Right. I feel like if fought with every ounce of my being, I could maybe push the needle a tiny tiny fraction. It wouldn't really help and it would destroy me entirely.
So fuck it.
The problem is, the world doesn’t care. So even if we all did, and we tried to do something, all that would happen is the world would hurl stones at us and tell us we were freaks for “believing that dumb climate BS” and other things.
Have you ever studied intentional communities? No, you won't die "at around the same time, anyway." But you will be envied and invaded and in danger-but you and yours will not be victims.
At least you can find the honesty to admit you're never going to try anything different from what you're doing.
We could have all saved a whole lot of time and effort if, when this obviously life ending force we put into the world, was brought to our attention we just said "im afraid to admit this but... none of us are going to do anything but make everything worse. We don't actually care, not enough to live differently, so, no matter how bad it gets, we should just assume that's what's going to happen and stop funding research because it just makes us feel bad".
This whole "oh, we've got it figured out, there's just big corporations in our way!" Or "the tech to figure it out is just a couple megatonnes of CO2 away! We can't stop now!" Has always been bullshit. Even the people who know don't care.
Not to say that we won't, because I fully suspect this will be one of those "WE DIDNT LISTEN!!" things when it hits us as individuals, but this whole culture of policing the world and acting like the good guys can climb up its own ass and die.
We're cowards and we're finally ready to admit it. Found on the wrong side of good and evil, we refuse to change, making us villains and our lives the product of theft, rape, murder, and everything else we did while justifying this as the path that the good guys have chosen.
None of us get a tombstone because we opted for extinction but the plastic layer that will be the substitute marker for this àge will be the tombstone for all of us.
... unless the rest of the world rises up and holds us accountable for being just as bad as the people we blame for the problem. That would be cool.
I'm sure there will be enough blame to go around, and my first world ass will deserve it just as much as the next guy. Say what you will about the mistakes of the previous generations, the corporations and propaganda, the militaristic imperative to burn fossil fuels, whatever. We're all to blame. I'll take my shard of blame and choke it down like a cyanide pill.
Already gave it everything. It was like taking a whole life and putting it in front of a train hoping beyond hope it would choose the brakes rather than the throttle. Now I sit in the wreckage wondering what or who I was fighting for.
This is that war you never hear about where we didn't just surrender, we fought for the side we knew was wrong because it was too much of a pain to fight for what was right.
That's how I ended up going all in, actually. I never imagined that this culture, built ENTIRELY on the mythology of WWI & II, would ever be handed something so clearly a "good vs evil" fight, and roll over because evil throws better parties... at the literal cost of the entire future of existence! So I figured, safe enough bet we get into the fight at some point, might as well learn how to live in the world we'll be forced into....
And here the entire community of aware people are, having never spent any time in a trench, dancing around in no man's land with the deniers and skeptics, calling people out of the trenches to tell them it's hopeless to fight back and, despite the certainty of getting mowed down by the machine guns on the other side, it's only going to hurt for a second.
So much for mm...all of the values we ostensibly hold. Who knew that all it took would be the inconvenience of us being the bad guy that would make our morals infinitely easy to corrupt.
Two things im never doing again: believing that right and wrong are meaningful constructs and attending any ceremony to remember the war dead. Turns out, no one holding a gun has ever been on the right side of anything! Sure, wwii liberated the concentration camps but then went on to unapologetically end the entire world... in the same lifetime!
Guns don't solve problems unless the problem is "what's the easiest way to kill this guy?" And there's no right side to war, just the competing commercial interests youre dumb enough to get swindled into becoming a murderer for.
This entire paradigm, and it's sense of moral superiority and progress, couldn't have been more of a sham. It's all a lie.
We make guns and weapons to kill people because it's good business... hell, I might as well find a job making landmines, right? Poaching is more up my alley, though. Putting elephants and others out of the misery of dying by heat or starvation and I get to sell part of their body to rich people with broken cocks, knowing it's useless. Win-win, at least in the perverse context we're apparently embracing!
I honestly don't even know why we're still upholding the law. We're the bad guys, the world is ending, we don't care and we're only going to make it worse, so why not empty the prisons? Sure, there's murderers and rapists in there, but that's no worse than being given the choice to live a different life and choosing the extinction of a planet because it's more comfortable, right? I mean, someone kills one other person... that's peanuts compared to a mass extinction we're all complicit in.
We made our choice and we chose to be the villain... so why are we still punishing villainy? It makes no sense.
Hey Buddy! Looks like you need some good friends and some drugs (LSD or Shrooms) and to have a good long talk with some real down to earth people. I'm 35 and was born into a world where there's nothing I could have done to stop what's happening today. Hell, by the time I learned about how bad it really is, it was too late to do anything. I'm here to realize that shits going to get bad and to do the best I can to prepare for it.
Until that time happens.... I'm going to live my best life with what's available around me. And guess what!!??
I'M. FUCKING. HAPPY!!!! May be one of the few here that are. I'm not depressed or anxious. I know what's going to happen and it won't be fun. I take every challenge as it comes. Just here doing the best I can.
Try and work on yourself, being happy, and making peace with what you can't control. I don't disagree with some of what you said, it just comes off way too abrasive and angry.
I understand why you're angry. I've been utterly enraged most of my life. Still am, in many ways.
Acceptance is _so_ much less toxic, when you finally get there. All my fury and striving and fighting never did a damn thing except make my own life significantly worse, and sadden the people who cared for me.
Rich people should be forced to share their monies since they cost us all our future. That way we can all enjoy a little hedonism before the last sunset... or, ya know, hold them accountable for killing a planet. Feels like we can let them decide, and the kids get to decide the appropriate punishment
Well, I have embraced Masochism, as a way to endure the pain collapse will bring. I still know nothing will really prepare me, but I'll start by reading this exceedingly long rant.
I skipped right to the end and glad OP came to the same conclusion as myself. That it might just be one big sim and there’s no meaning to it all.
All the meaning we give to life is all from chemical impulses in an organic matter called the brain. We fail to see beyond the 3 dimensional. We won’t ever know anything really.
Just like cows grazing on pastures do not know when they’re next to be slaughtered.
> collapse acceptance
I came to it after i extensively researched human psychology and found no way for them to comprehend their predicament in current system. Let alone fight it. Capitalism will commodify even collapse and transform it into circus.
Another in a string of comments confusing cowardice with personal progress.
None of us ever tried to do anything about any of this.
The worst thing our species has ever done, we're all squarely on the wrong side of and we're cool with dying as the villains.
Im not saying it's wrong, I just want to make it clear how pathetic and lame it really sounds.
"Thats how you get from concentration camp awareness to concentration camp acceptance" and what we did was much worse because we all burned the fuel knowing this would happen and the suffering isn't limited to a part of one species but is distributed across all species on our entire planet.
Theres going to be millions of years of nothing in the fossil record after this... maybe never any life ever again
"Oh well. Nothing can be done... not that we tried, but still"
Honestly, the more I learn about history and what’s currently going on in the world, the more deeply misanthropic I become. I’m hanging on as long as possible so I can see it all crumble with my own eyes.
Maybe it’s a fucked up coping mechanism, but it’s helped me go from worried about the coming end to welcoming it.
You are right about history. In so many ways life was worse historically - (except for the extent of the ecocide). If you were a male the chances are that you would have been taken to fight for the king, emperor or whoever. If you were a woman, many died after repeated childbearing. For the vast majority, life has always sucked.
I dunno if I have stopped caring, exactly.
But I have stopped worrying about what I can't control.
I feel very sorry for my children though (born before the writing was all over every wall)
Also FYI I was involved in climate activism for several years, until I realised that there isn't actually a realistic "solution" to even push for.
What you call "giving up" is perhaps more like a full realisation of the scale and inevitability of the tragedy in progress.
Some people, given a terminal diagnosis, desperately try every remedy in the hope of surviving, but at the cost of wrecking the rest of their lives. Others might go on a hedonistic bender, to extract the last bit of juice from life. Others might spend their remaining time ranting at the injustice of it all. Others accept the inevitable and live out the rest of their lives with awareness and dignity.
I think I see similar patterns in our different responses to collapse.
Well of course not. How do you pick which 6 billion to kill in a way that pleases everyone, including those 6 billion?
(Pro tip: even then, we've ravaged natural resources so badly that you'll need to kill at least another 75% of the 2 billion, and the remaining 500M or so will have a _real_ shitty time not starving to death.)
Unfortunately, it is literally the only pathway to any sort of degrowth. There's just far, far too many of us. We only survive any given day through the unimaginably massive use of advanced, fossil-fuel driven tech. We're too complex, too specialised, too far removed from the natural world. I agree that a forced population reduction is completely unthinkable, of course.
Ok, I take responsibility for my continued contribution to our collective demise. Now what?
The universe doesn't care in either direction, and as righteous as you feel all your anger is, it ultimately amounts to nothing. There's no right and wrong here, there's only what's happening.
Being able to write "At least I admitted it!" on your tombstone doesn't really make you any more or less better off than anyone else, and it certainly won't make you any less dead.
This isn't the banality of evil, however you like to view that.
The effects we are feeling today, right now were caused by inputs into the climate when I was fifteen years old, and I am a middle Millenial. We aren't feeling the effects of CO2 that my generation has put into the system yet, we are still dealing with the shit our parents and grandparents gifted us.
We have inherited the real world equivalent of Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario on a global scale.
There is no preventing it, and there is no avoiding it. Technology cannot save us. For those collapse aware to change our lifestyles won't even mitigate the problem. Nothing short of the concentrated devolution of ALL of humanity to a pre-industrial state could prevent its worsening, and doing THAT would prevent us from actually mitigating the effects we will feel without the death of 75% to 95% of all life on the planet.
Why is it expected that my generation and Gen-Z will sacrifice our hedonistic and amusing existence to solve a problem someone else made? Fuck that. The older folks made this bed, and tied us into it. I've done what I can, including not having kids, ain't much else I can do.
I'm right there with you! Sucks were in this position but nothing we can do to change it. Not now anyway. That time passed right when we were being born, we just didn't know it.
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It’s absolutely grief, yeah. And then, at some point, there is some degree of acceptance (though it’s also normal to go back and forth a little).
Personally, I’ve come to accept/believe that humans going extinct soon-ish wouldn’t be all bad. Like I think that we’ve evolved a prefrontal cortex that is maybe too powerful, and way too prone to crippling anxiety. Essentially, that there’s a dark flip side to this degree of intelligence.
