huge amount of death primarily among gun owners committing suicide but also the mass shootings, the domestic violence homicides, etc. You know, and guns are almost designed to produce fear and alienation and division. And also there's so much propaganda around it that some parts of our country support and some parts don't. And that divisiveness has really been weaponized, I think, by political actors. And the pandemic, of course, required us to withdraw and to be separate. But I saw beautiful things happen around the world in parts of Europe, people singing together from the balconies of tall apartment buildings. I had a beautiful experience as a member of the Auntie Sewing Squad. That's A -U -N -T -I -E, not “anti.” And organized by the LA performance artist, Christina Wong, when she realized people needed masks, it became a group of more than 800 people, mostly women, really a lot of Asian American women, who made more than a third of a million masks on their sewing machines for the most vulnerable and marginalized people in the pandemic. And it became a really wonderful social community organized through Facebook I was part of. So I felt like people found a lot of ways to reach out, but I also felt a bit like the gun thing, the propaganda, the vaccine denial, the denial about the virus altogether, the misinformation coming from a particular political angle, really sowed division. And that relates back to immediate disasters. I said in immediate disasters, we often don't have time to like kind of… regarb ourselves and all our prejudices and assumptions and political divisions. But they do happen in some ways. Some of the disaster sociologists I talked to coined this extraordinary word, elite panic, or extraordinary term since that's two words. And what they meant is that ordinary people actually behave really well in disasters, but often the people who think they should be in charge and who feel like the status quo is totally works for them are freaked out because they're not in control and the status quo no longer exists. Suddenly the world is organized completely differently. You live in a city where if there's one big fire, the fire department can put it out. If there's 500 fires, either the citizens are going to take care of it themselves or things are out of control. And often elite panic focuses, as we saw in Hurricane Katrina, with police and vigilantes shooting black men in the back with accusations of looting, seeing black men as threats. In 1906, where the same obsession with protecting private property happened. And that focus also on private property has often led people to focus on the idea that we need to preserve property relations and to see people doing quite altruistic things, trying to get needed diapers, medicine, formula for babies when money doesn't exist, banks don't exist, business doesn't exist, nobody's open for business. And by money doesn't exist, I mean, you know, there's no electricity, your credit card doesn't work, your bank's not open. If you're gonna get, you know, the antiseptic to the people who swam, you got wounded and then swam through the filthy water with sewage in it, you're going to get it by taking stuff directly from the store. And that's often described as looting rather than altruism. And so, you know, that's where disasters really go wrong.

I just came off Rebecca, finished and came off of a college tour that I was doing and we were focused on visiting campuses around the country and talking about the issues of loneliness and isolation. And part of this has been really one more step in a long multi -year journey here to understand the deeper roots of despair that are affecting people and in many colleges that we visited I many young people didn't feel hopeful about the future. They felt this sense of despair. When I would ask them why they they talked about a lot of the challenges that they were seeing in the world and talk about climate change in particular which I know you have spoken, you know eloquently about in the past, but when they looked at these challenges, they didn't see them getting better. They didn't feel a source of hope and they ended up in a place of despair. And I wish I could have had you with me on this college tour to speak directly to these students, because I've heard you speak so powerfully about how to find hope during difficult circumstances. But what do you say to young people who look at climate change and say, there's no hope and this is the reason why I feel like I'm just anchored in despair right now. How would you advise them?

