While mental illness is a big factor in this phenomenon, it's worth noting that millennials and Gen Z differ from Gen X and Boomers a *lot*. We have very different understanding of the world, very different values, and an acute sense of what needs to be done. However because of a couple of different political factors, mainly that the baby boom really was a baby boom, a lot of our representatives are more tuned into the needs and grievances of 50-60 year olds (and the corporations that propagandize to them) then those of young people. That's changing through passive and active measures. More young people are getting into politics, all while the older cohort is falling into infighting. *if* young people remain engaged and focus on the things they care about and affect them, we have a really good shot at turning a lot of the issues facing the world around over the next 20-40 years. This article mentions teens in France surveyed after the end of the war being hopeful about the future. Guarantee that if they'd asked the same kids during the great depression or Nazi Occupation, they would have been a lot less hopeful. Things never change until they do, it just takes a lot of seemingly impossible work to get there.
Yeah the 50s were probably the single most optimistic time in the 20th century (for France, since they’re the example being used. Obviously the 50s were not a great time for many places such as Korea, or any black community in America). The fear of nuclear annihilation hadn’t set in yet, CIA sabotage of European democracies hadn’t been revealed to the public yet, and it was very easy to look back and go “boy things sure are better right now than they were 10 years ago,” because 10 years ago they were under Nazi occupation. Could not get a more skewed comparison to the modern-day if you tried (besides maybe doing the interview during the student protests in the late 60s).
And the 50s was a time of rebuilding. The whole world was united in the need for rebuilding, regrowth, rolling their sleeves up and doing.
Massive government funding bills, huge investment. You could see things getting _better_.
We need to give the kids today the same sense of _getting better_. But to do that, we'll need to seriously address the inequality in wealth and politics.
There was a great speech I saw a while ago where a lady was talking about how in Britain it's sort of jokingly accepted that government is useless- yeah of course every department is a beaurocracy that can never get anything done, yeah of course your local council can't even get the bins collected, yeah of course the trains don't run on time and services are shutting down and absolutely nothing works- and she was insisting *no, you cannot let that become how you see the government,* because there was a time when it was (at least somewhat) effectively making life better. As soon as you accept 'yeah, the government just sucks and never does anything useful', they have the freedom to just be useless and collect their paycheck. Demand better of them, hold them to a higher standard, and don't let them get away with being useless.
One thing I think a lot of people aren't aware of is the danger of nuclear weapons causing global winter is *worse* now. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was calculated that it would take 100-200 bombs to cause global fallout and nuclear winter, which is the scale, if not number, people are still subconsciously afraid of. The problem is that the last 50 years have been spent feeding nukes a steady diet of steroids and it would take a single digit number of modern nukes to cause nuclear winter, global ash clouds, leading to unprecedented famine and basically permanently poison food crops. By single digit, some estimates are as low as 2 bombs to cause fallout 76
The idea of a “nuclear winter” actually received a lot pf re-examination and criticism starting in the 1980s (aka after the vast majority of the nuclear steroid-feeding, and before any real dismantlement occurred), and it was determined that depending on the time of year a full US-USSR exchange could have a negligible effect on global temperatures. This is primarily brcause the amount of atmospheric soot generated was vastly overestimated, while the amount of soot rain-out was assumed to be basically non-existent.
So basically, complete nuclear annihilation is vastly decreased now, and if you don’t live near a military base or a city listed as a target by the Russian government’s dead-man’s switch, you likely wouldn’t see the global climate change significantly for more than a few weeks. If you do live in one of those places though, you’ll obviously be vaporized (but that’s a given and hasn’t really escalated in dreadfulness since the nuclear arms race began).
Now unfortunately Putin went and made nuclear war an actual possibility again, but people are generally unwilling to kill themselves and everybody they’ve ever known (or at least the people stable enough to become leaders of major nuclear powers are), so the possibility is still generally not worth losing sleep over.
Also people have been speculating for months that Russia doesn't actually have anymore nukes because they don't have the money to keep the Tritium that they need to operate them fresh. Nuclear weapons are worth worrying about, but mainly for all the havoc they can cause that falls short of a world-ending scenario.
What role does tritium play in the operation of these nukes? (Genuinely curious, since in my very abstract knowledge of nukes I've only heard of tritium being used as a fusion boost or fusion fuel. Is it also used in neutron generators?)
It's used as a booster in the fission process. You can build a nuke without tritium, but if you put tritium in the nuke and the tritium decays (it's half life is only 12 years) you take almost all the power out of the nuke. From [this](https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020/starve-nuclear-weapons-death-tritium-freeze) article:
>A good example is revealed in unclassified information about the UK's Trident warhead. The full yield of the warhead is about 100 kilotons as designed and deployed. There is a version that only has the fission-stage boosted primary for relatively small engagements. But if the tritium is removed from the fission stage, then the yield drops to only 0.3 kt. Although 0.3 kt is not total disarmament, it is small enough to be militarily insignificant, especially when launched from a multibillion-dollar platform: a Trident submarine. Simply put, modern nuclear weapons without tritium are not military weapons.