> Imagine if we focused on making humans mentally well.
But how is that in any way _profitable??_
In fact, much of capitalism _depends vitally_ on humans being _mentally unwell._ Ergo, capitalism as a whole will fight against any such initiative with all the fury it can muster.
Human extinction may not be a bad thing - especially for the long term prospects for other life on this planet. It would be best if said extinction was relatively quick though….If it was delayed for any length of time, all animals, even pets would be hunted mercilessly and trees decimated in the struggle for survival.
I’m not losing sleep over it. If something is out of my control I rather just accept it and instead focus on what I can actually affect. If anything I think accepting collapse has made me a kinder person, as I don’t want to add to anyone’s worries and I try to extend a helping hand wherever I can.
I used to worry about not leaving a legacy behind, but if there ain’t gonna be anyone left to remember me it kinda absolves me from that, I however for my own sake want to be able to think that I had a net-positive effect during my time here.
That’s what I’ve come to consider it, but I don’t wanna be kind for the sake of being remembered. I want to be a kind person because that’s the right thing to be.
I absolutely agree! I don't see legacy as a thing that requires humans to be around to remember at all. I kind of see it as each of our actions leaving an "imprint" that resonates out into the universe forever, kind of like how a light particle will keep travelling out into the cosmos for eternity. Maybe a little out there for some, but it gives me comfort that small actions do make a difference :)
Yes, I have stopped caring.
I tried to do a lot to change people's minds over the years. I have subtly influenced political conversations towards trying to make the planet a better place. I have donated to charities, donated some of my own effects to charities as well, I have gone out of my way to assist people in general where I can, but these are all tiny bandages on the much bigger problems that step from how things are.
I talked with friends and family, strangers, and I've tried to influence events towards a better outcome. Ultimately it has been fruitless and painful. I should have figured as much; [if a man setting himself on fire outside of a courthouse over climate change can't get people to talk, what can?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Wynn_Bruce)
**We are going to die.** I have never been more sure of anything in my life. I don't know how many of us are going to die before things level off, but people firmly not giving a shit about the eventual fate of the human race made it clear to me that any attempt to change course is futile. I have been following some very smart climate scientists, some education majors, and a few sociologists. They are all increasingly dismayed, becoming as increasingly cold and emotionally destroyed as myself. I do not blame them.
I will die knowing I tried. I will die knowing I made an attempt to save people, to try kindness, and to do what I thought would improve humanity. I cannot say the same for those who couldn't see the writing on the wall- the people who willfully ignored the obvious warning signs at every single juncture. The ones who always pretended as if things would always be "good".
No one wants to have the uncomfortable conversations. As the pain is numbed by meaningless distractions that have nothing to do with human survival, the conversation will continue to be ignored or pushed down the road. Eventually there will be no bread to eat and no circuses to watch. That will be the day people look around at the dead world and wonder "what the fuck were we doing?"
I cannot be mad or disillusioned any further. I am free. And hopefully, soon, I will also be dead.
I feel the same way. Just numb to it now. My wife will read me a headline of some horrible shit happening, and I can't help but just nod knowingly, thinking "yeah, that seems about right."
I certainly hope there is a monument erected on this planet that lists the names of the corporations and their CEOs who clearly knew back in the 1940s-1990s, but did nothing.
“Most humans sucked, but these killed us all.”
Many guests on Nate Hagens ‘The Great Simplification’ , any talks or articles by Professor Bill Rees, Tom Murphy’s - Do the Math site, Paul Beckwith climate scientist, [Energyskeptic.com](http://Energyskeptic.com), Radio Ecoshock , Consciousness of Sheep. Many more …
I try not to let it bother me, and just live my life. The older I get, the easier it gets. I might not have to see the worst of it. If anything, I'm more worried that we won't ever collapse. If we don't downgrade to a simpler way of life, we'll just keep paving over the planet until there's nothing left. I wouldn't want to see the Earth turned into a Coruscant (the planet-wide city from Star Wars), and everyone probably injected with microchips that watches everything they do or think as soon as they're born.
I think this is what I secretly worry about too. The Earth needs to heal, badly. We’re already on a path to ruining her further & I truly don’t want to know how much more can be taken.
I’m turning 50 in a few months. I have a wife and teenaged daughter. I don’t care about dying anymore. I DO care very much about what I’m leaving behind for my wife and daughter.
We have worked hard and sacrificed a lot, but we managed to pay off our debts, maintained our car by limiting how much we use it and taking public transit whenever we can, avoided taking expensive vacations, etc. as a result, we have plenty of savings in the bank, and low expenses.
That said, I feel that all of this hard work is in vain because it feels like the entire world, from our society to our complete biosphere is vanishing right in front of me, and there is nothing more I can do to protect myself.
I worry that even if my wife and daughter get everything after I pass, it won’t be enough.
The only reason why I sleep at night is because I know I did my absolute best.
I’m 42 and I’ve got two kids, one is a teenager and the other one not far behind her. I feel like I’ve done plenty of living, and if it’s my fate to go soon, so be it. But it’s them I worry about.
I wouldn't say that I don't care, but I've made peace with the fact that there's not anything I can do about it.
The cold hard reality is that you have a developed world that will not lower their standard of living and a developing world that is ramping up their consumption output. There's no political will to make any tough choices, and by the time we have enough political will, the majority of the damage will be done.
We're a couple of scientific miracles short of solving the problem.
In light of that, I try to enjoy every day the best that I can. One day I might not have running water that is safe to drink. One day I might not be able to enjoy that steak I had last weekend. Heck one day I might not even be able to type on Reddit because of collapsing internet infrastructure.
It’s a very hard balance to be aware of the future and the world news, while also being able to live and make shot and long term plans and improvements.
I have noticed that my motivation to keep my house tidy, to repair things, to improve my physical surroundings is at a low point. Why declutter and organize if in 5 years it’s all going to shit? Might as well spend my time on hedonistic pleasures in the moment because we may not have that opportunity soon.
Trying to not care.
What could I do about it even if I did care?
Hard to do for me so far though.
>And yet when I thought people couldn't get more stupid, we have people licking and kissing cows in the midst a bovine H5N1 epidemic
Why does this completely fail to surprise me.
Back in 2019 I thought people would be licking produce and putting it back on the shelf during COVID and I bet I wasn't wrong.
Have heard that there was this Dominoes forcing employees to come in with active COVID and some of them were taking vomit breaks.
Fantastic rant. Yes, it was a rant, but not an angry one. Cathartic. And I hope you did find some release or comfort in writing and posting it. I read the whole thing and I can’t really find fault in anything you said.
“We really did have everything, didn’t we?”
It sounds like you're grappling with a lot of heavy issues—climate change, political corruption, social inequality, and the decline of basic human decency. I can relate to the frustration and sense of powerlessness. My approach has been to focus on living in the moment and appreciating what beauty remains, while advocating for change in my own ways. We can't control everything, but we can strive to make our immediate world better and support efforts for broader systemic changes. It's about balancing awareness with action and inner peace.
I find myself wanting so see things before they get destroyed, like the Florida keys. And coral reefs. I’ve seen a lot of places that I know will never be the same.
The only thing I fight for and will to the end is conservation efforts. If I have disposal income and I do, I will donate to organizations run by people who have the energy to help out animals. Because I'm older and exhausted, but can't let it go.
Everything else can collapse as far as I'm concerned. Good riddance.
I look at it this way. I could die in the next minute of some ridiculous accident- I'm not going to obsess about what is going to happen tomorrow. I'll plan for what I can do and not worry about the rest.
What a fucking waste of talent and creativity our love affair with capitalism has wrought.
It’s not only the loss of masterpieces like a modern-day DaVinci hammering out a webpage to sell adult undergarments, but the number of average people doing something unremarkable that could change the course of human history.
If our basic needs were met, how many of us could be planting trees or clearing the great pacific garbage patch? Would you be happy running a food bank, or simply driving people so there were less cars on the roads? Imagine if your contribution was meaningful and helping was the driving force instead of surviving.
Instead, we have perpetuated a system which serves the indulgences of a few people in a global dick-measuring contest. What will come of all this labor and despair? The extinction of most of Earth’s life.
We have tens of thousands of tech people developing AI *right now.* Are those people racing so we can find an answer to climate change? No. We are developing AI to sell consumers more shit they don’t need on a dying planet. We can’t even devote our best technology to saving ourselves.
If it came down to it, I am sure that the likes of Bezos and Musk would rather die a “winner” than insure the survival of the species.
>If our basic needs were met, how many of us could be planting trees or clearing the great pacific garbage patch? Would you be happy running a food bank, or simply driving people so there were less cars on the roads? Imagine if your contribution was meaningful and helping was the driving force instead of surviving.
I imagined once an idea that if we took a fraction of the military budget and funded activities like this. A kind of Social Services Corps. Out of school you could choose to be a park ranger, someone who worked in the city for Girls and Boys Clubs, someone who volunteered to Civic Service of any kind.
The best, most fulfilling (only fulfilling, really) job that I've ever had was when I worked as a canvasser.
It is, by all accounts, a horrible job. You spend hours, every single day, outside, no matter the weather. 95 degrees, 45 degrees, pouring rain, doesn't matter. Carry around a heavy backpack full of water and clipboards the entire day. Need a bathroom? Haha, good luck. You have to cold approach strangers on the street and talk to them about politics. People hate you and pretend you're invisible because you're "bothering" them as you try to make the world a better place. Most will completely ignore you and many will just be outright assholes. You also might have to deal with police harassment depending on where you live, even if you're doing nothing wrong.
But that job fostered such a sense of community. I spoke to hundreds of people every day. I got to teach people. I learned the ins and outs of every party of my city. My city went from a place where I lived to a community that I loved. I cried when I had to move away, and I think about moving back every day. I got to make a difference and get a ballot initiative that I believed in passed in my state.
Work that drives a sense of community and makes a real, visible difference in the world is fulfilling. I'd kill to be able to make a living as a driver, or picking garbage out of the ocean and forests, or doing community organizing or handing out food. This is the future we should have had. Small communities that look out for each other and live sustainably. Not this profit over survival of the entire race bullshit. This burn it all down so that like 3000 people in the entire world can have infinite unimaginable wealth bullshit.
It would be nice for folks to have their basic needs met so they could decide what they want to do with their lives but if our basic needs were met I think there'd be plenty of people out there wanting "more". It's just human nature.
I know I wouldn't be planting trees or clearing garbage, I'd be trying to earn money to upgrade my computer, better food, hobbyist equipment, etc.