One of the things that's so dismaying about the climate challenge is a lot of the despair comes from people who, because they've been told we're doomed, I hear versions where civilization or humanity or life on earth is gonna die out, they don't dig deeper and they don't go to, you know, and there's a lot of misinformation on TikTok and other platforms that circulate pretty widely and a certain kind of dismissiveness. That's a little surprising to me. And if I got told I had a terrible disease, and I know people who have, I've had a little round with cancer, you know, you tend to research the hell out of it. climate organizers, climate scientists, they're anxious, they're worried. They know the worst case scenario. They also know the best case scenario. So I feel like there's specific stuff with lack of good information about climate including that we have the solutions, the climate move, well, we have the solutions, people do care, there's a powerful climate movement with a huge number of victories, obviously not nearly enough, but we'd be in profoundly worse shape if it hadn't happened. And the great majority of people in almost every survey I've seen in recent years, thanks to the climate movement, I think, and this is our biggest victory, are very aware of climate change, very concerned about it, and absolutely eager to see money spent, policies made, the world changed to address this crisis. So we actually have a lot of equipment, and we also know what the obstacles are. They're primarily the fossil fuel industry and the vested interests trying to prevent us from doing what we need to do, which is a swift transition away from a world run on fossil fuels, plus a lot of good design about our agriculture, about our everyday life, you know, public transit rather than private cars, walkable, bicyclable cities. From your point of view, I think one of the wonderful things about what the climate crisis requires of us, I think if we really did it right, it would be a lot more sociable and gregarious and less alienated. You know, if you live in a pedestrian -friendly, walkable place, if there's more green space. And so I think that doesn't get through is a lot of it, but I think that there's a deeper problem. I started writing about hope in 2003 in response to a lot of the despair I saw around me, which was not, some of it was due specifically to left -wing activist despair when the Bush administration started dropping bombs on Iraq. They correctly felt we didn't stop this war. But they went from something that was true to we didn't do anything, which was not true. I think we delayed and changed the shape of the war. Some countries withdrew then or later because of the global anti -war activism. But then they went into this larger story. We have no power. We've never done anything. I think amnesia and despair are closely related. And I think we live in a very amnesiac country. We cannot see the future, but we sure can see the past and the past shows us, the past teaches us how to understand change and power. Part of I think despair is connected to a sense of powerlessness. But what you learn from the historical record is power does not reside in a few high visibility wealthy, you know, or politically appointed people. Power lies in grassroots movements and civil society and good ideas. in tenacious organizers who persevere in trying to protect a place, an environment, a species, a marginalized group. And so the stories of the past give us equipment also to understand that at the very end of a change, it feels like, you know, legislators give us a law, the Supreme Court gives us a decision. But if you have the long arc of change, and here I say slowness is a superpower, you see, it didn't begin with the Supreme Court or Congress. It ended there. It began with, you know, the climate movement and particularly the Sunrise Movement is where the whole conversation about climate change, which became the Biden campaign's climate platform, which became Build Back Better, which eventually passed as Inflation Reduction Act, which is now being implemented with tremendous consequences. So that long memory, long arc, lets you see that we have power as civil society, as members of groups and movements. And here I'll just throw in that Bill McKibben is often asked, what's the most effective thing I can do as an individual? And he always looks at them and says, stop being an individual. Join something, which I think really addresses loneliness and despair around climate and more generally, and is how you become somebody who can really affect change. But the other thing I think is people often expect two things, one of which is that, history proceeds in pretty predictable ways. But what history really shows us is that it's full of surprises. Something suddenly happens. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Marriage Equality takes a huge leap forward at Me Too and the feminist eruptions that began in 2013 or so that culminated with Me Too, suddenly change the conversation about violence against women in ways that really let us change public collective understanding laws, prosecute long -time sexual predators. And then the other thing I find over and over among my fellow middle -class Americans, not so much frontline communities in other places like the Zapatistas in Mexico, climate activists in the South Pacific. But what I find here is people speak with a kind of certainty as though the future has already been decided, whether it's optimism or pessimism, cynicism or despair, that we already know what's gonna happen. And we don't, the world changes suddenly in ways nobody anticipated. One of the great influences on me was, that fall of 1989, when suddenly through nonviolent organizing, often with deep roots, almost every country in Eastern Europe freed itself from their totalitarian governments and precipitated a profound change nobody had ever imagined. I was born the summer the Berlin Wall went up and I really expected it would outlive me. I expected the Soviet Union and the Cold War were gonna be there for my lifetime and long afterwards. I went back as a journalist and looked at what people were thinking before all that happened. Nobody really foresaw it. One of the things I think that really leads to despair is a funny kind of And so one of the things I think that really leads to despair is a funny kind of confidence. We know what's going to happen and it's bad, which is not that different than optimism. We know what's going to happen and it's good. And they both really prevent participation. I think we have a really hard time in this country with uncertainty with the fact that we don't know what's going to happen. We can have some astuteness about the possibilities as we learn from the historical record of how the Voting Rights Act was passed, how slavery was ended, how women got the vote, how marriage equality was achieved, how the Clean Air and Water Acts were passed or things like that. So we can learn from the past. And, part of what you learned from the past is, to recognize unpredictability. And then the task becomes getting people, as the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron says, comfortable with uncertainty. I think partly in this era where everybody's supposed to have an opinion about everything, it's really hard for people to just say, I don't know, we're gonna have to find out what happens. And in a country where we don't often get told the real story about how change happens, it's hard to say we're making the future in the present and back to where we started, and sorry to be long -winded, nowhere is that more true than with climate. The scientists told us six years ago, we have 12 years to get this right on climate. Six years have been partially wasted by administrations that deny climate, lack of action in a lot of countries of the world. Although we've seen from Costa Rica to Denmark, some remarkable transformations. And so, you know, we really need to understand, especially with climate, we're making the future in the present. And what we do now matters, not just for our lifetimes, but for the next 10 ,000 years, the condition of the oceans, the conditions of the poles, the conditions of the rainforests and the tropics. Another term for uncertainty is possibility. If you don't know what's going to happen, there's room for us to intervene. And that's what hope is. I think it's a sense of possibility within the profound uncertainty of what's going to happen, paired with the sense that maybe we can make the best case scenario happen if we throw ourselves into it wholeheartedly.

