What Can You Do When You Feel Stuck... Even as the World Is Burning?

When the challenges facing the world feel enormous, what can any one of us actually do?

Drawing on her debut novel, Eudaimania: Happiness Disease, author Simone Abbot invites us to explore what it means to find agency, belonging and hope in times of social and political uncertainty — and how reconnecting with the people and places around us might help us find a way forward.

Set against the backdrop of Australian political and social events in 2001, Eudaimania follows a political speechwriter who leaves Canberra and returns to her family’s rundown caravan park. Caught between worlds and questioning where she belongs, she gradually begins reconnecting with her body, the natural world and the people around her. Through new relationships, different perspectives and small acts of participation, she begins moving from speaking for somebody else to finding her own voice.

Blending an author talk and readings with interactive conversation, Simone will use the novel as a starting point to explore questions that extend far beyond its pages: How do we respond when we feel overwhelmed or stuck? What happens when we reconnect with our neighbourhoods and communities? And how might small acts of care, participation and community organising help us find a way forward?

Participants will also have an opportunity to connect and reflect together, considering one simple question: what is one step each of us could take to strengthen the communities around us?

Rather than asking any one person to solve the enormous challenges facing our world, this session invites us to consider how change might begin with one small gesture — and what becomes possible when many of us begin taking those steps together.

This session is part of Healthy Humane Habitats Month: Reimagining how we live, together.

Simone Abbot is an author who writes with heart, humour and hope about the people within politics. After spending more than 25 years working within Australia’s Canberra political environment, she now brings her knowledge of political life to fiction while exploring the people, relationships and possibilities that exist beyond conventional measures of progress.

Her debut novel, Eudaimania: Happiness Disease, launched in September 2026 and explores Australian politics, belonging, community, advocacy and what happens when someone who feels stuck begins finding their own path and voice.

Since finishing her political work in 2023, Simone’s own life has taken an unexpected turn towards community participation. She now volunteers with organisations working with refugees, migrants, writers and third spaces. Her work is grounded in the belief that life cannot be reduced to an economic equation, that not everything valuable can be measured through GDP, and that hope can emerge from improbable places.