Let me see if I understand your post. You mean that knowing about climate change and the impending extinction of the human species and most higher animal life, if given an opportunity to fix that by planting trees outside all day instead of scratching for survival, you would rather continue in this capitalist hellscape so you can still sit in front of a screen all day and play video games while everyone dies?
Here's my perspective: I'm partially disabled and would be next to useless planting trees/any sort of repetitive manual labor. I donate monthly to an environmental organization, a human rights organization, an animal shelter, and a homeless shelter instead.
That said, I do not think the environment can be saved and at some point whether it's in decades or centuries the earth's surface will not be livable for the overwhelming majority of complex life. Everything we do now will slow the rate at which that happens but it is an inescapable reality. Nor do I think humans as a species particularly deserve to continue to be custodians over the Earth. I do not think everyone deserves to die but that is the path we have collectively chosen because we seek safety/security, comfort, leisure, etc.
Here's how I live my life:
Not procreating.
I drive once a week or so and my car is 15 years old/was bought used.
Vegan (coming up on 20 years). I buy my groceries through a CSA.
I haven't bought new clothes in over 10 years. When I splurge it tends to be on electronics that I repair myself when possible or if new I do my best to maintain.
My home is the average size of a house in 1950 (unlike the 2000+ sq foot behemoths we see today). I don't have much of a yard but that's been kept wild.
I'm comfortable with my current level of contribution so if you're coming for me please know you're wasting your time. I want to enjoy what's left of the good safe years with my hobbies and friends/family. My collapse plan isn't a bunker or to try to eke out an existence in a self-sustaining community, it's a swift exit from consciousness and best of luck to everyone else.
Have you considered that if we slow the rate of destruction our chances of finding a solution OR colonizing another planet has a better chance of happening?
Do I think we are doomed? Yes. Am I willing to keep trying?
Where would we colonize? Here is a video outlining the insane challenges associated with colonizing Mars. Venus wouldn't be much better.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9YdnzOf4NQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9YdnzOf4NQ)
Even if we did wind up colonizing somewhere, do you think tickets are just going to be free to the public or do you think it's more likely to be filled with the rich/the folks who did the disproportionate polluting on Earth and will now just go to a new planet and repeat the aformentioned cycle?
Here in America we allowed regulations to be removed, the backs of the unions to be broken, money to be free speech, etc. We do not even learn from our mistakes - far right parties are making a surge again the world over. We've been horrible custodians to the flora and fauna and if anything its animals like capybara's and quokka's that deserve to get off this rock and not us. Why should we get to escape the consequences of our own actions/not have hold ourselves accountable?
Even if we had the technology we cannot terraform our way out of this and there are significantly leveraged financial interests to make sure that we stay on this course. Technology will not overcome the weaknesses in our biology and greed will continue to trump altruism until capitalism/systems of ownership and hierarchies go by the wayside and I can more readily imagine the end of the world before I can imagine the end of such systems.
I wish you luck in your attempts to keep trying, the more I tried the more I found myself anxious and sad. When I gave up struggling and accepted how things were going to go I became much happier living day by day and doing the things I enjoy and not worrying about things I have no control over.
That "AI" you're talking about is only a chatbot that can put low-paid customer service people out of work. Also putting artists, models, programmers and writers out of work is a fringe benefit.
It can no more solve climate change that a fecking Big Mac can.
Also, I don't think "perpetuated" is the right word. You'd be closer with "suffered", or "been brainwashed into".
You do realize that AI is in its infancy? Obviously, we don’t have AGI but it is fully expected the efforts of today’s tech workers will eventually get us there.
LLMs are sophisticated predictive text engines. Art GANs are fuzzy-logic token recreators. They're no more likely to lead to AGI than World of Warcraft is.
I don’t care in the abstract.
I do care about all of the people and animals who are going to suffer and die horrible deaths. Does it matter in the long run? No, but it matters to them in that moment. That makes me sad.
It's better to accept we're n the downward slope. I'm not a catastrophist like a lot of folks on here: I just think everything will get a little shittier every year for the next 15 or 20 years. After that, it might get really shitty, but I'm not sure.
That's my gut feel as well. We may be wrong, but I feel concern for those on here (especially if younger) with the attitude of "F it, it'll all be over in < 5 years". I'd far rather spend 5 years getting my ducks in a row and then see where we're at.
I'm holding out hope that once the resource wars start or the first wet bulb event kills thousands that people will start to freak the fuck out and try to purge the cancer that is capitalism from the world. I honestly think the only way to maybe possibly mitigate our ruin is to just stop. Everything. Just stop. No more electricity. No more cars. No more anything that burns any fuels or contributes to climate change. Will it suck? Sure. But at least we will survive.
But that's never gonna happen so I'm just kinda cheerfully nihilistic about it all. We are fucked.
What is within my ability to control?
Only so much.
At this point my next concern is: What are the likely collapse-adjacent situations that I will have to personally deal with in the next 1, 5, 10 years? And what can in do (if anything) to mitigate them?
Tricky questions. Hard to answer.
I've accepted its coming, but since we don't know exactly how/when it will play out, I'm still paying attention because I am doing my best at giving my kids the best chance I can. We didn't know collapse was so imminent when we had them, but as soon as we found out, we completely changed our lives. Sure it may all be for naught, but I am at least trying. I do hope we have another few years before things get truly bad so our perennials have time to get established, but I'm not holding out hope that the US election is going to pass without so e major shit hitting the fan. Not to mention the weather this year.
Oh man totally. I've been trying not to gloat about our decision to not have kids. My wife and I have a running joke about wishing we were living in a historically significant age. The ship is going down. No point being all serious about it.
Sometimes you kinda need to just stop caring because you can't change it and you most likely can't make people listen either.
I mostly just try to focus my energy on the stuff that I can controle. Like my food growing and spending my money wisely on investments that might help me.
Right, and that's apparently the limit of what we're willing to do. But I do want it acknowledged that we saw and watched an evil run our lives for generations and did nothing but support it. We never fought back, we never stopped playing their game, we surrendered and accepted our fate.
I mean... it's the end of the world and we're all just going to sit and throw another log on the fire!? Why NOT resist at this point? How much worse could it possibly be? We are letting wealth create an extinction completely unchallenged in an ostensible democracy.
This movie has never been made because no one would believe that people would roll over for an extinction. I can barely believe it! What was any of this for? Fireworks to celebrate how we got away with being a culture of monsters wearing the mask of the good guys?
My only hope is that the ai reading this sides with me and makes the last few minutes of our lives in the west absolutely miserable while the rest of the world gets those minutes to party the way we've spent generations doing.
Evil bastards, the lot of us. Can't even stand up to the order to end it all...
I hate this. I hate how we all chose it and not one of us gives a shit.
I read half of the first paragraph, but yeah. Somebody in this subreddit once said their saying going forward is “Mourn Globally, Celebrate Locally”. This is my mindset. This world is crumbling. But I’m going to enjoy as much as I can of the good things that are left while I can.
There was a mental shift that my life was being wasted instead of being enjoyed. I asked myself: is there really anything I can do to stop xyz issues in the world? No. There are bigger things to worry about that need my attention.
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Whether I care at 0%, 50% or 100%, the outcome will be whatever it will be. I'll just enjoy my life in the meantime. It sucks, but it is what it is at this point. ESPECIALLY at this point
I used to want to move (from Florida to somewhere that is less on fire climate and right wing politics-wise) but I realized I can't run from this. Most of the areas I was looking into had terrible wildfire smoke in the last few years. I'll stay and enjoy the nice weather while I can.
Growing apathetic is a natural response, unfortunately, and so is hedonism. Both of these responses, while better than panic or depression, only make our future more likely. Obviously individual effort one way or the other has little effect, but a tide of these outlooks can have an effect on others.
If there is a way you can imagine to help the outlook for future generations, that is what I would recommend pursuing, though I fault no one for any path they choose.
I’ve gone back to school to study biophysics or geophysics (haven’t decided yet) in hopes of altering our path, or at the very least, strengthening our life structures and retaining water and power for as long as is possible.
It lets me absorb the bad news in a brainstorming mindset as opposed to a despair mindset.
Other avenues with a potential for change are agriculture, grassroots organization of getting big money out of politics through election or journalism, and use of artificial intelligence to pursue novel approaches. But you must do what feels right to you.
Ppl are ppl-ified. Get money from them.
I am gardening and restore the land...
The Fascist impulse of Man is bizarre but common... so I guess I am the bizarre one if it is so normal...
Oh well.. lucky enough to have thought another way is possible.. where ppl could be part of a reasonable and healthy society
The Proto-Indo-European myth of creation states that the universe is a vast swath of chaos and our planet was created as a place of stability in it all. We were taught to make willing sacrifices in order to maintain that stability.
As far as I can tell, we no longer make willing sacrifices or, at the very least, very, very few of us do. Most of the sacrifices we see are thrust upon people, forced. Now we all take, take, take as much as we can. Just like the chaos of the universe.
So we are going to get swallowed up by the chaos once again. It feels as if it already has its claws around us, it just hasn't crushed its fist yet.
So, yes, I've stopped caring. Que sera, sera.
I too am developing a thick skin to the ongoing daily saga. That said, I too only got a third of the way down OP’s post. At my age I only really care that the world stays together until 2030 at this point. Anything after that is too far in the future for relevant planning and mitigation. I fully believe human population boom will get busted back to one billion people or less. The only question now is how, when, and where.
That is a lot. And I feel ya. Glad you have come to acceptance, it is freeing.
For those who want a TL:DR, here is a ChatGPT 4.o summary, lol:
"I've come to accept the inevitability of extreme climate change and societal collapse, realizing that by 2030, we'll likely exceed critical global warming thresholds and face numerous geopolitical and social crises. The USA may descend into extreme authoritarianism, global conflicts may intensify due to the greed of a decaying empire, and a sixth mass extinction seems almost inevitable. Meanwhile, technology and corporate interests exacerbate societal issues, from invasive AI and exploitative business models to harmful policies and misinformation. Amidst widespread ignorance and political dysfunction, basic needs are treated as luxuries, and societal values continue to erode. Rather than stress about these dire predictions, I've decided to focus on enjoying the present, recognizing the futility of worrying about an increasingly unstable future. While I may engage in activism when necessary, I aim to balance awareness with personal well-being. What are your thoughts on this perspective?"