Yeah, there's this beautiful definition of hope that I've seen you also share in the past, which has stuck with me, which was that hope is not an emotion, it's a stubborn commitment to possibility, and I love that because it's active. It's like hope is not just something that happens to us or that we feel by happenstance, but it's something that we have to do. It's an action that we have to, an action that we have to commit to. And I like that because I'm thinking about that in the context of what you were saying about amnesia and about the fact that sometimes our despair is accompanied by this amnestic sort of response or forgetting of the stories that do bring us hope or the things we've done in the past that should hopefully help us realize that we can do things in the present. But I've often noticed that amnesia is selective, that we tend to remember the bad things that happened and use those to perhaps, you know, sort of further justify or make the case for why we should not be optimistic, but we do tend to forget the good things and the reasons to be hopeful that are buried and found in the stories in our past. Why is it that selective memory sort of functions that way? Because I do feel like it contributes to this cycle of despair and hopelessness that we're seeing right now.

And there's a few pieces to that. I think one thing is that the kind of mainstream history and news we get often focuses on, you know, and our superhero movies, which I think are really damaging by telling us that lone individuals with an exceptional talent for violence are how we save things or save the world or change things. I think we don't, we… get told in a lot of ways that we're not powerful. Even the focus on personal virtue around climate, you know, with your climate footprint tells you, you're just a consumer, just stay home and be careful about what you eat and buy versus you're a citizen, you're a participant. You can go out and help a movement to, you know, dismantle the fossil fuel industry and speed the transition to renewables. So I think that's a piece of it. And the same way the history we get told is often the great men of history, the idea that a few people are in charge and do everything. But I also think there's something a little more sinister. For those of us who lead fairly safe, comfortable lives, telling ourselves we have no power and we never win means we have no responsibility. If you have no power, you have no responsibility. Another thing that's been really profound for me is seeing people in terrible circumstances. In Fiji and in the South Pacific, there's a climate movement called the Climate In Fiji and in the South Pacific, there's a climate movement called the Climate Warriors. Their motto is, we're not drowning, we're fighting, because they were told, oh, you poor island dwellers, your islands are going to go underwater. That's very sad. We're giving up on your behalf. And they're like, we're not giving up. We're not drowning, we're fighting. Mariame Kaba, the great prison abolitionist, said it really beautifully, hope is a discipline. I also think people think hope is an emotion. If you don't feel good, you can't be hopeful. I often say I respect despair as an emotion, but please don't confuse it with an analysis. So I think in a lot of different ways, we can give people better equipment both for dealing with their emotions and dealing with the way they understand how change happens, what the possibilities are, where power lies. And that's so much of what I've tried to do with my own life work.

