As we entered 2026 with what little hope we could muster – painfully gathered, perhaps even self-inflicted – we were quickly reminded of our “delulu” fantasies. We were confronted with the hypocrisy we had blindly nurtured: fake ceasefires, the erasure of histories, the massacre of generations fighting to be heard, the silencing, deportation, and murder of entire communities – and we could go on. Then came the final (better say the latest) blow: the revelation of a truth we all knew but loved to deny, hiding behind illusory democratic ideals and false truths – yes, I’m talking about the Epstein files and the disgusting inaction that followed.  

I can only say that I feel heartbroken. But this does not feel like the usual heartbreak.

It lacks that bittersweet quality of romantic heartbreaks that magically remind us we’re alive. This heartbreak marks deeper and broader: it is collective, societal, and political. And grief follows – viciously for some, abruptly for others – dividing us all. 

[While this article was written in the middle of February, the US-Israel war against Iran had not broken out yet. Another unbearable grief to bear for the murder of 150 girl students, and the ones that will follow to support this nonsense.] 

This story presents precarity as a shared condition of life and as a generative ground for collaborative survival among human and nonhuman beings. It approaches survival not as individual achievement but as collective practice shaped by vulnerability, interdependence, and uncertainty. 
Living is always relational and emergent, and it is precisely through indeterminacy and mutual exposure that life evolves and transforms. 
The matsutake mushrooms violently and poetically mirror how life persists and creates new possibilities in our damaged world, challenging narratives of linear progress and offering hope in the darkness of uncertainty.

Drawing on this powerful story, I came to value precarity and vulnerability instead of devaluing them as neoliberal societies usually do. From this perspective, I also learned to appreciate moments of exhaustion, brokenness, and ugliness that constitute our intimate yet collective experiences with a world that is also, by consequence and by its own ontology, exhausted, broken, and ugly. As Gargi Bhattacharyya powerfully states in their book We, the Heartbroken: “I don’t believe we can build a different, better world without being heartbroken.”²  

This article explores darkness through the lens of heartbreak, but also through knowing that “every dream of a new world requires us to understand we have been broken by the old.” ³

Fallen into this darkness, we embrace Bhattacharyya’s revolutionary thought for which “heartbreak is the class consciousness of our times,”⁴ and we turn to designers and artists who have transformed brokenness into empowering acts of collaborative survival. 

¹ TSING, ANNA LOWENHAUPT. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
^{2, 3, 4} BHATTACHARYYA GARGI. We, the Heartbroken. Hajar Press, London, 2023.