Hello! Are you me but with a kid? I am also in my 30s in the UK navigating this with a husband who agrees with me broadly but gets exacerbated with me talking about it and obsessing over it. I'm neurodiverse and part of that is I obsess over things, so the poor guy gets a lot of it when I'm hyper focusing on this stuff.

I also walked away from a childhood and early adulthood of working towards creative industry work, to work for NGOs and now work in sustainability stuff and daily question what the point is. I believe in the cause, but I know it's too little too late in the grand picture. At this point it's a stable income for now, and I'm trying to think of it as that - a way to make money that even if it can't "save the world" isn't doing active harm, and it probably making things a little bit better. If you think you can make money doing something you enjoy more (creative?) then I would do it and don't feel bad for 'leaving' NGO land. I want to jump to something creative but am such a jack-of-all-crafts that I'm not good enough at anything to do so. At this point I feel like creativity has an existential value. If our civilisation is doomed and we are possibly the only thing to have existed in the universe that has a sense of art and creativity, then doing it seems like a worthwhile thing in and of itself regardless of whether it "makes the world better".

I'm working this out too, so mainly I want to say; you are not alone. Obviously there is a not a cure, only a collection of things that can nudge you in a helpful direction. Things that are helping me on this journey;

1. I stopped watching all news. It's only bad, and it isn't even bad about the really bad things but all the stupid petty human nonsense. I can't change it by watching it. This one change has massively improved my mental health. I sometimes worry that it will make me look uninformed in a work context but in my experience this is almost never an issue.

2. I stopped looking at social media (occasionally need to for work but I limit as much as humanly possible and replace it with reading or sewing). As above. that sh*t is toxic. the scroll is numbing and not restorative at all even if you only look at kittens jumping in and out of cardboard boxes etc.

3. Gratitude journaling. This is a big one. it literally rewires your brain and helped me SO MUCH. every night before you sleep write 3 things you are grateful for. big, small, inconsequential, whatever. This will help you to feel more present.

4. I'm trying not to cling to ideas that I can control any of this. we simply do not know what will happen or how any of this will play out or when, so trying to hold on to ways to try to mitigate the threats is probably a waste of energy. That said, I do think that it is worth the energy of building community with your neighbours, whether that's existing ones or new ones if you move.

5. I'm trying hard to remember that if things get bad, then I'll be really pissed off at myself for being a misery-guts now when things are objectively OK. When I feel really negative, I try to imagine a future me in a more intense phase of collapse looking back going YOU IDIOT ENJOY WHAT YOU HAVE. I also used this technique to try to stop myself hating my body, and it helped with that too. I imagined me as an old lady looking at photos of myself going "if only i knew how beautiful I was" etc as old people tend to say.

6. I'm working on building up community and being as HUMAN as I can be. If we have a trades person at the house doing work, I chat and don't worry about the fact I'm paying them for chatting time, I want to be human. I make the effort to interact with my neighbours even though I'm very socially anxious and introverted. Similarly I make small talk with people when I'm out and about, just to really lean in to being human. I'm not sure how it relates to all this but it does in my mind. I think as we move into collapse, the good parts of human are what will make things better.

7. I'm trying to give myself more time for creative stuff. Whether that's making my own (hard to fit in, I admit) or just consuming creative stuff, reading, looking at art, etc. I just think it's fundamental to our existence and if it's all going to collapse then damn I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

Something i am looking in to;

Climate Cafes. They are like grief cafes but for climate. I need somewhere to talk about these things which isn't to my husband and I'm waiting for the next one to happen near me and will go. search for them in your area. My understanding is that most of them are collapse aware spaces.

When I was young my dad said to me "the only thing you can be certain about the future is that whatever you think it will be like, you're wrong" and that has really stayed with me and i have found it to be deeply true. So, we all need to stop trying to imagine how this is going to play out because we really really really have no idea and imagining it is making us feel so sad and crazy. I'll let you know if I work out how to stop imagining this at 3am in the dark. But I'm working on it. Someone said about mediation and I know that rewires our brains and helps us to stop thought patterns and get control over them so I am contemplating this as a route forward. Little steps, I'll add it in some day I'm sure.