One, it's incredibly empowering, the message that you're sharing and at a time where I think people are feeling like they don't have agency and feel powerless in the face of everything, you're talking about hope and optimism as active choices that we make and commitments that we demonstrate in our lives. And to me, that's powerful. And I think this notion also, You mentioned Bill McKibben's advice to stopping an individual and to be a part of a collective, to join an effort. That makes so much sense to me. I think, especially when we look at the burden that's placed on people, just heaped on their shoulders to have to manage and deal with everything that's happening in the world by themselves. I think that of course feels overwhelming. But we weren't meant to do all these things by ourselves. We were meant to exist together and to take on challenges together, and that's how we've succeeded historically, despite the biographies that we may read and the movies that we may watch. One thing I'm curious about, and I wanted to ask you about too, is you mentioned that some of the preoccupation with negativity and despair and the inclination in that direction is impacted in part by the news that we're consuming, right? Like 24-7 and in… and there's a negative tilt to it, often focuses on despair, but I think the fact that people are also immersed in it 24-7 now in a way that was not possible because of technology 30, 40 years ago, I think has made a big difference. I wanted to ask you though, in your own life, how have you managed your relationship with the news? And I would also add social media to that, because when we talk to young people, that is one of the primary channels through which news and stories of despair are often being routed. So how have you managed these in your life.

I wish I could suggest that I was an exemplary example, but I'm afraid I'm not. And, you know, and of course we have the equipment these days to follow the news, you know, as things are happening, live streams, journalists tweeting away as they listen to hearings and things like that. And so I kind of have that. I think out of a sense that if I completely know what's going on, somehow it feels under control, which is ridiculous on the face of it. And then social media is the only thing I've ever found that's really, really addictive to me and I feel that social media has contributed to isolation. A lot of us have withdrawn over the decades thanks to tech from a lot of other ways we used to communicate. I'm older. I grew up in the 80s and 90s where you could call up your friends out of the blue and have these beautiful long heartfelt phone conversations. Now phones feel very transactional, you know, and a lot of people, particularly younger people, find calling out of the blue a little, you know, like they have stronger boundaries about that. I used to, I love letter writing. I'm a writer. I can express myself so deeply that way. I loved email when it came along until about 10 years ago. Email just felt like letters you could send back and forth instantly. I had romances. in letters. I had deep friendships. I had a friend where we wrote back and forth almost every day for 10 years. It's like the best journal I've ever kept. And now email is either kind of lists that you're on or also like I feel like the original model was letters. Now the model is texting. It's very short, transactional things. And so I'm here in San Francisco, which has been fully annexed by Silicon Valley. I think that technology has contributed hugely to isolation and alienation, both in practical terms, by withdrawing us a lot from direct contact and withering away some of the things. Like if I quit social media tomorrow, I can't have those email friendships, I can't have those spontaneous phone calls, cafes are not hangout places the way they were when I was young, a lot of like, let's just hang out together for no particular reason stuff doesn't seem so natural anymore. I wrote a piece recently where I quoted you about loneliness, about tech, and I often call it the great withdrawal. Everything gets buffered through a platform, a technology, a device that somebody's making money off, which is part of the motivation. But also I think something about the mindset of people in Silicon Valley. And maybe it's just marketing, but they constantly frame direct human contact, leaving the house, running your own errands, being face to face as unpleasant, inconvenient, and inefficient. And you know, love and friendship is not about efficiency and convenience. It's about something much more deep and valuable than that. And yeah, it's nice to see my friends on social media, but it's not the same thing as hanging out. And I think recovering that, just that deep contact is one of the things, one of the rebellions against the direction technology has taken us in, we need to do.