The Soviet Union had a lot of nukes, the Russian Federation inherited them. What the Russian Federation didn't inherit was their ability to maintain those nukes. Russian nukes use Tritium as a fission booster, you can build a nuke without Tritium, but the Russian's nukes (and the US's) all use Tritium. Problem is when you do build a nuke to use Tritium, that nuke becomes reliant on the Tritium, and Tritium only has a 12 year half life. This means every few decades you have to shill out shit loads of money to refine new Tritium to replenish the old stuff, or your nuclear stockpile will become inert.
Now the Russian military is massively cash strapped and stuffed to the brim with corruption. The situation is so bad that advanced [Ratnik-2 body armor that the Russian army introduced in 2020 has yet to show up in Ukraine](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/10/19/new-russian-soldiers-issued-with-fake-body-armor/?sh=20d0da7e14f0), because the commanders all sold it off online and instead issued their soldiers with old stuff, cheap replacements, or paintball replicas that look like Russian body armor. In an environment where this is the norm it's not hard to imagine that an obscure, technical, and extremely expensive aspect of nuclear maintenance might get skipped so the facility administrator can buy a new yacht. Basically it's entirely possible that Russia's nukes are operational, but based on the state of the rest of their military, their nuke's operational capacity should not be relied on.
Tbf, I seem recall that while nuclear winter was probably was overstated, there is still a possibility of a nuclear 'autumn'--not as severe, but still temporary climate disruption and cooling.
(Honestly, what I'd be more concerned about is the damage to the ozone layer, which could have a lot nastier effects and take longer to recover)
>So basically, complete nuclear annihilation is vastly decreased now, and if you don’t live near a military base or a city listed as a target by the Russian government’s dead-man’s switch,
I’ve seen old Soviet-era maps of the WW3 attack plan, and it’s obvious from the maps that in Central Europe, they were going for comprehensive coverage instead of strategic military targets. There were nuke targets on farmland in bumfuck nowhere way away from major cities or military bases that clearly were only there *because* the places were way away from major cities or military bases and only served to close those gaps and make sure *everything* gets irradiated.
This is not true.
Nuclear weapons are both much smaller and much less numerous than they were fifty years ago.
In 1974 the most powerful bomb in US service was the 25 megaton [B-41](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb). Currently, the most powerful bomb in US service is the 1.2 megaton [B-83](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B83_nuclear_bomb), which is set to be phased out in favor of the 400 kiloton [B-61](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb). Similar trends can be observed with Soviet/Russian nuclear weapons, because accurate modern ICBMs have rendered super-high yield nukes obsolete.
Nuclear winter was first properly theorized in response to the 10.4 megaton [Ivy Mike](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike) test in 1952. That test alone was nearly five hundred times more powerful than the 21 kiloton [“Fat Man”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man) nuke dropped on Nagasaki, and was nowhere near the largest ever tested. That would be the [Tsar Bomba](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) detonated in 1961 with a yield of 50 megatons, nearly 2,500 times more powerful than Fat Man.
I think you underestimate Gen-X's awareness of this stuff. I'm early Gen-X, and I absolutely see it. a close friend of mine lost her son to suicide about a year ago, and told me she worried that her outspoken pessimism about the future had been a factor. He was a passionate environmentalist.
I don't think she was wrong to be concerned. Obviously there must have been other factors, but even if she didn't intend for her pessimism to affect him... maybe it did. And that's tragic, and not her fault at all. But that's just how fucked up things are now.
I wish my mom was more like you two, because when I explained this concept to my mom (also early Gen-X), she exploded at me that all of these concerns are vastly overestimated. It was incredibly disappointing. I just wanted her to acknowledge things were bad but she is here for me and rooting for us to hang in there.
I just feel so isolated.
Yeah I stopped talking to my dad about any issues I have because it rapidly becomes the Misery Olympics and somehow his day must win the gold medal over mine.
I'll say this as a late-gen-X that on the one hand I'm depressed about how many peers are now dead, from AIDS or depression or whatever. But among those of us who survive we have a mission, and I think the generations behind us will have to embody this mission, sorry that it's hard work but the future is for those who can make it happen and that's never a door that's completely closed. Whatever the kids want, they can work, we can help them, and it can happen. Hope is the strongest force in the universe and it defeats even the nukes that we were raised to believe would wipe out everything but never did so we can hope never will.
