Dead fish washing up on the shores of southern Vietnam.

On Sunday, March 1st of 2015, a friend of mine hanged himself in his dorm at MIT. The year before he died, we had worked together to change Colorado state law. He was soft spoken, but brilliant; while his peers squabbled over politics, he developed policy. With his death, the world lost an invaluable and incredible human being.

My friend, whose name I am intentionally obscuring, is just one of thousands of young people who took their lives that year — victims of a system which accused them of laziness while working them to death. We live in a world where more working millennials are depressed than any generation in recorded history. In 2015, suicide was the third leading cause of death amongst young people.

He deserved better. They deserved better. We deserve better.

While my generation works unpaid internships (aka indentured servitude), sells their blood to the vampiric wealthy as an anti-aging treatment, dies sooner than our parents, is encouraged to work beyond the point of exhaustion, and faces more debt than any other generation in history, we are hated, accused of laziness, and blamed for our own suffering.

Yesterday, Business Insider published an article accusing millennials of killing casual dining. While we face challenge after tragedy after trial, the media reports on our inability to eat out more than a few times a month. It would be humorous if it weren’t so depressing.

To make matters worse, we will inherit a dying world. As I noted in my last article, we will see the world warm more than 3.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels before the end of the century. This warming will displace hundreds of millions of people, and create dozens of regional conflicts, as refugees flee flooding cities and thirsty farmlands. And if our plight was not enough, we will be forced to clean up the 8 million tons of plastic which are dumped in our oceans every year.

A few days ago, a young woman from Vietnam messaged me and asked for my organization’s help ending pollution in her area. Recently thousands of fish washed up dead on shores near her home, all thanks to a chemical factory which places profit over people. She will spend her whole life cleaning up a mess she had no part in making. How can there be justice when any person faces such a fate?

Now, we will defeat these horrors in stride, and fix this world as best we can. I have no doubt in my generation’s ability to unite against and eradicate the evils we have endured. But we won’t do so out of virtue or wisdom — we will save the world out of fear for extinction. And we will pay dearly for salvation.

If we cannot be driven by love or solidarity, then at least let us be motivated by sheer force of rage. We were given a broken world, and now find ourselves slave to it. And as we sell our blood, watch our oceans die, and work ourselves to death to survive, we must not lose sight of this great injustice. For if we are to leave a better world for those who come after, we need more than hope. If we are to preserve liberty, justice, and life, we must demonstrate the audacity of our rage.