기후 위기, 팬데믹, 경제 불안 등 여러 위기가 동시에 겹치는 '폴리크라이시스(polycrisis)' 속에서 성장하는 아이들이 겪는 불안과 우울에 대응하기 위해 Force of Nature 같은 온라인 지지 네트워크가 등장했다. 이들은 기후 문제를 독립된 이슈가 아닌 혼란한 세계의 한 단면으로 다루며, 청소년의 걱정을 행동으로 전환하도록 돕는다. 다만 이러한 프로그램의 효과에 대한 과학적 검증은 아직 초기 단계여서, 학계에서는 효과성 측정이 필요하다고 지적한다.
번역된 본문
2000년대 후반 어느 날, 핌 설리번-탈리어(Pim Sullivan-Tailyour)는 태국 남부에 있는 증조할머니의 작은 마을로 향하는 차 뒷좌석에 앉아 있었다. 그녀는 창밖으로 스쳐 가는 큰 산들을 바라보았다. 그녀는 겨우 여섯 살이었지만, 어른 못지않은 깨달음을 곧 맞이하게 될 참이었다. "산들이 그냥 채석되고 있었어요"라고 그녀는 말한다. "산 절반이 파헤쳐져 사라지고, 커다란 주황빛 절벽 면만 남아 있었죠." 당시 그녀는 '채석장'이라는 단어를 몰랐겠지만, 자신이 보는 것이 자연스럽지 않다는 것은 느꼈다. 또한 가족 이야기를 통해, 어머니가 어렸을 때 근처 강에서 목욕했으며 물이 너무 맑아서 헤엄치는 물고기를 볼 수 있었다는 것도 알고 있었다. 하지만 채석으로 물은 흐려져 있었다. "우리가 세상을 바꾸고 있구나"라고 설리번-탈리어는 생각했다. "그리고 그건 옳지 않아 보였어요." 인간이 세계를 변화시킬 수 있다는 것, 그리고 실제로 변화시키고 있다는 것을 처음 깨달은 순간이었다. 나쁜 방향으로. 그녀는 그 인식을 안은 채 성장했고, 가족과 함께 영국으로 이주했다. 그곳에서 그녀는 환경 운동에 참여하는 단체들의 상위 조직인 '학교 지속가능성 네트워크(Schools Sustainability Network)'에 소속된 다른 학교의 십대들과 함께하게 되었다. 하지만 그런 연결에도 불구하고, 자기 학교에서는 환경 운동에 관심 있는 사람을 만나지 못했다. 변화를 추구하고 싶은 마음 속에서 외로움을 느꼈고, 혼자 일하며 소진되어 갔다. "사실상 이런 일을 하고 싶어 하는 사람이 저 혼자였어요"라고 그녀는 말한다. 그때 그녀는 'Force of Nature'이라는 또 다른 이니셔티브에 대해 알게 되었다. 영국에 기반을 둔 이 단체는 2021년, 기후에 대해 걱정하는 아이들과 청년들을 위한 일종의 비공식 온라인 집단 치료 프로그램인 'Becoming a Force of Nature'을 시작했다. 이 세션은 설리번-탈리어 같은 젊은이들이 자신의 걱정을 행동으로 전환하도록 돕고, 그녀가 겪던 바로 그런 불안과 소진을 막는 것을 목표로 했다. 그녀는 등록했고 곧 첫 세션을 위해 줌(Zoom)에 접속했다. 수십 개 국가에서 온 수십 명의 얼굴이 그녀를 마주 보고 있었다. "저 혼자가 아니라는 걸 깨달았어요"라고 그녀는 말한다. 그녀는 자기 학교 아이들도 행동은 하지 않더라도 실제로는 자신과 같은 마음일 것이라고 의심하기 시작했다. 알고 보니 설리번-탈리어의 추측은 옳았다. 전 세계 여론조사에서 대부분의 아이들이 세상의 상태에 대해 불안해한다는 것이 밝혀졌다. 그리고 이는 해수면과 탄소 농도가 계속 오를지에 대한 걱정만이 아니다. 그들은 일부 역사학자, 정책입안자, 경제학자들이 '폴리크라이시스(polycrisis, 복합위기)'라 부르는 시대에 성장하고 있다. 지구는 물론 뜨거워지고 있지만, 팬데믹이 일어났고 또다시 일어날 수 있으며, 분쟁은 계속 발생하고, 핵무기는 사일로에서 위협적으로 도사리고 있으며, 주택은 믿을 수 없이 비싸지고, 식료품과 연료는 사치품 구매처럼 느껴지며, 의료비는 급등하고, 권위주의가 확산되고, 당파주의가 사회를 분열시키며, 일자리를 구하기 어렵고 AI가 점점 더 많은 일자리를 가져갈 것이라는 우려가 만연하고, 이 모든 일에 대한 알림(그리고 더 많은!)이 하루 24시간 편향된 디지털 에코체머로 쏟아진다. 정말 많다. 그래서 Force of Nature 같은 온라인 네트워크가 등장한 것이다. 이들이 지구를 대신 정복해 주는 것은 아니지만, 수천 명의 참여자를 확보했다. 그리고 이제 이들은 기후를 고립된 이슈가 아니라 전반적으로 문제 많은 세계의 한 단면으로 다루고 있다. 목표는 이전 세대보다 더 높은 비율로 우울과 불안 증상을 겪고 있는 젊은이들이, 성숙해 가는 다변적으로 변화하는 미래에 대한 자신의 감정을 다루도록 돕는 것이다. 하지만 이런 네트워크의 효과성에 대한 과학적 연구는 아직 초기 단계이며, 심리학자들과 일부 실무자들은 이제 이 분야가 스스로를 측정할 때라고 말한다. 그래야 학교, 학부모, 그리고 아이들 자신이 젊은이들이 실제로 더 나아지도록 어떤 프로그램에 시간과 자원을 투자할지 알 수 있기 때문이다.
험난한 시대
기후 위기와 함께 오는 실존적 공포는 너무나 만연해서 수년 전부터 공식적인 이름이 있다. '생태불안(eco-anxiety)'이다.
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.” Although she probably didn’t know the word “quarry” back then, she sensed that what she was seeing was unnatural. She also knew, from family stories, that her mother had bathed in a nearby river when she was young, its water so glass-clear she could see fish swimming by. But the extraction had muddied the water. “We’re changing things,” Sullivan-Tailyour thought. “And it doesn’t seem right.” It was the first time it occurred to her that humans could alter the world—and that they were. For the worse. She carried that knowledge with her as she got older and her family moved to the UK. There, she joined teenagers from other schools in the Schools Sustainability Network, an umbrella organization for groups that work on environmental initiatives. But even with those connections, Sullivan-Tailyour didn’t encounter anyone at her own school who was interested in