Climate Change and the Everyday: Becoming Present to Precarity

Concepts of the everyday typically correlate with the normal and regular, while narratives of climate change are structured by predictions that exceed the normal. Since extreme events of climate change are not assimilable into the everyday, their destabilizing effects heighten destructive feedback loops mediated through fear. Developing psychic and social resilience necessary for re-routing climate change predictions from their direst outcomes thus requires transformed relations to the everyday. After analyzing how a default conception of the everyday hinders existential adaptation, I draw on Jean-Luc Nancy, Alfred North Whitehead, and William James to develop a concept of the everyday that emphasizes precarity, multiplicity, and creativity as better fostering social and psychic resilience amidst destabilization. This different concept of the everyday is necessary for learning how to live meaningful daily lives not predicated on an illusion that all is well or the fantasy that climate change can be resolved through a perpetuation of current norms of the everyday.