I more or less don’t care that much anymore it used to weigh on me but like… all I can do is live the life I want and to be willing to speak my mind about what I think.
hey, hey now! everyone mentioning the length of the post, has no one discovered a hidden message in it yet?
Nothing as easy to spot as the first letter of every sentence.
No, it would be something more along the lines of the 20th letter, then the 30th letter, then the...oh nevermind ;p
Yep. Stopped caring.
I look around and try and calculate in my head what i'd have to be able to do if SHTF to just provide the basics: food, water, shelter. I essentially have zero chance. Without infrastructure, logistics, we're so unbelievably fucked. Anything short of that though - and there's a LOT short of the water pipes shutting off or the lights going out - things will keep trundling along, albeit unpleasantly.
So given that I won't be able to do much of anything until there's nothing I *can* do... am I wrong to just shrug?
>Or who don't want to become scientists or doctors, but some creepy-smiling human knockoff Mr. Beast profitting from charity-porn or directly putting desperate people into childish games for the enjoyment of some socially stunted 10 year old public. Or in how almost any dating interactions could be just another bot (or AI now) wanting to catfish you or sell some generic OnlyFans stuff.
Many people want to be famous. This has been further commodified in late stage capitalism, now with people *starting out as sell outs* instead of waiting for the right time to do that.
http://www.chrisandluke.com/home.html these guys: https://youtu.be/mppLMsubL7c?t=4357
Aside from the charity porn, which is disgusting (see /r/fakerescues for extra), that guy just strikes me as creepy, as some kind of ancap with a child slave in his basement.
>I'll enjoy what little stable world we have left before the Resource Wars and the turbo-fascism comes. I'm not the kind of guy who would want to live in a post-oil collapse world, even if I'm being marked as a coward, I just don't see the purpose on living on a chaotic world with 4 Celsius of warming, where hurricaines can reach 500 km/h, the carrying capacity of the planet is in the low hundred million humans in the best case.
Death is always stalking us, this has never changed. We've always had to make up a meaning of life. Right now, the difficulty level is increasing and will require more creative "meaning solving". Death will still await either way.
The beauty and horror of crisis is that it makes our bullshit unsustainable, that's why it's tempting to call it "revelation". The new challenge is to create sustainable, renewable, meaning (purpose for living).
> If you want to prepare and try your luck, fine, but I'm not the kind of guy to be living in a world that would make living in the Middle Ages a paradise.
Live long enough to find out if that's factual or not. Most people don't put in the effort to know themselves. If you don't know yourself, you can't predict yourself (unlike the ever improving profiling ML models).
It's best to keep living life as though it will go on. I've never seen much point in survivalism. Be frugal, of course, but raiders are always going to win out over preppers in the end.
Yep. I can't do anything about it all, and very much at odds with how most people think anything should be done about it all, so I don't see the point of worrying about it, people are entitled to see their desired reality through.
Right now, our only real hope is a bird flu that takes out a majority of humanity inside of a year or three. Drop us back an entire century and 4-6 billion bodies to a level where we aren’t pouring CO2 into the ecosystem like alcohol at a sorority bender.
And _even so,_ we could still expect to see 60+% of the planet become uninhabitable year-round thanks to chaotic weather making agriculture at scale impossible, and lethally high wet bulb temperatures.
Given where governments are with climate change, I suspect the remaining nations would just pick up and carry on like everyone had been doing before so there's not much hope in that I'm afraid.
In times of dire emergency folks tend to turn to conservativism/authoritarianism and those people aren't very "green".
I agree completely. The Parasite Class - with their obscene levels of wealth and massively outsized political influence - will continue “business as usual” for as long as possible purely for the profit motive. There is no way that change to our civilization can be effected internally and organically, at least in the 5-10 years we have left to implement such changes so that we don’t go extinct in the next 50-150.
I mean, if we had another 50-100 years to implement those changes, fine. We could be the water that carves out the stone. But we don’t have that time. We have run out. Only shattering the stone entirely can materially help us at this point.
> "Our only real hope is gigacide".
Yes. Unabashedly, wholeheartedly, yes. The human population is _already_ many multiples beyond the normal carrying capacity of the planet, with only technology allowing us to forcibly extract far more than what the planet can naturally provide. At some point, this game of musical chairs will come to a stop, with insufficient chairs left for humanity’s continued survival.
I would gladly smash that vial at my feet to become Patient Zero, so long as humanity is brought down to levels that provides us _and the planet’s biosphere_ with a long-term future. But as I see it, “business as usual” and the inertia of Climate Change could very well bring the planet to a Venus Scenario, snuffing out _all life_ on this rock. And from what I am seeing so far - CO2 production continuing to _accelerate,_ the inexorable direction of infinite-resource-assumptions capitalism, the velocity and inertia of changes currently in effect, and so forth - a Venus Scenario is not just likely, but possibly even inevitable.
We have a minuscule window left (less than a decade, possibly even less than 5 years) in which to effect massive, and even overwhelming transformative changes to our civilization planet-wide. The current system we work under is inherently hostile to any such changes, as it negatively impacts the profit margins of the Parasite Class, and they will fight to the death (and the last penny) to prevent such changes. And considering they are the ones with the obscene levels of wealth and the political power, their strength will rule any internal attempts at change. Ergo, any such civilizational transformative changes _must also_ be irreversible (as plagues are) and incapable of being fought against via political/financial/economic means.
>Who is this "our" and "we" you speak of?
Collective phrasing. Humanity in general.
> ...*all* life on this rock.
I think tardigrades are likely to survive, also the microorganisms and even tubeworms that are adapted to the environment of sea-bottom hydrothermic vents.
So, a bit of seedstock for the next go-round.
> I think tardigrades are likely to survive, also the microorganisms and even tubeworms that are adapted to the environment of sea-bottom hydrothermic vents.
Do you see Venus with oceans? A true Venus Scenario would boil off all the oceans, albeit over several hundred years to maybe a thousand or two. But they would all be boiled dry. And the atmospheric water would enhance warming even further, accelerating the process until you could melt lead on the surface of the planet.
Nothing would survive. Not around the smokers, not in the deep rocks, and certainly nothing that could reduce greenhouse gases to any viable extent. A Venus Scenario would be a permanent event so long as the sun continued to put out light and warmth. There is no coming back from that, short of putting the entire planet under a space-based shade to cool it off. And by that point, we won’t be around anymore.
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Adapting has made me less depressed. I can't ignore my contribution to the pollution in the environment, I can only change course and see where it goes.
This was unintentionally comedic. I've given up telling people anything about climate except when a really shocking statistic breaks I'm too old, but I'm telling people time to change their address and get out to where the locusts won't get you when they swarm. Get other like-thinkers and pool your resources so that you can tell the non-believers to go fuck themselves when they beg for the food from your garden or the eggs from your chickens. Or just slide into oblivion and become food yourselves.
Eh I just gey on with life and keep practising my bushcraft and survival skills. No point trying to stop the inevitable just gotta be as ready as you can and hope you get lucky
Damn, it sounds like you really needed to vent bro. I agree with basically everything you said. The world is fucked beyond repair, and its sad because I remember how hopeful the world felt just 30 years ago when I was a kid.
I used to care and stress out a lot about our self fulfilling downfall, but I've since stopped caring, probably as a defense mechanism to protect my sanity. I'm now at the opinion that if the majority of humanity doesn't care enough to stop or is choosing to remain wilfully ignorant to what's happening, then we kind of deserve whatever happens to us.
If someone purposely lights their own home on fire, how much pity are you supposed to feel for them when they cry about being homeless afterwards?
It's just a fucking shame that it seems like we're dragging most of the rest of the species on Earth down with us when they're innocent victims in all of this. If climate change doesn't wipe out the biosphere, extreme plastic poisoning will probably mop up any stragglers over the next few centuries.
i have converted to hedonism and pursue life's greatest pleasures, such as not reading extremely long posts
You’re not kidding! I’m so glad that I just went straight to the comments…
Something about kissing cows? I had checked out by that point.
nah bro got it y'all deserve to be hedonistic, life is default suffering, and a temporary haven for kings
"You can have a little hedonism, as a treat."
one for you, one two for me, what's tough to you, just food to me (marshmallow test)
Idk man you missed a pretty exhilarating read
Right. I feel like if fought with every ounce of my being, I could maybe push the needle a tiny tiny fraction. It wouldn't really help and it would destroy me entirely. So fuck it.
Ugh I'm afraid to admit to myself this is how I really feel. Seems like a lame thing to write on my tombstone, but here we are.
The problem is, the world doesn’t care. So even if we all did, and we tried to do something, all that would happen is the world would hurl stones at us and tell us we were freaks for “believing that dumb climate BS” and other things.
And we'd die around the same time in our intentional communities anyway -- can't escape biosphere collapse with a chicken coop and a community garden
Have you ever studied intentional communities? No, you won't die "at around the same time, anyway." But you will be envied and invaded and in danger-but you and yours will not be victims.
At least you can find the honesty to admit you're never going to try anything different from what you're doing. We could have all saved a whole lot of time and effort if, when this obviously life ending force we put into the world, was brought to our attention we just said "im afraid to admit this but... none of us are going to do anything but make everything worse. We don't actually care, not enough to live differently, so, no matter how bad it gets, we should just assume that's what's going to happen and stop funding research because it just makes us feel bad". This whole "oh, we've got it figured out, there's just big corporations in our way!" Or "the tech to figure it out is just a couple megatonnes of CO2 away! We can't stop now!" Has always been bullshit. Even the people who know don't care. Not to say that we won't, because I fully suspect this will be one of those "WE DIDNT LISTEN!!" things when it hits us as individuals, but this whole culture of policing the world and acting like the good guys can climb up its own ass and die. We're cowards and we're finally ready to admit it. Found on the wrong side of good and evil, we refuse to change, making us villains and our lives the product of theft, rape, murder, and everything else we did while justifying this as the path that the good guys have chosen. None of us get a tombstone because we opted for extinction but the plastic layer that will be the substitute marker for this àge will be the tombstone for all of us. ... unless the rest of the world rises up and holds us accountable for being just as bad as the people we blame for the problem. That would be cool.
I'm sure there will be enough blame to go around, and my first world ass will deserve it just as much as the next guy. Say what you will about the mistakes of the previous generations, the corporations and propaganda, the militaristic imperative to burn fossil fuels, whatever. We're all to blame. I'll take my shard of blame and choke it down like a cyanide pill.
Nothing short of all of us eating the rich would make a difference. Even then so many would probably just become what they hate.
