If we want to survive, we do it together

With the seasons changing and the news full of doom, Nikesh considers how to keep going when life feels like it’s getting too much

Hope Is Around The Corner 6th November, 2026

Nikesh Shukla

Years ago, a photographer pitched an idea about mental health for Rife, the youth magazine I used to run for Watershed. He wanted to interview people to come up with visual metaphors for what depression looked like for them, whether that be drowning, or being trapped in a glass cage while everyone walked around you, minding their own business. We never got to make that story happen but it stayed with me.

I’ve been thinking about it recently because I’ve been sleeping a lot. I’ve also been growing what I tell my wife and friends is my “got the sads” beard.

It started a few weeks ago when I went to St George’s to watch Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor talk about their incredible book, End Times Fascism. During the talk, they spoke eloquently about the desire to stay in this world and make it liveable and equitable for everyone.

It was a powerful, invigorating evening, despite the doom-laden framing of the book which spends three of its four parts diagnosing the problem and the final quarter showing us the people leading the fight back. In my copy, Naomi wrote “let’s stay”, something she said she was writing in everyone’s books.

For some reason, the night proved too heavy for me. Maybe it was the change of season, the return of the back-to-back rains, the multiple projects at various stages of end-of-year failure, ennui and dead ends, the feeling that I was failing everyone and everything, and the news cycle, on repeat, streamed through my phone and into my ears and eyes. 

And on top of that, racists returned to Bristol uni campus and when they were chased away by a mobilised group of students, called for a flash protest on a Friday night. I spent all week trying to galvanise support to come out and counter them, and no one responded. Not even a “nah, it’s Friday, I’m busy carb-loading before the club”, nary a “Fri-Yay, alas”, just a wall of group chat silence until someone who hadn’t seen my post moved everyone on with a post about the next thing, and it continued.

So I went to bed. I feel like I’ve been sleeping nonstop for a month or so now. I cannot get through the day without sleeping. And all that does is help move the day along closer to the big sleep. My antidepressants have started to let intrusive thoughts leak back in. I’ve yo-yo’ed in caffeine consumption and I’ve tried to block out times in my week to go see movies and make use of the fact that I’m a writer who can go see a screening at 9.30am on a Tuesday should I want to. Except the dark room just means I fall asleep. Usually at the apex of the movie.

I say all this not to whine or prioritise my problems or say I have any of this worse than anyone else. I know many of you are feeling it too, and it’s easy to feel like the only one when these sorts of things go unsaid. But I’m fucking depressed at the moment. I’m watching our new Prime Minister say and do wildly opposite things that I can’t get a handle on. It reminds me of that James Baldwin quote: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” 

Friends in various group chats are doom-prepping, sharing the best places to buy cheap water to stockpile, and various things like generators and water purification tablets and heat pads. And the flags are up and then they’re down and then they’re up and then they’re down. On buses, people are still watching reels on a loop with no headphones and that will probably be my Falling Down moment. People I love are ill and not doing so great. Everyone is trying so very hard and yet, things feel difficult.

Everything is on top of me.

However, Naomi Klein did say, “let’s stay.”

It took me a little bit of time before I shaved off my “got the sads” beard and had a haircut, and got through the day without a sad nap, and reached out to my doctor to say that my medication felt like it wasn’t currently working, but I did it. Also, I recognise that people are doing all these things because they care. We care so very much. I think Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor were trying to tell us that hope and survival is a joint project, not an individual one, and we won’t survive by doomprepping for our household only and pushing the sads down even further in the hope no one notices. Hope and survival depends on open hearts and open hands, and extending both to the people around us. 

I’m not writing this column from a place of “ta-da, pushed on through, I’m fine now”-ness. I’m still feeling stressed and tender, paranoid and anxious. But I hope that in sharing some of this with you, those of you who felt you were the only one, know you’re not alone. That is me opening my heart and hand and extending both to you. Your turn. Let’s stay.