environmental activism. She felt lonely in her desire to push for change—and burnt out on working solo. “I was pretty much the only person who wanted to do these things,” she says. That was when she heard about another initiative, called Force of Nature. A UK-based organization, in 2021 it had spun up Becoming a Force of Nature, a kind of informal online group therapy program, for kids and young adults worried about climate. The sessions aimed to help young people like Sullivan-Tailyour take their worries and turn them into action, stemming the exact kind of anxiety and burnout she was feeling. She signed up and soon logged into Zoom for her first session. Dozens of faces from dozens of countries looked back at her. “I realized that I wasn’t alone,” she says. She began to suspect that kids at her school actually did feel the way she did, even if they weren’t doing anything about it. Sullivan-Tailyour was right, it turns out: Global surveys have found that most kids are anxious about the state of the world—and not just about whether sea levels and carbon counts will continue to rise. They are growing up in a time of what some historians, policymakers, and economists are calling a “polycrisis”: The planet is warming, yes, but also a pandemic happened and could happen again, conflicts keep erupting, nuclear weapons lurk menacingly in silos, housing is growing impossibly expensive, groceries and gas can feel like luxury purchases, health-care costs are skyrocketing, authoritarianism is on the rise, partisanship splits populations, jobs are hard to get and there’s rampant worry AI will take more and more of them, and pings about all those things (and more!) arrive 24-7 in polarizing digital echo chambers. That’s a lot. And it’s why online networks like Force of Nature have popped up. Although they’re not taking over the planet, they have gained thousands of participants. And they’re now dealing with climate not as an isolated issue but as one facet of a generally troubled world. The goal is to help young people, who are experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety at higher rates than earlier generations, deal with their feelings about the multivariately changing future they are maturing into. But the science on the effectiveness of these sorts of networks is still nascent, and psychological scholars—and some practitioners—say it’s time for the field to measure itself. That way, schools, parents, and kids themselves can know which programs to invest their time and resources in to actually help young people feel better. Tough times The existential dread that comes with the climate crisis is so pervasive that it’s had an official name for many years: eco-anxiety. “The American Psychological Association calls it a ‘chronic fear of environmental doom,’” says Liza Jachens, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Nottingham’s school of medicine. “What people describe is closer to grief. A real sense of loss—not just fear of what is coming but mourning for what has already gone.” Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist and coauthor of “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States,” a 2012 report for the National Wildlife Federation, has called it “pre-traumatic” stress; she sees it as a kind of anticipatory trauma. In a 2021 study measuring climate anxiety, 56% of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.” But there isn’t really a word to describe feelings people have about <waves hands> the rest of what’s going on in the world. A 2025 study from Polish researchers attempted to define “polycrisis syndrome” in the young people bubbling into adulthood in this hot soup of ingredients. The researchers assessed their reactions to the many crises using established scales of emotional and mental symptoms—things like the “Flourishing Index” and the “Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale.” “Most young individuals in our study face psychological challenges,” the authors write. In fact, more than 60% reported problems —difficulty regulating emotion, symptoms of depression, and lower overall mental and physical well-being—that they attributed to the cumulative stress of world affairs. That finding meshes with earlier, more climate-specific research suggesting that the kids are (sorry) not all right. In 2021, researchers published a landmark study in The Lancet Planetary Health measuring climate anxiety in 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries. Around 60% reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, with more than 45% saying that eco-anxiety affected their daily ability to function. The word “polycrisis” wasn’t in as wide use then, but 56% of the young respondents nevertheless agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed.” But Gen Z isn’t the first to worry about the fate of the species. There isn’t a readily available baseline in the academic literature to compare current youth angst against, but previous studies can give some context. In the early 1980s, during the latter years of the Cold War, around 35% of high school seniors agreed with the statement “Nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within my lifetime,” according to a survey of 130 schools in 48 states. Around the same time, a Gallup poll found that 49% of teens said the possibility of nuclear war influenced how they planned for the future. Those young Baby Boomers and elder Gen Xers were, though, perhaps more optimistic than kids today as a whole. A majority of students from the high school study agreed with the statement “The human race has come through tough times before and will do so again.” A 1986 analysis of such research, published by the National Academy of Sciences, described how to help kids feel less alone with their fears: “What is necessary for those providing the education is knowledge of the issue, sensitivity to the inner processes of working through the painful feelings engendered, and a willingness to try to come to grips with what the youngsters are voicing.” That connection between adults and kids, psychological scholars are currently finding, is still key four decades later. Caroline Hickman, the psychotherapist who led the Lancet Planetary Health study, says the most striking finding was that kids weren’t just anxious about the state of the planet; they were upset that older people had failed to protect their future. “Whatever your politics, we have this expectation that faith leaders, school leaders, community leaders, government officials, will look after us and have our best interests at heart,” Hickman says, “and that social contract was being broken re