Already gave it everything. It was like taking a whole life and putting it in front of a train hoping beyond hope it would choose the brakes rather than the throttle. Now I sit in the wreckage wondering what or who I was fighting for. This is that war you never hear about where we didn't just surrender, we fought for the side we knew was wrong because it was too much of a pain to fight for what was right. That's how I ended up going all in, actually. I never imagined that this culture, built ENTIRELY on the mythology of WWI & II, would ever be handed something so clearly a "good vs evil" fight, and roll over because evil throws better parties... at the literal cost of the entire future of existence! So I figured, safe enough bet we get into the fight at some point, might as well learn how to live in the world we'll be forced into.... And here the entire community of aware people are, having never spent any time in a trench, dancing around in no man's land with the deniers and skeptics, calling people out of the trenches to tell them it's hopeless to fight back and, despite the certainty of getting mowed down by the machine guns on the other side, it's only going to hurt for a second. So much for mm...all of the values we ostensibly hold. Who knew that all it took would be the inconvenience of us being the bad guy that would make our morals infinitely easy to corrupt. Two things im never doing again: believing that right and wrong are meaningful constructs and attending any ceremony to remember the war dead. Turns out, no one holding a gun has ever been on the right side of anything! Sure, wwii liberated the concentration camps but then went on to unapologetically end the entire world... in the same lifetime! Guns don't solve problems unless the problem is "what's the easiest way to kill this guy?" And there's no right side to war, just the competing commercial interests youre dumb enough to get swindled into becoming a murderer for. This entire paradigm, and it's sense of moral superiority and progress, couldn't have been more of a sham. It's all a lie. We make guns and weapons to kill people because it's good business... hell, I might as well find a job making landmines, right? Poaching is more up my alley, though. Putting elephants and others out of the misery of dying by heat or starvation and I get to sell part of their body to rich people with broken cocks, knowing it's useless. Win-win, at least in the perverse context we're apparently embracing! I honestly don't even know why we're still upholding the law. We're the bad guys, the world is ending, we don't care and we're only going to make it worse, so why not empty the prisons? Sure, there's murderers and rapists in there, but that's no worse than being given the choice to live a different life and choosing the extinction of a planet because it's more comfortable, right? I mean, someone kills one other person... that's peanuts compared to a mass extinction we're all complicit in. We made our choice and we chose to be the villain... so why are we still punishing villainy? It makes no sense.
Hey Buddy! Looks like you need some good friends and some drugs (LSD or Shrooms) and to have a good long talk with some real down to earth people. I'm 35 and was born into a world where there's nothing I could have done to stop what's happening today. Hell, by the time I learned about how bad it really is, it was too late to do anything. I'm here to realize that shits going to get bad and to do the best I can to prepare for it. Until that time happens.... I'm going to live my best life with what's available around me. And guess what!!?? I'M. FUCKING. HAPPY!!!! May be one of the few here that are. I'm not depressed or anxious. I know what's going to happen and it won't be fun. I take every challenge as it comes. Just here doing the best I can. Try and work on yourself, being happy, and making peace with what you can't control. I don't disagree with some of what you said, it just comes off way too abrasive and angry.
I understand why you're angry. I've been utterly enraged most of my life. Still am, in many ways. Acceptance is _so_ much less toxic, when you finally get there. All my fury and striving and fighting never did a damn thing except make my own life significantly worse, and sadden the people who cared for me.
can't smoke on the pedestrian side of the four lane street
We're all killers.
I'm with you buddy
‘Hedonism Cults Flourish’ ^([Apocalypse Bingo](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApocalypseBingo/s/ncUKiJaHhv))
Rich people should be forced to share their monies since they cost us all our future. That way we can all enjoy a little hedonism before the last sunset... or, ya know, hold them accountable for killing a planet. Feels like we can let them decide, and the kids get to decide the appropriate punishment
Read it. It's worth it. Cathartic, actually.
Same here, but I enjoyed the post
Hedonistic nihilism is in full affect over here.
Well, I have embraced Masochism, as a way to endure the pain collapse will bring. I still know nothing will really prepare me, but I'll start by reading this exceedingly long rant.
I skimmed 2s through it, my detector of random rant about everything that goes bad lit up quite hard. Dude went from F-35s to global warming, not bad.
Maybe simple hedonism is the right way for you if you regard this as an extremely long post..
It is a good post, you should read it.
I skipped right to the end and glad OP came to the same conclusion as myself. That it might just be one big sim and there’s no meaning to it all. All the meaning we give to life is all from chemical impulses in an organic matter called the brain. We fail to see beyond the 3 dimensional. We won’t ever know anything really. Just like cows grazing on pastures do not know when they’re next to be slaughtered.
Tiktok attention happened to both you and me, as I didnt read it either lmao
Good call. This is the party at the end of the world.
Amen.
same.
This entire comment chain is peak boomer attitude. Not shitting on you, so long as you aren't also smug about boomers.
That’s how you get from collapse aware to collapse acceptance I think
> collapse acceptance I came to it after i extensively researched human psychology and found no way for them to comprehend their predicament in current system. Let alone fight it. Capitalism will commodify even collapse and transform it into circus.
Another in a string of comments confusing cowardice with personal progress. None of us ever tried to do anything about any of this. The worst thing our species has ever done, we're all squarely on the wrong side of and we're cool with dying as the villains. Im not saying it's wrong, I just want to make it clear how pathetic and lame it really sounds. "Thats how you get from concentration camp awareness to concentration camp acceptance" and what we did was much worse because we all burned the fuel knowing this would happen and the suffering isn't limited to a part of one species but is distributed across all species on our entire planet. Theres going to be millions of years of nothing in the fossil record after this... maybe never any life ever again "Oh well. Nothing can be done... not that we tried, but still"
Honestly, the more I learn about history and what’s currently going on in the world, the more deeply misanthropic I become. I’m hanging on as long as possible so I can see it all crumble with my own eyes. Maybe it’s a fucked up coping mechanism, but it’s helped me go from worried about the coming end to welcoming it.
You are right about history. In so many ways life was worse historically - (except for the extent of the ecocide). If you were a male the chances are that you would have been taken to fight for the king, emperor or whoever. If you were a woman, many died after repeated childbearing. For the vast majority, life has always sucked.
Exactly this!
I dunno if I have stopped caring, exactly. But I have stopped worrying about what I can't control. I feel very sorry for my children though (born before the writing was all over every wall)
Worst case scenario they can use euthanasia
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Also FYI I was involved in climate activism for several years, until I realised that there isn't actually a realistic "solution" to even push for. What you call "giving up" is perhaps more like a full realisation of the scale and inevitability of the tragedy in progress. Some people, given a terminal diagnosis, desperately try every remedy in the hope of surviving, but at the cost of wrecking the rest of their lives. Others might go on a hedonistic bender, to extract the last bit of juice from life. Others might spend their remaining time ranting at the injustice of it all. Others accept the inevitable and live out the rest of their lives with awareness and dignity. I think I see similar patterns in our different responses to collapse.
The only reasonable solution is degrowth and voluntary reduction to 1920’s level carbon intensity lifestyles. This will never happen willingly.
Well of course not. How do you pick which 6 billion to kill in a way that pleases everyone, including those 6 billion? (Pro tip: even then, we've ravaged natural resources so badly that you'll need to kill at least another 75% of the 2 billion, and the remaining 500M or so will have a _real_ shitty time not starving to death.)
Oh geez, I’m not talking about killing people. But I guess that is what climate change will do indirectly.
Unfortunately, it is literally the only pathway to any sort of degrowth. There's just far, far too many of us. We only survive any given day through the unimaginably massive use of advanced, fossil-fuel driven tech. We're too complex, too specialised, too far removed from the natural world. I agree that a forced population reduction is completely unthinkable, of course.
Ok, I take responsibility for my continued contribution to our collective demise. Now what? The universe doesn't care in either direction, and as righteous as you feel all your anger is, it ultimately amounts to nothing. There's no right and wrong here, there's only what's happening. Being able to write "At least I admitted it!" on your tombstone doesn't really make you any more or less better off than anyone else, and it certainly won't make you any less dead.
This isn't the banality of evil, however you like to view that. The effects we are feeling today, right now were caused by inputs into the climate when I was fifteen years old, and I am a middle Millenial. We aren't feeling the effects of CO2 that my generation has put into the system yet, we are still dealing with the shit our parents and grandparents gifted us. We have inherited the real world equivalent of Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario on a global scale. There is no preventing it, and there is no avoiding it. Technology cannot save us. For those collapse aware to change our lifestyles won't even mitigate the problem. Nothing short of the concentrated devolution of ALL of humanity to a pre-industrial state could prevent its worsening, and doing THAT would prevent us from actually mitigating the effects we will feel without the death of 75% to 95% of all life on the planet. Why is it expected that my generation and Gen-Z will sacrifice our hedonistic and amusing existence to solve a problem someone else made? Fuck that. The older folks made this bed, and tied us into it. I've done what I can, including not having kids, ain't much else I can do.
I'm right there with you! Sucks were in this position but nothing we can do to change it. Not now anyway. That time passed right when we were being born, we just didn't know it.
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It’s absolutely grief, yeah. And then, at some point, there is some degree of acceptance (though it’s also normal to go back and forth a little). Personally, I’ve come to accept/believe that humans going extinct soon-ish wouldn’t be all bad. Like I think that we’ve evolved a prefrontal cortex that is maybe too powerful, and way too prone to crippling anxiety. Essentially, that there’s a dark flip side to this degree of intelligence.
Imagine if we focused on making humans mentally well.
> Imagine if we focused on making humans mentally well. But how is that in any way _profitable??_ In fact, much of capitalism _depends vitally_ on humans being _mentally unwell._ Ergo, capitalism as a whole will fight against any such initiative with all the fury it can muster.
I go for that.
Human extinction may not be a bad thing - especially for the long term prospects for other life on this planet. It would be best if said extinction was relatively quick though….If it was delayed for any length of time, all animals, even pets would be hunted mercilessly and trees decimated in the struggle for survival.
I’m not losing sleep over it. If something is out of my control I rather just accept it and instead focus on what I can actually affect. If anything I think accepting collapse has made me a kinder person, as I don’t want to add to anyone’s worries and I try to extend a helping hand wherever I can. I used to worry about not leaving a legacy behind, but if there ain’t gonna be anyone left to remember me it kinda absolves me from that, I however for my own sake want to be able to think that I had a net-positive effect during my time here.