You're so spot on. And I think particularly when it comes to technology, I think the irony is that those technologies that were meant to build community have actually fractured community and pulled us away from one another. And this thing about efficiency I find so challenging and I think dangerous in a way because efficiency is trying to optimize for a time. But there are other things we want to optimize for. We want to optimize for meaning and for fulfillment. in our lives and you know I think often about an article I read some years ago and it was written by a journalist who was talking about these family vacations that he had once a year where extended family would all gather in some part of the country out in the woods and they would rent a cabin together and for like a week they would just be there and he would say that in the beginning you come late, few days late, leave a few days early. He was just like, what are we doing? We're all just hanging out here, there's no agenda, et cetera. But then he wrote this because he said that in our society we focus a lot on just quality of time and trying to say, okay, I'm gonna have half an hour with this person, what are all the questions I can ask? How can I make it count? How can I make sure that we get the most out of this 30 minutes? But when he started spending more time at this family retreat. he realized that the beauty of what was taking place was in the unplanned moments. And he talked about taking the garbage out with his niece and how they just happened to have a conversation about something that was happening in her life when they were dragging the garbage down the driveway. Couldn't have planned that, but it happened because he was around. And so he made the point that in addition to quality of time being important, sometimes quantity of time is just as important and quantity can breed quality. because we can't always predict where good conversations and insights and inspirations come but it's hard to have quantity of time for friends and for family when you're constantly trying to optimize for every minute saved and trying to be efficient in that regard. And so that's where I worry sometimes that we are optimizing for something that has a place but isn't necessarily what's going to make us truly fulfilled and happy. in our life. Like I know of no one, you know, of all the patients I've cared for over the years who are at the end of their life, who've come to the end of their life and said, you know, I led a really meaningful life because I was able to optimize time and be really efficient. Like nobody says that, right? When people talk about what gave them joy in their life, they're talking about the people they loved, the people who loved them, about their relationships. And that requires a focus on people, not necessarily on… sort of minutes saved.

Yeah, the, you know, efficiency, convenience, productivity, are business values. And our lives are not businesses. You know, we're, we're not, we're not on the assembly line trying to grind out product for profit. And so it's kind of a conflict between being and doing, I would think. And I also think about the way the economy has been restructured since 1980. People had a lot more free time. You know, I grew up in a world where a family could live pretty well on one income and the 40-hour work week was really a 40-hour work week. Now it's so normal to have both parents in a household working more than 40 hours a week. Kids have a lot more homework and a lot more structured time. And there's, and I think there's a lot of economic anxiety. One of, you know, it's so easy to fall into profound debt. poverty, even homelessness. And I think that frightens people and makes them scramble. So I feel like part of recovering quality of time would be recovering some kind of economic security and free time. One of the things I love about the possibility if we do what the climate crisis requires of us, I think it requires a shift from wealth as being just material things. And I'm not saying people don't need food, clothing and shelter, but we also need meaning connection and beauty and joy. If we don't have to, if we don't consume so much, we don't have to produce so much, we could have a world with more time for our inner lives, connections to the natural world, to the people around us, to things that give us meaning beyond our work. So I feel like so much, so many of our crises, are storytelling crises. When we change the story of what's important, what's valuable, the story of who we are we change the possibilities that people see and then they can act on them. Stories can change the world.

