The world feels heavy right now. Every day seems to bring more reasons to feel afraid, angry, or powerless, and it can seem like the institutions we once trusted are faltering while basic needs like housing, healthcare, and safety slip further out of reach. In this episode of Human After All, Tanisha Christie, LCSW starts from an honest place: it’s vital to acknowledge that reality, because pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

But naming the darkness isn’t the whole story. Tanisha turns to history to ask what people have always done when the systems around them failed, and what she finds is a throughline of adaptation, imagination, and relationship. Across cultures and generations, communities have survived and thrived not by facing hardship alone, but by forming networks of care and responsibility.

She traces that thread throug ...