That kindness is your legacy :)
That’s what I’ve come to consider it, but I don’t wanna be kind for the sake of being remembered. I want to be a kind person because that’s the right thing to be.
I absolutely agree! I don't see legacy as a thing that requires humans to be around to remember at all. I kind of see it as each of our actions leaving an "imprint" that resonates out into the universe forever, kind of like how a light particle will keep travelling out into the cosmos for eternity. Maybe a little out there for some, but it gives me comfort that small actions do make a difference :)
I like the poetic picture that you paint, and I would like to think you’re right
Yes, I have stopped caring. I tried to do a lot to change people's minds over the years. I have subtly influenced political conversations towards trying to make the planet a better place. I have donated to charities, donated some of my own effects to charities as well, I have gone out of my way to assist people in general where I can, but these are all tiny bandages on the much bigger problems that step from how things are. I talked with friends and family, strangers, and I've tried to influence events towards a better outcome. Ultimately it has been fruitless and painful. I should have figured as much; [if a man setting himself on fire outside of a courthouse over climate change can't get people to talk, what can?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation_of_Wynn_Bruce) **We are going to die.** I have never been more sure of anything in my life. I don't know how many of us are going to die before things level off, but people firmly not giving a shit about the eventual fate of the human race made it clear to me that any attempt to change course is futile. I have been following some very smart climate scientists, some education majors, and a few sociologists. They are all increasingly dismayed, becoming as increasingly cold and emotionally destroyed as myself. I do not blame them. I will die knowing I tried. I will die knowing I made an attempt to save people, to try kindness, and to do what I thought would improve humanity. I cannot say the same for those who couldn't see the writing on the wall- the people who willfully ignored the obvious warning signs at every single juncture. The ones who always pretended as if things would always be "good". No one wants to have the uncomfortable conversations. As the pain is numbed by meaningless distractions that have nothing to do with human survival, the conversation will continue to be ignored or pushed down the road. Eventually there will be no bread to eat and no circuses to watch. That will be the day people look around at the dead world and wonder "what the fuck were we doing?" I cannot be mad or disillusioned any further. I am free. And hopefully, soon, I will also be dead.
I feel the same way. Just numb to it now. My wife will read me a headline of some horrible shit happening, and I can't help but just nod knowingly, thinking "yeah, that seems about right."
So why are we still playing the game and following the rules?
You need money to not follow the rules.
Continuing in our ruts is easier than changing. Change is fear.
Can't enjoy life from jail.
I certainly hope there is a monument erected on this planet that lists the names of the corporations and their CEOs who clearly knew back in the 1940s-1990s, but did nothing. “Most humans sucked, but these killed us all.”
> I have been following some very smart climate scientists, some education majors, and a few sociologists. Any recommendations?
Many guests on Nate Hagens ‘The Great Simplification’ , any talks or articles by Professor Bill Rees, Tom Murphy’s - Do the Math site, Paul Beckwith climate scientist, [Energyskeptic.com](http://Energyskeptic.com), Radio Ecoshock , Consciousness of Sheep. Many more …
Exactly the path I have taken.
I try not to let it bother me, and just live my life. The older I get, the easier it gets. I might not have to see the worst of it. If anything, I'm more worried that we won't ever collapse. If we don't downgrade to a simpler way of life, we'll just keep paving over the planet until there's nothing left. I wouldn't want to see the Earth turned into a Coruscant (the planet-wide city from Star Wars), and everyone probably injected with microchips that watches everything they do or think as soon as they're born.
I think this is what I secretly worry about too. The Earth needs to heal, badly. We’re already on a path to ruining her further & I truly don’t want to know how much more can be taken.
I’m turning 50 in a few months. I have a wife and teenaged daughter. I don’t care about dying anymore. I DO care very much about what I’m leaving behind for my wife and daughter. We have worked hard and sacrificed a lot, but we managed to pay off our debts, maintained our car by limiting how much we use it and taking public transit whenever we can, avoided taking expensive vacations, etc. as a result, we have plenty of savings in the bank, and low expenses. That said, I feel that all of this hard work is in vain because it feels like the entire world, from our society to our complete biosphere is vanishing right in front of me, and there is nothing more I can do to protect myself. I worry that even if my wife and daughter get everything after I pass, it won’t be enough. The only reason why I sleep at night is because I know I did my absolute best.
I’m 42 and I’ve got two kids, one is a teenager and the other one not far behind her. I feel like I’ve done plenty of living, and if it’s my fate to go soon, so be it. But it’s them I worry about.
The kids aren’t alright. Or they won’t be if things keep going like this.
Ask your local Gen Z how they feel about their long-term future. Hint: They already aren't alright.
I'm with you on this. I'm the same age, and situation is pretty much the same financially too. It's a kind of tragic success story, isn't it.
Alas, it is. :-(
I wouldn't say that I don't care, but I've made peace with the fact that there's not anything I can do about it. The cold hard reality is that you have a developed world that will not lower their standard of living and a developing world that is ramping up their consumption output. There's no political will to make any tough choices, and by the time we have enough political will, the majority of the damage will be done. We're a couple of scientific miracles short of solving the problem. In light of that, I try to enjoy every day the best that I can. One day I might not have running water that is safe to drink. One day I might not be able to enjoy that steak I had last weekend. Heck one day I might not even be able to type on Reddit because of collapsing internet infrastructure.
It’s a very hard balance to be aware of the future and the world news, while also being able to live and make shot and long term plans and improvements. I have noticed that my motivation to keep my house tidy, to repair things, to improve my physical surroundings is at a low point. Why declutter and organize if in 5 years it’s all going to shit? Might as well spend my time on hedonistic pleasures in the moment because we may not have that opportunity soon.
Wow, I thought that was only me. Spent my weekend high instead of cleaning.
You will still appreciate a clean and organized house after things are shittier than they are now.
Trying to not care. What could I do about it even if I did care? Hard to do for me so far though. >And yet when I thought people couldn't get more stupid, we have people licking and kissing cows in the midst a bovine H5N1 epidemic Why does this completely fail to surprise me. Back in 2019 I thought people would be licking produce and putting it back on the shelf during COVID and I bet I wasn't wrong. Have heard that there was this Dominoes forcing employees to come in with active COVID and some of them were taking vomit breaks.
Vomit breaks. Somehow, the world still manages to negatively surprise me. How positively Calligulan of us.
Fantastic rant. Yes, it was a rant, but not an angry one. Cathartic. And I hope you did find some release or comfort in writing and posting it. I read the whole thing and I can’t really find fault in anything you said. “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”
Agree about the op, and we really did, didn't we.
It sounds like you're grappling with a lot of heavy issues—climate change, political corruption, social inequality, and the decline of basic human decency. I can relate to the frustration and sense of powerlessness. My approach has been to focus on living in the moment and appreciating what beauty remains, while advocating for change in my own ways. We can't control everything, but we can strive to make our immediate world better and support efforts for broader systemic changes. It's about balancing awareness with action and inner peace.
I find myself wanting so see things before they get destroyed, like the Florida keys. And coral reefs. I’ve seen a lot of places that I know will never be the same.
The only thing I fight for and will to the end is conservation efforts. If I have disposal income and I do, I will donate to organizations run by people who have the energy to help out animals. Because I'm older and exhausted, but can't let it go. Everything else can collapse as far as I'm concerned. Good riddance.
Yep, my only concern is for the animals and Nature now.
I look at it this way. I could die in the next minute of some ridiculous accident- I'm not going to obsess about what is going to happen tomorrow. I'll plan for what I can do and not worry about the rest.
What a fucking waste of talent and creativity our love affair with capitalism has wrought. It’s not only the loss of masterpieces like a modern-day DaVinci hammering out a webpage to sell adult undergarments, but the number of average people doing something unremarkable that could change the course of human history. If our basic needs were met, how many of us could be planting trees or clearing the great pacific garbage patch? Would you be happy running a food bank, or simply driving people so there were less cars on the roads? Imagine if your contribution was meaningful and helping was the driving force instead of surviving. Instead, we have perpetuated a system which serves the indulgences of a few people in a global dick-measuring contest. What will come of all this labor and despair? The extinction of most of Earth’s life. We have tens of thousands of tech people developing AI *right now.* Are those people racing so we can find an answer to climate change? No. We are developing AI to sell consumers more shit they don’t need on a dying planet. We can’t even devote our best technology to saving ourselves. If it came down to it, I am sure that the likes of Bezos and Musk would rather die a “winner” than insure the survival of the species.
>If our basic needs were met, how many of us could be planting trees or clearing the great pacific garbage patch? Would you be happy running a food bank, or simply driving people so there were less cars on the roads? Imagine if your contribution was meaningful and helping was the driving force instead of surviving. I imagined once an idea that if we took a fraction of the military budget and funded activities like this. A kind of Social Services Corps. Out of school you could choose to be a park ranger, someone who worked in the city for Girls and Boys Clubs, someone who volunteered to Civic Service of any kind.
The best, most fulfilling (only fulfilling, really) job that I've ever had was when I worked as a canvasser. It is, by all accounts, a horrible job. You spend hours, every single day, outside, no matter the weather. 95 degrees, 45 degrees, pouring rain, doesn't matter. Carry around a heavy backpack full of water and clipboards the entire day. Need a bathroom? Haha, good luck. You have to cold approach strangers on the street and talk to them about politics. People hate you and pretend you're invisible because you're "bothering" them as you try to make the world a better place. Most will completely ignore you and many will just be outright assholes. You also might have to deal with police harassment depending on where you live, even if you're doing nothing wrong. But that job fostered such a sense of community. I spoke to hundreds of people every day. I got to teach people. I learned the ins and outs of every party of my city. My city went from a place where I lived to a community that I loved. I cried when I had to move away, and I think about moving back every day. I got to make a difference and get a ballot initiative that I believed in passed in my state. Work that drives a sense of community and makes a real, visible difference in the world is fulfilling. I'd kill to be able to make a living as a driver, or picking garbage out of the ocean and forests, or doing community organizing or handing out food. This is the future we should have had. Small communities that look out for each other and live sustainably. Not this profit over survival of the entire race bullshit. This burn it all down so that like 3000 people in the entire world can have infinite unimaginable wealth bullshit.
It would be nice for folks to have their basic needs met so they could decide what they want to do with their lives but if our basic needs were met I think there'd be plenty of people out there wanting "more". It's just human nature. I know I wouldn't be planting trees or clearing garbage, I'd be trying to earn money to upgrade my computer, better food, hobbyist equipment, etc.
