Betina Moreira Infante, a local entrepreneur as well as the board president of Aspen Valley Land Trust, led an in-depth conversation with Robin Johnson, the author of “Quantum Feelings, Inc.,” on Friday, Sept. 25 at the Crystal Theatre.
Moreira and Johnson have worked and traveled together periodically over the past 25 years through USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
The book is the first of a series and follows a group of MIT graduates with very different career paths and convictions, who reunite after 15 years apart to tackle the national youth mental health crisis from different angles.
When asked about the reason for choosing teen anxiety and the country’s broken public health system as the backdrop for her book, Johnson expressed that she chose this topic because it is such an underlying issue in our society currently.
“There are so many things that feed into creating the problem of youth anxiety that the solution has to be equally complex and integrative,” she said. “There’s not going to be a silver bullet.”
After working as a journalist and having been on the front lines of human suffering around the world, Johnson told the audience that she chose “to pursue hope and resilience through writing literary speculative fiction — what I call ‘hopepunk’ fiction.”
“Hopepunk uses fiction to build resilience by showing
the reality that things are hard and they take a multi-
generational effort,” she said. “Sometimes [it] is a very tedious process, but the characters in my book choose to take on these challenges from a place of kindness, inclusiveness and cooperation, rather than a lone-hero approach.”
Notably, she added, “The villain of the book is not a human but the bureaucracy, the calcified process of policymaking right now in our country.”
“After USAID was closed by DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency, which officially shut down in July 2026 after an 18-month operation] … I made a conscious decision to choose hope and to find a way to convey hope to people that are certainly feeling anxiety, but also despair,” she continued.
Johnson referred to author Neil Howe and his depiction of the millennial generation in his book, “The Fourth Turning is Here,” as an important inspiration that she draws from, with four millennials being the main characters of her book, who she considers the “solution bringers.”
“Millennials have the characteristics as a generation to lead us out of our current gridlock,” she said. “They bring tech skills; they have a teamwork ethos; and they’re coming of age now.”
Moreira asked the author how people can take action, while overcoming the anxiety depicted in the book.
“How do you inspire environmental action without fueling climate anxiety?” Moreira asked as an example.
“If we just keep talking about how serious the problem is without offering solutions, we’re fueling climate anxiety,” Johnson replied. “And this one is a big component of this growing youth anxiety epidemic in our country.”
Referring to a Forest Service study of the relief from anxiety that nature can bring, Johnson extended her admiration for what Aspen Valley Land Trust has been doing to preserve natural environments, saying, “[That’s] already thinking as a community about the future, and not just about what we need in this [moment].”
Johnson made use of a quote from Terry Tempest Williams: “The challenge [was] to impart large ecological concepts to young burgeoning minds in a language that [wasn’t] polemical, but woven into a compelling story.”
“I want to follow that advice,” Johnson said. “I’ve certainly learned in my work overseas that people take action because they see someone like themselves who has taken that action and then learned from it.”
“I believe that even when things are difficult and the struggle is real, the struggle still gives us meaning, it gives people purpose and meaning,” she continued.
With that, Johnson turned the microphone over to the audience, asking to hear how they managed the balance between the struggle and the purpose.
Answers to this question varied between ages and professions, but local environmental advocate who served for two decades as Carbondale’s Wilderness Workshop executive director, Sloan Shoemaker, put it this way: “… The answer is that action is the antidote to anxiety … Action leads to mental health because you’re able to respond and engage in a way that feels like you’re making a difference, however small it might be … It’s those increments together that amount to a lot … If others are experiencing that [anxiety], then do something, get involved, get active … You don’t have to solve the whole world’s problems at once but you solve what is right in front of you in the ways that you can.”
“Quantum Feelings, Inc.” is available for purchase at White River Books.