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A review by egilmore
Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World by Daniel Sherrell
5.0
It took me a long time to finish this, in part because of the heavy subject, but mostly because I didn’t want to lose Sherrell’s company. This is - without a doubt - one of the best books I’ve ever read. Regardless of which generation you were born into: read it.
Sherrell’s mastery of language and sentence composition is absurd. His ability to articulate the daily toll of existentialism that millennials and Gen Z face is uncanny. This is the toll born of an exhausting tension between responsibility and resignation, necessary optimism and realistic cynicism; the desire to live in the present - to live our lives - with the understanding that thinking about the enormity of the future is morally imperative.
Sherrell acknowledges how the intensity of this toll is inextricably linked to intersectionality and environmental racism, as well as the subjection of both young people and the Global South to flooding debt, political gaslighting, poor healthcare, and the ideological paradox of needing to fight capitalism’s wreckage with a dogged capitalist ethic… effecting activist burnout (in all its energy metaphors) and condemning the geographically oppressed to a longview genocide.
Sherrell is heavy on metaphors, and once or twice I felt tired with them. But then the author pointed out… how else to talk about this? All comparisons will fall short, but it seems ontologically impossible to face the issue any more directly.
As it went on, the epistolary premise sometimes felt a little gimmicky and precious. But then Sherrell addressed that reaction, too… how else to position the Problem in a meaningful way, than through imagined intimacy and radical care (in other words, compassion) for the reader and for the future? How else to do so than to write with emotion? As exhausting as it is, sustaining emotion is critical to sustaining reform.
There aren’t solutions here, but sometimes we focus so much on the scramble for solutions we forget to check in with ourselves. Which is to say: it’s terrible - and it’s much more terrible for people who don’t have the privilege many of us do - but it’s not singular. Let that be a balm to the exhaustion we feel thrashing in the nets of anxiety and depression. As Sherrell reminds us, there are plenty of reasons why it’s still worth the fight, and we cannot fight alone.
Sherrell’s mastery of language and sentence composition is absurd. His ability to articulate the daily toll of existentialism that millennials and Gen Z face is uncanny. This is the toll born of an exhausting tension between responsibility and resignation, necessary optimism and realistic cynicism; the desire to live in the present - to live our lives - with the understanding that thinking about the enormity of the future is morally imperative.
Sherrell acknowledges how the intensity of this toll is inextricably linked to intersectionality and environmental racism, as well as the subjection of both young people and the Global South to flooding debt, political gaslighting, poor healthcare, and the ideological paradox of needing to fight capitalism’s wreckage with a dogged capitalist ethic… effecting activist burnout (in all its energy metaphors) and condemning the geographically oppressed to a longview genocide.
Sherrell is heavy on metaphors, and once or twice I felt tired with them. But then the author pointed out… how else to talk about this? All comparisons will fall short, but it seems ontologically impossible to face the issue any more directly.
As it went on, the epistolary premise sometimes felt a little gimmicky and precious. But then Sherrell addressed that reaction, too… how else to position the Problem in a meaningful way, than through imagined intimacy and radical care (in other words, compassion) for the reader and for the future? How else to do so than to write with emotion? As exhausting as it is, sustaining emotion is critical to sustaining reform.
There aren’t solutions here, but sometimes we focus so much on the scramble for solutions we forget to check in with ourselves. Which is to say: it’s terrible - and it’s much more terrible for people who don’t have the privilege many of us do - but it’s not singular. Let that be a balm to the exhaustion we feel thrashing in the nets of anxiety and depression. As Sherrell reminds us, there are plenty of reasons why it’s still worth the fight, and we cannot fight alone.