How Do You Plan for a Future That Might Not Exist?
What collective grief looks like.
The last 24 hours have been unreal, a blur of smoke and panic.
What started as a stressful day spiraled into a full-blown nightmare as the LA fires tore through the city. Humor is usually my go-to coping mechanism, but I ran out of jokes pretty quickly. My roommate fled to San Diego, convinced it couldn’t get worse, while I stayed behind, naively confident that it wouldn’t, and, boy, was I wrong. Friends have evacuated, people I know have lost their homes, and I ended up sleeping at a Comfort Inn south of the city.
Though I returned home a few hours ago, the air is thick with smoke, leaving me with a pounding headache and a body locked in fight-or-flight mode. And yet, I’m aware that I’m one of the lucky ones. The devastation is unspeakable. Los Angeles, a city with a population larger than half of the states in the US, has been brought to its knees. The fires have ravaged not just homes, but the very sense of safety and stability we once took for granted.
I don’t have the words to describe what I’m witnessing. It’s surreal. It’s dystopian. It’s not the life I thought I’d be living. But then again, that’s been true for a while now.
Moments like these make me acutely aware of how far life has veered off the path that we imagined. And while life is always full of unexpected twists, the last decade feels like an unrelenting crescendo of crises. Climate disasters, political instability, wars, mass shootings, genocide—wave after relentless wave. Trump’s election in 2016 was a tipping point, one that made it clear: things weren’t going to get better. They were going to get worse. Even Canada, long seen as a bastion of stability, has been teetering toward a right-wing government especially in the wake of Trudeau’s resignation.
We’re only nine days into 2025, and I already want to quit.
It’s not just the disasters, though. It’s the erosion of the future we thought we’d have. Our generation isn’t buying homes the way we thought we would, isn’t having kids like we imagined, isn’t experiencing the job security or financial stability our parents did. We don’t have the clean air and the safety that we thought would be ours too. We grew up with the promise that we’d have it better than our parents, and while in some ways that’s true, the state of the world is much more fragile than it once was.
I miss my 2015 brain, the one unburdened by the weight of relentless catastrophes, and I miss my 2015 problems, those small, manageable worries that felt so monumental at the time. But more than that, I mourn the 2025 happiness I once allowed myself to envision, a life shimmering with possibility, untouched by the shadow of all we’ve lost. I grieve the future I was so certain would be mine, the life I thought I was building towards. I can’t pinpoint the moment it slipped through my fingers, but I know it’s gone. Most of all, I ache for the version of myself who believed in that future, who had the audacity to imagine a world that was bright and brimming with promise.
What we’re all feeling is grief. Not the tidy, private kind, but a vast, collective mourning that binds us together. We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit.
We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit.
And for a long time, we resisted. Resistance even became an official anthem, our identity, and for some, an entire brand. After Donald Trump’s first mandate, “resistance” was a rallying cry, a verb transformed into a movement. But now, the word feels hollow, almost absurd, a parody of its former power.
Why? Because resistance alone cannot sustain us. Many of us are realizing that we’ve been resisting instead of accepting, holding back sorrow we were too terrified to acknowledge. Acceptance, after all, is not passive; it’s excruciating. It demands that we face what we’ve lost and what we’re up against. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should stop protesting fascism or climate change deniers and just accept their version of facts or reality. But perhaps accepting their presence, rather than pretending they can be wished away, might make them easier to confront.
As we fight for the change we want, we also need spaces to grieve the change we’ll never see. I think the progressive movement has done a good job of channeling our anger, but I’m not sure it’s done a good job of channeling our pain. It knows what to do with our rage, but it doesn’t always know what to do with our tears. And too often, our anger is just sadness in armor, a bodyguard for the more vulnerable emotions we don’t know how to share. Rage is easy! But real grief, is messy. It doesn’t fit into a cute slogan on a bedazzled poster board or an instagram carrousel. How we collectively mourn this, will shape not just how we process the losses of today, but how effectively we organize and mobilize for the future we envision tomorrow. This grief might be a group project, and the irony is that recognizing it as such may be our greatest source of strength. Healing together, grieving together, we may find new ways to rise together.
And as we fight for the change we want, we also need spaces to grieve the change we’ll never see.
And besides, what is grief, if not at its core, proof that we in fact did love? It’s certainly painful, but it’s also proof of the measure of how deeply we’ve cared, how fiercely we’ve hoped, how boldly we’ve imagined. Losing the future we thought we’d have doesn’t mean we can’t approach the one we have with the same tenderness, the same nurturing, the same defiant hope.
We grieve because we loved that imagined future. And that’s a beautiful, precious and rare thing. And perhaps, in that love, lies the foundation for what comes next, a new vision, forged from the ashes of our loss.
Maybe once we do collective grief, we will uncover our collective love. Love for the ones who stayed, for the ones who rebuild, for the ones who believe, against all odds, that we can still fight for a future worth having. And maybe it’s by letting go of control over our future that we can finally begin to enjoy it.
It won’t be the future we imagined as kids, sketching dreams of a cute house, two kids, a dog and endless possibilities. It might not resemble the life we once envisioned so vividly. But if we allow ourselves to grieve—if we let ourselves feel the depth of the loss without resentment—we might just discover a way forward. And maybe this time, it will be a future forged in resilience, built to last, stronger for having endured the flames together.
how to grieve something you never had
Have you ever had to grieve the loss of something that was never yours to begin with?
If you’re looking for ways to support those impacted by the devastating Los Angeles fires, here are some ways to help:
John Kim’s GoFundMe: My friend John Kim, who lost his home and posted this heart-wrenching video, has started a GoFundMe for his family and his neighbors who lost their homes, one of which is nine months pregnant.
Beth’s GoFundMe: Beth is a pivotal leader in our community and has lost everything.
Support Melissa’s GoFundMe: a teacher who needs support after she lost her home and the school she works at.
Mother and Newborn Baby: A friend with a newborn baby also lost everything and could use your support.
Verified Fundraisers: GoFundMe has created a centralized page of verified fundraisers for those affected by the fires.
Red Cross: Donate to the Red Cross by calling 1-800-RED CROSS (800-733-2767), texting REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation, or visiting their website.
Los Angeles Regional Food Bank: Your donations can help provide food to families in need during this crisis.
Emergency Network Los Angeles (ENLA): Support those who have been evacuated or displaced by donating to ENLA.
Every contribution makes a difference, no matter the amount. Let’s come together to support our neighbors during this unimaginable time.
x
Liz
I’m so sorry for what you are going through. And you’re right. I’ve said a million times that America sucks at dealing with grief. I’m a 9/11 survivor, and I watched this country take New York’s grief and turn it into national rage, destructive rage that we are still dealing with the consequences of. The city never got the space to mourn its own tragedy, the country never got to mourn its loss of stability.
and here we are.
After reading this excellent substack article, it has caused me to wonder if the progressive movement is not as emancipated from the patriarchy as we'd all hoped it to be.
I say this as much of the experiences mentioned, such as living in a world much different to the one you were told and expected to happen, as well as instead of finding or creating an outlet to grieve, it is sadness expressed through rage. These are very similar to how young men who move towards conservatism (and possibly inceldom in some cases) respond to living in the current patriarchy compared to the one that their father's and grandfather's experienced.
Obviously these are two wildly different sides of the spectrum, but maybe not as far apart as we'd like to imagine it being. If we can't takes the steps to grieve, ourselves, how can we expect anyone else to.