Oh, that's beautifully put. Absolutely. I very much believe that. And we can change the narrative. And there's a narrative right now, I worry, in our country, which is telling us to be pessimistic. They're telling us we don't have agency that's telling us that the future is bleak. And I think often about like the stories my parents told me as immigrants about. what America was. I was a little kid growing up. I was wondering what this country was about and why did my parents come here? And they would always describe America in those days as a place that was inhabited by courageous, compassionate optimists. That's how they described their vision of America that brought them here. That they weren't under the illusion that every single person was like that. But their feeling was that was the story of our country, that was the… the ideal to which we aspired, even if we didn't always live up to it, but it's what we wanted to be. It was like in our DNA, it was our spirit. And I worry that we have drifted away from that and have become more fearful, have become less optimistic, and have become more inward-focused and less focused on how we can serve and how we can care for one another. And I think that's about the story in part that we tell. I think we have to now tell a different story about ourselves about who we are, not just as individuals, but as a collective and about what we can do. I'm curious, you know, in your story, before we were recording, we were talking a bit about you growing up in Novato and about your fascination with books and your love of nature. And I was curious, like this passion that is so evident that you have for not only topics like climate change, but for helping to revitalize hope and for helping people deal with uncertainty. I was curious, where did this come from? Like when you were a young child growing up, did you have a sense that these were topics that would be important to you, or these things you wondered about?

No, I loved stories before I learned how to read. Learning how to read, I always say it was like books are treasure chests. Reading is how you open them and enjoy the treasure within. It was so exciting and I decided in first grade I wanted to be a writer. And throughout, I was very much, mostly thanks to my younger brother, David, had one foot in the activist world, one foot as a writer, a historian, et cetera, in these other worlds. And it just gradually came together that we can tell a better story. And so my book, Hope in the Dark, which came out of that, essay I wrote right after the attack on Iraq began in the spring of 2003, I felt like I had learned both as an activist watching the world change in astonishing ways. I mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another huge influence for me was I got very involved in a Native American land rights struggle and also the quintessential of Columbus's arrival in America as 1992 became a real turning point where I think a lot of native people, as activists, as historians, people who supported them, really changed the story of this hemisphere from, you know, it was virgin wilderness that white people discovered, to a radically different story and seeing the resurgence of native people after 500 years of oppression reclaiming land rights, languages, ceremonies, pride, culture, and becoming visible in a way that I had never imagined. And I should have done a land acknowledgement. You know, I'm here on the Ramaytush-Ohlone land. I grew up right across the Golden Gate Bridge on the Coast Miwok land, as your wife did, and the unceded land. So seeing native people change their own circumstance and their visibility, all these things made me feel like I just had a front row seat and was learning also from reading historical stories that gave me a sense about how change happens that I've been talking about all through that it's much less predictable, indirect consequences matter, change is often slow. What ends up in the limelight often begins in the margins and shadows. And we have a tremendous amount of power. And that I think has stayed with me as something true and important to tell. I did it with Hope in the Dark that talks about a lot of different kinds of stories. And then after years of trying to figure out what's my real job in the climate movement. Finally, I realized like, oh, duh, it's to just do continue the Hope in the Dark work of trying to hand people these other perspectives, these useful tools for finding power, finding possibility and taking action. And so, you know, storytelling doesn't do all the work we need to do, but the work we need to do is never not partly storytelling. And I'm a storyteller, so that's been just an exciting and wonderful job to play. And, you know, as a participant in civil society and movements, maybe in history, because the world has changed so much in our lifetimes too. And that's another gift of the long perspective. Martin Luther King famously said, the arc of justice, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. And I always say, you need to, you need to see the long-term things. What was the status of women when I was born that summer of 1961? It is so terrible I think most people don't remember and almost can't imagine how profound inequality was by both law and cultural customs in marriage, um, lack of, lack of representation and equality in almost anything in the, you know, in jobs and in power and political life and education, and it all changed. So, you know, trying to give people these tools as stories has really been a lot of my job the last 20 something years.

Well, I think stories are absolutely essential tools for building a movement for just the sustainability and the well-being of any society. We need to keep telling ourselves the story so we know who we are, we know where we're going, and we know where we've been. And it's one of the reasons I'm so grateful to you for being the storyteller that you are and incredibly gifted in that regard. But people like you are just incredibly important for societies, especially now when we're… in a place where we're, I think, dealing with questions of identity, like who are we? Are we pessimists who feel like the future is bleak? Are we optimists who feel like we can create a brighter future and embrace uncertainty and recognize that possibility has within it the seeds of positive change and we can do everything we can together to push for that. So I think these are choices around identity that are impacted by the stories we tell. I've really enjoyed this. the conversation that we've had. I know it's been wide ranging, but this has been especially, I think, helpful for me to hear at a time when I do hear so much worry and despair from people around, and you've helped lay out a path here for how we can confront that despair and find a better path forward. I lastly wanna ask you, as you think, Rebecca, just about all that's happening in the world, I suspect maybe sometimes in your own life. Maybe there might be moments where you feel down or you may feel worried. And I'm curious, what do you reach for in those moments when despair seems like it's creeping in? What helps you bring you back to a place of hope and optimism?

