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And if you’re new here, welcome for the first time. I’m Quinn Emmett, and every week I write a free essay breaking down how to think about our rapidly changing today and tomorrow, and supply specific Action Steps you can take to help us build one that’s better — for everyone.

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What We Can Do

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was protecting your online privacy with the Mullvad VPN.

⚡️ If apocalyptic skies and hazardous air quality reports are making your climate anxiety a little more intense this week (I feel you), look into the Climate Psychiatry Alliance’s database to find a climate-aware psychiatrist near you.

⚡️ Help spread fire adaptation practices and give communities the tools they need to reduce their wildfire risk and increase their resilience by donating to Fire Adapted Communities.

⚡️ Campaign to speed up the transition away from coal in your community by joining a local team to retire coal plants.

⚡️ While you’re staying indoors to avoid the unhealthy air outside, purchase an air purifier to keep your indoor air quality up to par (got Scrooge McDuck cash? Donate a few to local schools).

⚡️ Learn more about the impacts of air pollution, and read these recommendations for proper building ventilation.

Start Over

Originally published April 2021, updated June 2023

Sometimes, in life, you get fired. Or you fall off your bike, or your startup fails.

And sometimes, in a video game, you die.

When you die in a video game, you get sent back to some checkpoint that’s either just a few moments before, if you’re lucky, or (usually, infuriatingly) way the hell back at the beginning of the alien’s lair.

And now you’ve gotta get over all those goddamn bottomless pit again, kill all the levitating alien shrimp things again, outrun the deluge of poisonous gels, again, until finally — finally — you get to face that huge beating heart again.

And I have to break it to you now, friend — if you don’t have the spread gun the entire time, you can just forget it.

You might as well go all the way back to the hangar.

Starting over can be frustrating as hell. In real life, or in Contra. Out of shape? Flunk out? Fired? Divorced?

At least in Contra you can just tap out up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B -A-start, and starting over suddenly becomes a whole hell of a lot easier.

There’s no Konami Code in real life. Well, that’s not totally true. I’m well-aware that being born a white man in America in 1982 is a massive and historic level-up. It’s the only real universal cheat code that brings unlimited power ups.

We could all use some do-overs. COVID, for example, exposed long-held cracks in our society and economy with devastating consequences. It exhausted us and our systems, and continues to punish and take away so many, with predictably inequitable results.

We’ll all feel the after-effects of COVID for a very long time, but for many of our most marginalized neighbors, and for the hundreds of thousands of children (in the United States alone) who lost caregivers, the loss will be held much more acutely.

Other things have changed, too: offices aren’t dead, but they’ll never be what they were, so downtowns will never be what they were. That’s already having second-order effects in commercial leases and balance sheets.

We have to start over, and re-imagine what living in cities means, and what it means to run a large company where employees can benefit from being around one another, but don’t have to, and not if it means unaffordable rent and/or brutal commutes and lost time with loved ones.

Consider the climate crisis. For the privileged among us (myself included), the experience of the climate crisis is just beginning, while low-income and marginalized countries and communities have been suffering for years.

Sure, I left California in part because my home insurance policy became astronomically expensive, but millions of folks have lost their actual homes or jobs, been forced to relocate, to start over. Shit, Indonesia is already building an entirely new capital city. We can’t put sea-level rise back in the box, so Jakarta is the past.

The same goes for something like clean water. Millions of kids can’t just un-drink lead-flavored water and get their precious IQ points back.

Sometimes, though, we do get the opportunity to start over, and with some key lessons learned.

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