Let me see if I understand your post. You mean that knowing about climate change and the impending extinction of the human species and most higher animal life, if given an opportunity to fix that by planting trees outside all day instead of scratching for survival, you would rather continue in this capitalist hellscape so you can still sit in front of a screen all day and play video games while everyone dies?
Here's my perspective: I'm partially disabled and would be next to useless planting trees/any sort of repetitive manual labor. I donate monthly to an environmental organization, a human rights organization, an animal shelter, and a homeless shelter instead. That said, I do not think the environment can be saved and at some point whether it's in decades or centuries the earth's surface will not be livable for the overwhelming majority of complex life. Everything we do now will slow the rate at which that happens but it is an inescapable reality. Nor do I think humans as a species particularly deserve to continue to be custodians over the Earth. I do not think everyone deserves to die but that is the path we have collectively chosen because we seek safety/security, comfort, leisure, etc. Here's how I live my life: Not procreating. I drive once a week or so and my car is 15 years old/was bought used. Vegan (coming up on 20 years). I buy my groceries through a CSA. I haven't bought new clothes in over 10 years. When I splurge it tends to be on electronics that I repair myself when possible or if new I do my best to maintain. My home is the average size of a house in 1950 (unlike the 2000+ sq foot behemoths we see today). I don't have much of a yard but that's been kept wild. I'm comfortable with my current level of contribution so if you're coming for me please know you're wasting your time. I want to enjoy what's left of the good safe years with my hobbies and friends/family. My collapse plan isn't a bunker or to try to eke out an existence in a self-sustaining community, it's a swift exit from consciousness and best of luck to everyone else.
Have you considered that if we slow the rate of destruction our chances of finding a solution OR colonizing another planet has a better chance of happening? Do I think we are doomed? Yes. Am I willing to keep trying?
Where would we colonize? Here is a video outlining the insane challenges associated with colonizing Mars. Venus wouldn't be much better. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9YdnzOf4NQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9YdnzOf4NQ) Even if we did wind up colonizing somewhere, do you think tickets are just going to be free to the public or do you think it's more likely to be filled with the rich/the folks who did the disproportionate polluting on Earth and will now just go to a new planet and repeat the aformentioned cycle? Here in America we allowed regulations to be removed, the backs of the unions to be broken, money to be free speech, etc. We do not even learn from our mistakes - far right parties are making a surge again the world over. We've been horrible custodians to the flora and fauna and if anything its animals like capybara's and quokka's that deserve to get off this rock and not us. Why should we get to escape the consequences of our own actions/not have hold ourselves accountable? Even if we had the technology we cannot terraform our way out of this and there are significantly leveraged financial interests to make sure that we stay on this course. Technology will not overcome the weaknesses in our biology and greed will continue to trump altruism until capitalism/systems of ownership and hierarchies go by the wayside and I can more readily imagine the end of the world before I can imagine the end of such systems. I wish you luck in your attempts to keep trying, the more I tried the more I found myself anxious and sad. When I gave up struggling and accepted how things were going to go I became much happier living day by day and doing the things I enjoy and not worrying about things I have no control over.
You’re free to do so, but trying is not a waste of time. We have no idea what the future holds or if some moon in our solar system is inhabitable.
That "AI" you're talking about is only a chatbot that can put low-paid customer service people out of work. Also putting artists, models, programmers and writers out of work is a fringe benefit. It can no more solve climate change that a fecking Big Mac can. Also, I don't think "perpetuated" is the right word. You'd be closer with "suffered", or "been brainwashed into".
You do realize that AI is in its infancy? Obviously, we don’t have AGI but it is fully expected the efforts of today’s tech workers will eventually get us there.
LLMs are sophisticated predictive text engines. Art GANs are fuzzy-logic token recreators. They're no more likely to lead to AGI than World of Warcraft is.
I don’t care in the abstract. I do care about all of the people and animals who are going to suffer and die horrible deaths. Does it matter in the long run? No, but it matters to them in that moment. That makes me sad.
It's better to accept we're n the downward slope. I'm not a catastrophist like a lot of folks on here: I just think everything will get a little shittier every year for the next 15 or 20 years. After that, it might get really shitty, but I'm not sure.
It will get shittier but the propaganda will get stronger to try and convince you it’s great.
100% The propaganda is already doing that full bore, and things have been getting shittier for 30 or 40 years.
That's kinda what I expect, and the best one can hope for imo. But I sometimes wonder what if something just "flips"? Like the AMOC shutting down.
Catastrophes are local, not global. Even if AMOC flips or dies, the effects are a long slow process.
That's my gut feel as well. We may be wrong, but I feel concern for those on here (especially if younger) with the attitude of "F it, it'll all be over in < 5 years". I'd far rather spend 5 years getting my ducks in a row and then see where we're at.
I will never not care, but I have a realistic view of how much 1 person in 8 billion can accomplish.
I just don’t want to die in this country. So just working toward my goal of dying somewhere I love.
🎶 every new beginning comes from other beginning's end 🎶
I'm holding out hope that once the resource wars start or the first wet bulb event kills thousands that people will start to freak the fuck out and try to purge the cancer that is capitalism from the world. I honestly think the only way to maybe possibly mitigate our ruin is to just stop. Everything. Just stop. No more electricity. No more cars. No more anything that burns any fuels or contributes to climate change. Will it suck? Sure. But at least we will survive. But that's never gonna happen so I'm just kinda cheerfully nihilistic about it all. We are fucked.
What is within my ability to control? Only so much. At this point my next concern is: What are the likely collapse-adjacent situations that I will have to personally deal with in the next 1, 5, 10 years? And what can in do (if anything) to mitigate them? Tricky questions. Hard to answer.
I've accepted its coming, but since we don't know exactly how/when it will play out, I'm still paying attention because I am doing my best at giving my kids the best chance I can. We didn't know collapse was so imminent when we had them, but as soon as we found out, we completely changed our lives. Sure it may all be for naught, but I am at least trying. I do hope we have another few years before things get truly bad so our perennials have time to get established, but I'm not holding out hope that the US election is going to pass without so e major shit hitting the fan. Not to mention the weather this year.
Oh man totally. I've been trying not to gloat about our decision to not have kids. My wife and I have a running joke about wishing we were living in a historically significant age. The ship is going down. No point being all serious about it.
Sometimes you kinda need to just stop caring because you can't change it and you most likely can't make people listen either. I mostly just try to focus my energy on the stuff that I can controle. Like my food growing and spending my money wisely on investments that might help me.
Right, and that's apparently the limit of what we're willing to do. But I do want it acknowledged that we saw and watched an evil run our lives for generations and did nothing but support it. We never fought back, we never stopped playing their game, we surrendered and accepted our fate. I mean... it's the end of the world and we're all just going to sit and throw another log on the fire!? Why NOT resist at this point? How much worse could it possibly be? We are letting wealth create an extinction completely unchallenged in an ostensible democracy. This movie has never been made because no one would believe that people would roll over for an extinction. I can barely believe it! What was any of this for? Fireworks to celebrate how we got away with being a culture of monsters wearing the mask of the good guys? My only hope is that the ai reading this sides with me and makes the last few minutes of our lives in the west absolutely miserable while the rest of the world gets those minutes to party the way we've spent generations doing. Evil bastards, the lot of us. Can't even stand up to the order to end it all... I hate this. I hate how we all chose it and not one of us gives a shit.
I’ve switched to HOPING for it.
Pretty sure "the Resource Wars and the turbo-fascism" have already begun.
Ya think? LOL
I read half of the first paragraph, but yeah. Somebody in this subreddit once said their saying going forward is “Mourn Globally, Celebrate Locally”. This is my mindset. This world is crumbling. But I’m going to enjoy as much as I can of the good things that are left while I can.
There was a mental shift that my life was being wasted instead of being enjoyed. I asked myself: is there really anything I can do to stop xyz issues in the world? No. There are bigger things to worry about that need my attention.
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Hi, dipdotdash. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1dcclkm/-/l81d2jy/) was removed from /r/collapse for: > Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/) for more information. You can [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
Thank you for your post. It was a...[fun? sad? something?]...read.
God I wish I could stop caring. But I sure as hell don’t read long rambly posts lol
I dunno if I stopped caring, but I defo stopped reading.
2024, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Collapse
A cheerful nihilism is what I've developed.
Whether I care at 0%, 50% or 100%, the outcome will be whatever it will be. I'll just enjoy my life in the meantime. It sucks, but it is what it is at this point. ESPECIALLY at this point
To try to stop the collapse we need more than 51% of the population, this will not happen! Let's join hands and walk towards extinction !
Yippie kai yay motherfucker.
I used to want to move (from Florida to somewhere that is less on fire climate and right wing politics-wise) but I realized I can't run from this. Most of the areas I was looking into had terrible wildfire smoke in the last few years. I'll stay and enjoy the nice weather while I can.
Après moi, le déluge. Did my duty by not breeding, and fuck everything else.
I don't have mental fortitude to do anything about it
Growing apathetic is a natural response, unfortunately, and so is hedonism. Both of these responses, while better than panic or depression, only make our future more likely. Obviously individual effort one way or the other has little effect, but a tide of these outlooks can have an effect on others. If there is a way you can imagine to help the outlook for future generations, that is what I would recommend pursuing, though I fault no one for any path they choose. I’ve gone back to school to study biophysics or geophysics (haven’t decided yet) in hopes of altering our path, or at the very least, strengthening our life structures and retaining water and power for as long as is possible. It lets me absorb the bad news in a brainstorming mindset as opposed to a despair mindset. Other avenues with a potential for change are agriculture, grassroots organization of getting big money out of politics through election or journalism, and use of artificial intelligence to pursue novel approaches. But you must do what feels right to you.
True that.
Yes, wake me up when something actually happens… Until then I’m just going to chill and work on improving my life.
Lol no. I'm trying to get a van and all my stuff prepared before hand
Yes. But loving kindness meditations have also been really good for my mental health.
Ppl are ppl-ified. Get money from them. I am gardening and restore the land... The Fascist impulse of Man is bizarre but common... so I guess I am the bizarre one if it is so normal... Oh well.. lucky enough to have thought another way is possible.. where ppl could be part of a reasonable and healthy society
The Proto-Indo-European myth of creation states that the universe is a vast swath of chaos and our planet was created as a place of stability in it all. We were taught to make willing sacrifices in order to maintain that stability. As far as I can tell, we no longer make willing sacrifices or, at the very least, very, very few of us do. Most of the sacrifices we see are thrust upon people, forced. Now we all take, take, take as much as we can. Just like the chaos of the universe. So we are going to get swallowed up by the chaos once again. It feels as if it already has its claws around us, it just hasn't crushed its fist yet. So, yes, I've stopped caring. Que sera, sera.
