He might look like he’s got it made: a vast personal fortune, a beautiful wife, celebrity friends (and easy access to their fleet of private jets), most of his own hair, and free food.
But don’t let these outward trappings of privilege and good fortune fool you into thinking that the private life of Prince Harry conforms with his happy-go-lucky exterior.
Indeed, Prince Harry says he is so crushed by the state of the planet that he sometimes struggles to get out of bed in the morning.
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Harry’s reluctance to rise from the royal scratcher would once have been attributed to his party-loving lifestyle, but these days, with late-night japes in Kensington nightclubs a mere memory, it’s more existential fears that haunt the prince.
He made the surprising revelation in a conversation with 18-year-old South African student Peter Oki, who was a guest at one of the many engagements Harry and Meghan are attending during their tour of Africa.
After speaking to Harry, Oki told a reporter for the Daily Telegraph: “Harry said that he often woke up and felt overwhelmed by too many problems in the world and that sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the mornings because of all the issues, but he wanted to use their platform to enable grass-roots change and to try and create a better society.”
The comments came after Meghan left correspondents scratching their heads when she referred, in an on-camera interview, to a global “consciousness crisis” over mental health.
Harry’s comments drew immediate comparison to the doom-mongering of his father, Prince Charles, who said in July that there were just 18 months left to save the world (so, 16 now).
Harry may well have inherited his eco-depression from his father. Ahead of last week’s global “climate strike,” during which children were encouraged to skip school to protest the response to climate change, researchers warned that children are increasingly suffering anxiety and grief about climate change, and urged parents to discuss the issue with their kids in an age-appropriate way. (So, not “The world will end in 18 months, kids.”)
A spokesperson for the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA), a group of psychologists and researchers said, “There is no doubt that they are being emotionally impacted... That real fear from children needs to be taken seriously by adults.”
Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, the teenage icon of climate-change protest whose disgusted scowl at Donald Trump at the UN went viral this week, told world leaders who had failed to act on climate change that they had “stolen her childhood” and broke down in tears during an emotional address. She said, “People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