Three things I would say, going out into the natural world, I know that doesn't make everyone feel good, but the natural landscape around me, including the coast, the forest, the grasslands, are incredibly beautiful. They've been with, you know, I've been in the same region all my life. So that's one. Two, I'm so lucky I have these amazing great nieces, wonderful nephews, and… spending time with kids and then just calling up one of my good friends, one of my close friends and talking to them. Not, in other words, not being alone. And I think being with nature in its own way is not being alone. I think we need the companionship of fellow human beings, but we also need the companionships, the companionship of other species of the natural world and the sheer spaciousness of being out, out on the coast, on a hilltop. I also feel liberates me from being kind of boxed into my own head and it's loop tapes. So those things are great. And now I want to ask you what you do.

For me, I think, similar to you, I find that part of what happens when I'm in despair is I get in my head too much. And so I need to get out of my head. And I too find that just, a couple things help me do that. One is physical activity, just working out, going for a walk, those kind of things help. Second, like you, being in nature, it helps a lot. It just, I think a few things are as powerful as nature to put things in perspective for us and to help us connect with a source of energy and sustenance that's outside of us. And the third thing I do is I spend time with my kids, my wife, with my good friends, with people who just, it's not just that they remind me of what matters, but they help me feel something that's different, which is to feel. love and to laugh and to feel joy at a time when there may be despair in one's life. For me at least, that helps remind me that I'm still capable of feeling love and joy and of enjoying myself and of both not just getting love but giving it as well to someone else. And so I think this gets back to what you were saying about amnesia. I think I found sometimes in my own life, during times of despair, I realize I'm forgetting like a lot of the reasons that I actually have in my life to be hopeful, like the people, the experiences I've had in the past, the belief that I've had in myself in the past as well about what I can build and create. I forget those things during times of despair and then I feel powerless. But good friends sometimes are mirrors and they can help reflect some of those stories which I certainly need to be reminded of from time to time. So that's what I do.

I love that you talk about giving as well as receiving love. I feel like we so often talk about love, like, it's a commodity we want to get more of. And commodities are such a bad metaphor for the things of the spirit where the more you give, the more you have, the more you get. And you know, giving away love, kindness, friendship, encouragement, attention, you brings it back in a way and you're, I feel like the most profound poverty is somebody who has nothing to give. And so I feel rich sometimes from the ability to give, to help somebody, just encourage somebody, to have something positive to say to somebody is a form of wealth that's been important to me personally.

I want to thank you so much, Rebecca, for this wonderful conversation and especially for those pearls you shared at the end about what you do in your own life. I’m constantly finding I need to remind myself of those small, but powerful practices that can help re-center, re-ground, re-anchor me in a world which feels like it’s constantly pushing us one way or another. And so I just so grateful to you for being here with me today for having this conversation and just most importantly for all the Incredible work that you've been doing you're so gifted as a writer and as somebody who finds writing to be enjoyable But very painstaking and painful and it does not come easily to me. I so admire people like you Rebecca for whom it is just a extraordinary gift and you've been gracious to share that gift with so many of us over the years, so thank you so much.

My pleasure and honor. Thank you so much. It has been wonderful talking to you. And I love what you're doing with your work on loneliness and community and connection, this other worldview of what matters, what we need, and how to reorganize the world to value and recognize this. I just love it. So thank you.

Thank you so much. I so appreciate that. This concludes my conversation with Rebecca Solnit. Join us for our next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.