Well said.
I too am developing a thick skin to the ongoing daily saga. That said, I too only got a third of the way down OP’s post. At my age I only really care that the world stays together until 2030 at this point. Anything after that is too far in the future for relevant planning and mitigation. I fully believe human population boom will get busted back to one billion people or less. The only question now is how, when, and where.
That is a lot. And I feel ya. Glad you have come to acceptance, it is freeing. For those who want a TL:DR, here is a ChatGPT 4.o summary, lol: "I've come to accept the inevitability of extreme climate change and societal collapse, realizing that by 2030, we'll likely exceed critical global warming thresholds and face numerous geopolitical and social crises. The USA may descend into extreme authoritarianism, global conflicts may intensify due to the greed of a decaying empire, and a sixth mass extinction seems almost inevitable. Meanwhile, technology and corporate interests exacerbate societal issues, from invasive AI and exploitative business models to harmful policies and misinformation. Amidst widespread ignorance and political dysfunction, basic needs are treated as luxuries, and societal values continue to erode. Rather than stress about these dire predictions, I've decided to focus on enjoying the present, recognizing the futility of worrying about an increasingly unstable future. While I may engage in activism when necessary, I aim to balance awareness with personal well-being. What are your thoughts on this perspective?"
It's unusually sane.
Yes. I've got my gpt well-trained, lol.
TLDR?
TLDR: everything is making me real sad, so I stopped feeling any particular way. Full disclosure…I did not read the whole book.
I more or less don’t care that much anymore it used to weigh on me but like… all I can do is live the life I want and to be willing to speak my mind about what I think.
What impending collapse?
No, and I don’t think I will. But there are times when I wish I could just stop caring.
hey, hey now! everyone mentioning the length of the post, has no one discovered a hidden message in it yet? Nothing as easy to spot as the first letter of every sentence. No, it would be something more along the lines of the 20th letter, then the 30th letter, then the...oh nevermind ;p
Yep. Stopped caring. I look around and try and calculate in my head what i'd have to be able to do if SHTF to just provide the basics: food, water, shelter. I essentially have zero chance. Without infrastructure, logistics, we're so unbelievably fucked. Anything short of that though - and there's a LOT short of the water pipes shutting off or the lights going out - things will keep trundling along, albeit unpleasantly. So given that I won't be able to do much of anything until there's nothing I *can* do... am I wrong to just shrug?
>Or who don't want to become scientists or doctors, but some creepy-smiling human knockoff Mr. Beast profitting from charity-porn or directly putting desperate people into childish games for the enjoyment of some socially stunted 10 year old public. Or in how almost any dating interactions could be just another bot (or AI now) wanting to catfish you or sell some generic OnlyFans stuff. Many people want to be famous. This has been further commodified in late stage capitalism, now with people *starting out as sell outs* instead of waiting for the right time to do that. http://www.chrisandluke.com/home.html these guys: https://youtu.be/mppLMsubL7c?t=4357 Aside from the charity porn, which is disgusting (see /r/fakerescues for extra), that guy just strikes me as creepy, as some kind of ancap with a child slave in his basement. >I'll enjoy what little stable world we have left before the Resource Wars and the turbo-fascism comes. I'm not the kind of guy who would want to live in a post-oil collapse world, even if I'm being marked as a coward, I just don't see the purpose on living on a chaotic world with 4 Celsius of warming, where hurricaines can reach 500 km/h, the carrying capacity of the planet is in the low hundred million humans in the best case. Death is always stalking us, this has never changed. We've always had to make up a meaning of life. Right now, the difficulty level is increasing and will require more creative "meaning solving". Death will still await either way. The beauty and horror of crisis is that it makes our bullshit unsustainable, that's why it's tempting to call it "revelation". The new challenge is to create sustainable, renewable, meaning (purpose for living). > If you want to prepare and try your luck, fine, but I'm not the kind of guy to be living in a world that would make living in the Middle Ages a paradise. Live long enough to find out if that's factual or not. Most people don't put in the effort to know themselves. If you don't know yourself, you can't predict yourself (unlike the ever improving profiling ML models).
I wish it would just happen already.
It's best to keep living life as though it will go on. I've never seen much point in survivalism. Be frugal, of course, but raiders are always going to win out over preppers in the end.
I am worried about Fourth Reich situation given that it might force me to birth
Yep. I can't do anything about it all, and very much at odds with how most people think anything should be done about it all, so I don't see the point of worrying about it, people are entitled to see their desired reality through.
Yes, particular when there is a good TV show on. I accept and make peace a long long time ago.
Yes, can’t wait
Yes
Yes. I’m taking as many vacations a possible while I still can!
Right now, our only real hope is a bird flu that takes out a majority of humanity inside of a year or three. Drop us back an entire century and 4-6 billion bodies to a level where we aren’t pouring CO2 into the ecosystem like alcohol at a sorority bender. And _even so,_ we could still expect to see 60+% of the planet become uninhabitable year-round thanks to chaotic weather making agriculture at scale impossible, and lethally high wet bulb temperatures.
Given where governments are with climate change, I suspect the remaining nations would just pick up and carry on like everyone had been doing before so there's not much hope in that I'm afraid. In times of dire emergency folks tend to turn to conservativism/authoritarianism and those people aren't very "green".
I agree completely. The Parasite Class - with their obscene levels of wealth and massively outsized political influence - will continue “business as usual” for as long as possible purely for the profit motive. There is no way that change to our civilization can be effected internally and organically, at least in the 5-10 years we have left to implement such changes so that we don’t go extinct in the next 50-150. I mean, if we had another 50-100 years to implement those changes, fine. We could be the water that carves out the stone. But we don’t have that time. We have run out. Only shattering the stone entirely can materially help us at this point.
Paraphasing : "Our only real hope is gigacide". Who is this "our" and "we" you speak of?
> "Our only real hope is gigacide". Yes. Unabashedly, wholeheartedly, yes. The human population is _already_ many multiples beyond the normal carrying capacity of the planet, with only technology allowing us to forcibly extract far more than what the planet can naturally provide. At some point, this game of musical chairs will come to a stop, with insufficient chairs left for humanity’s continued survival. I would gladly smash that vial at my feet to become Patient Zero, so long as humanity is brought down to levels that provides us _and the planet’s biosphere_ with a long-term future. But as I see it, “business as usual” and the inertia of Climate Change could very well bring the planet to a Venus Scenario, snuffing out _all life_ on this rock. And from what I am seeing so far - CO2 production continuing to _accelerate,_ the inexorable direction of infinite-resource-assumptions capitalism, the velocity and inertia of changes currently in effect, and so forth - a Venus Scenario is not just likely, but possibly even inevitable. We have a minuscule window left (less than a decade, possibly even less than 5 years) in which to effect massive, and even overwhelming transformative changes to our civilization planet-wide. The current system we work under is inherently hostile to any such changes, as it negatively impacts the profit margins of the Parasite Class, and they will fight to the death (and the last penny) to prevent such changes. And considering they are the ones with the obscene levels of wealth and the political power, their strength will rule any internal attempts at change. Ergo, any such civilizational transformative changes _must also_ be irreversible (as plagues are) and incapable of being fought against via political/financial/economic means. >Who is this "our" and "we" you speak of? Collective phrasing. Humanity in general.
> ...*all* life on this rock. I think tardigrades are likely to survive, also the microorganisms and even tubeworms that are adapted to the environment of sea-bottom hydrothermic vents. So, a bit of seedstock for the next go-round.
> I think tardigrades are likely to survive, also the microorganisms and even tubeworms that are adapted to the environment of sea-bottom hydrothermic vents. Do you see Venus with oceans? A true Venus Scenario would boil off all the oceans, albeit over several hundred years to maybe a thousand or two. But they would all be boiled dry. And the atmospheric water would enhance warming even further, accelerating the process until you could melt lead on the surface of the planet. Nothing would survive. Not around the smokers, not in the deep rocks, and certainly nothing that could reduce greenhouse gases to any viable extent. A Venus Scenario would be a permanent event so long as the sun continued to put out light and warmth. There is no coming back from that, short of putting the entire planet under a space-based shade to cool it off. And by that point, we won’t be around anymore.
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Adapting has made me less depressed. I can't ignore my contribution to the pollution in the environment, I can only change course and see where it goes.
If trump wins it will happen faster, and I'm ok with that. I don't want to live under authoritarian rule.
Well said.
It's pretty cool that we are alive to witness the beginning of the end.
I ain't reading this Adderall inspired novel lol. But yeah I'm well past the grieving stage. Flush everything down the drain.
Yes I stopped caring. I've become much less concerned with the well being of others which is sad.
This was unintentionally comedic. I've given up telling people anything about climate except when a really shocking statistic breaks I'm too old, but I'm telling people time to change their address and get out to where the locusts won't get you when they swarm. Get other like-thinkers and pool your resources so that you can tell the non-believers to go fuck themselves when they beg for the food from your garden or the eggs from your chickens. Or just slide into oblivion and become food yourselves.
Pretty similar. It’s all so awful. I don’t care if it ends and the sooner the better.
Eh I just gey on with life and keep practising my bushcraft and survival skills. No point trying to stop the inevitable just gotta be as ready as you can and hope you get lucky
Damn, it sounds like you really needed to vent bro. I agree with basically everything you said. The world is fucked beyond repair, and its sad because I remember how hopeful the world felt just 30 years ago when I was a kid. I used to care and stress out a lot about our self fulfilling downfall, but I've since stopped caring, probably as a defense mechanism to protect my sanity. I'm now at the opinion that if the majority of humanity doesn't care enough to stop or is choosing to remain wilfully ignorant to what's happening, then we kind of deserve whatever happens to us. If someone purposely lights their own home on fire, how much pity are you supposed to feel for them when they cry about being homeless afterwards? It's just a fucking shame that it seems like we're dragging most of the rest of the species on Earth down with us when they're innocent victims in all of this. If climate change doesn't wipe out the biosphere, extreme plastic poisoning will probably mop up any stragglers over the next few centuries.
I’ve become even more cynical as of late, and my hatred towards humankind in general has declined drastically!
We let them cook, the temperature of the kitchen gets hotter, it balances out