How to Cope with Now
Proxy with Yowei Shaw
Yowei Shaw
4.8 • 589 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An Emotions Beat episode about how to keep caring without falling apart.
Anya Kamenetz was having trouble coping with the state of the world. So she decided to report on those feelings.
In this episode, Yowei talks with Anya about what she's learned from scientists, activists, psychologists, and thinkers about how to live through crises upon crises. Together, they investigate compassion fatigue, psychic numbing, fear, denial, burnout, joy, collective action, and why coping with now doesn't mean looking away — it means moving through the hard feelings to keep taking action.
From the episode:
— Anya Kamenetz — writer of the newsletter The Golden Hour
— We Are the Great Turning — a podcast she produced with eco-spiritual teacher Joanna Macy, about love, courage, and connection in the climate crisis
New to Proxy? Try Bisexual Wife Guy for a classic case, or Nicole Can’t Stop Being Aggro — when the world feels overwhelming and it starts to take over how you feel
For episode liner notes, show gossip, and dispatches from the emotions beat, get our free newsletter File Under Feelings at proxyhq.org.
Proxy is an independent show, supported mostly by listeners. Paid members get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, live Proxy hangs, and the satisfaction of keeping emotional investigative journalism alive 🍏
Follow us on Instagram — @proxypodcast @yoweishaw
Visit — proxypodcast.com
Get in touch — proxythepod@gmail.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered why some trends are just suddenly everywhere? |
| 0:05.1 | Newsflash, nothing gets popular by accident. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Brittany Luce, and on the It's Been a Minute podcast, I take the things you and I are both obsessing over |
| 0:14.3 | and show you the invisible forces behind the scenes that make us love it or hate it. |
| 0:19.8 | Be smarter about what you're consuming. Listen to the |
| 0:22.8 | It's Been a Minute podcast today. Hey everybody. Welcome to Paxi. I'm Yo-Wei Shaw. Today, we are on |
| 0:34.5 | the emotions beat. |
| 0:48.6 | Okay, so the team is busting ass to bring you more proxy conversations this September. |
| 0:58.3 | And so this month, we are putting out a couple episodes featuring reporters who've been addressing issues that are very much on my mind. |
| 1:13.8 | Conversations that have helped me navigate this moment of crises upon crises. Speaking for myself, and I'm sure this is a unique experience, I'm not doing great. I'm having a lot of trouble, |
| 1:19.0 | keeping up with all the bad, and continuing to respond in productive ways. |
| 1:26.3 | Waking up again and again to photos of dead bodies and starving Palestinian kids on Instagram, |
| 1:30.6 | opening the news to yet another attack on trans people, |
| 1:36.4 | immigrants, the poor, the sick, the EPA being gutted, job numbers looking bad. Oh, and what do you know, Trump has now fired the official in charge of those numbers. It feels like my heart can't take |
| 1:42.2 | what's happening. It wants to dissociate with hours of real housewives. |
| 1:47.5 | But then I feel bad about watching Real Housewives. |
| 1:50.7 | Like something is wrong with me. |
| 1:55.3 | But then last month, I came across someone who's made me feel very much not alone. |
| 2:02.6 | Anya Kamenetz is a reporter who's doing really interesting work about exactly this problem. |
| 2:09.7 | And like me, Anya has been having trouble coping with her feelings about the state of the world. |
| 2:16.0 | For her, it started in 2018. First, there were the |
| 2:21.0 | terrible Australian bushfires. And then the intergovernmental panel on climate change came out |
... |
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