During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, multimedia artist and writer Jenny Odell began to have panic dreams about the future. “The future has disappeared,” she writes in her journal, as she wakes to a rusty glow of wildfires burning behind her window blinds in Oakland, California. The threat of an unlivable planet is not only hard to bear, but it creates, as Odell reflects, a “temporal weirdness.”

Odell is not alone in finding it difficult to imagine the future. A recent survey by Yale and George Mason Universities reveals that over half of Americans are feeling “disgusted” or “sad” about global warming. A sense of dread about the future, coupled with a sense of powerlessness to do anything to shape it, has led to the rise of solastalgia — a new term to convey the existential angst prompted by the foreseen loss of the world as we know it.

In this climate of frayed nerves and foreclosed futures, Odell, who was until recently a professor of digital art at Stanford University, began to reflect on the meaning of time and work. Odell doesn’t remember the year that students in her art classes at Stanford began to make collages that resembled Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but she recalls of one that it “got darker and bleaker from left to right” and the student’s words: that it was “kind of like . . .  the sunset of humanity.” Some years later, she would see her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which was published in 2019, in a forum for people “heartbroken by climate change and worried about civilization collapse.”