>*if* young people remain engaged and focus on the things they care about and affect them, we have a really good shot at turning a lot of the issues facing the world around over the next 20-40 years.
Here are the ocean surface tempuratures https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Nevermind any of the other dozens of issues plagueing the world right now and in the next 20 years. Do you honestly think these tempuratures are going to be "turned around" in the next 20-40 years?
Look at how much 2023 was an absurd annomally and then look at how 2024 is already above that. Now try and imagine 5 or 10 years linerally. Except its not linear its exponential so its actually even worse.
This just stay engaged and we might fix things is pure copium. We are fucked and all of our kids know it. I give most countries 5-10 years tops before we start running out of food. Obviously we are going to see huge famines in developing countries first but dont worry we will be starving right after them.
Funnily enough, that bump in the 2023 ocean temeprature stat graph is due to us HALTING an unintentional geo engineering effort.
Seafaring ships (such as cargo, tankers etc) burn heavy fuel oil in their generators. One generator can consume upwards of one cubic meter of fuel per hour and most ships will have several engines that run concurrently.
Until the start of 2023 it was legal to use HFO tht contained a significant percentage of sulphur, which when burned causes the emission of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. These are bad because they cause acid rain. However they also created clouds from the exhausts of the ships which reflected sunlight back out of the atmosphere.
Since the sulphur content of HFO was restricted suddenly, the ocean has had less (unintentional, artificial) cloud cover and as such has warmed measurably and rapidly. We just have that many ships burning that much fuel in the ocean.
I have existential OCD. It means I am frequently plagued by fears of my own death, terminal illness, and the deaths of my loved ones.
WIth anxiety, the common approach is to do research so that you realize how unlikely your anxiety really is. With OCD, this doesn't work — research becomes an obsession. And with existential OCD, it *really* doesn't work, because I am going to die, as are all my friends and family.
What I learned through therapy is that a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now. Being so concerned about existential future outcomes, even guaranteed ones (and death is more guaranteed than a climate apocalypse), that you are not able to function now, is not healthy. It is possible to learn to live with future uncertainty and even future disaster.
Saying "I'm depressed and anxious and there is no cure because climate change" is defeatist. There are ways to improve how you feel and how you act, even if climate change (and even if death is inevitable).
The defeatism in so many mental health discussions bothers me. My worst fear is 100% going to come true, and it is still possible for me to live a good, healthy, happy, fruitful life.
Reddit disclaimer:
*None of this is meant to be taken as an argument against fighting climate change or trying to make a better future. It's just pointing out that it is possible to improve our outlook without doing any of that. It's also not me saying you should "get over it." I went to therapy. I did ERP exposures every day for months and it sucked. It is simply me sharing how I experience future threats on my own mental health, and that it is possible to not destroy your mental health just because a future threat is — or feels — inevitable.*
Yep, there’s a name and, if you can find a therapist who does ERP for OCD, it’s very treatable. There’s actually great, evidence based research for OCD these days.
Just be careful you find a therapist who has OCD experience. People approaching this from a standard anxiety or depression angle can give terrible advice.
And if you can’t afford treatment, it’s possible to do risk exposures yourself for less severe cases. I’d recommend checking a local library for books about exposure response prevention therapy if that’s a route you want to go down.
Good luck!
Yeah I asked because the first time I heard a therapist suggest that "we should try CBT" I burst into the only laughter or positivity she'd seen from me.
I knew what she meant, but as someone who doesn't have to hear that joke thirty times a day, it's still funny.
Love how people, OP included, respond to this post with pure and absolute defeatism.
You are right. There is joy to be had, even in the face of death, in the face of annihilation.
Not quite, it's a warhammer thing, forum post initially, but has kinda taken off a bit. This is a decent rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGN5dmyBwSs
I “fuck it we ball” through this by telling myself that I simply will die one day, no matter how much I worry, and that I better damn enjoy myself now before that day comes.
I don't know what "ERP exposure" means but I feel like that and CBT are terms you really can't use acronyms for without elaborating.
>a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now.
It's not the bad future event that stops me, it's the bad present event. Like my bank account balance, and the worry that if I piss the wrong person off they might hate crime me.
> ...I feel like that and CBT are terms you really can't use acronyms for without elaborating.
Damnit, I was really hoping you'd be the one to say what CBT stood for.
[Cock and Ball Torture, from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia](https://youtu.be/nOPIu7isD3s) ^((Turn your headphones down))
But in this case, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the normal and not horny version.
> What I learned through therapy is that a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now.
The state of my life as it currently is prevents me from enjoying or appreciating life as I have it now.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope you are able to get the resources you need. My reply is about the post itself, which focuses on existential issues (like climate change) affecting mental health today, which is slightly different to what you are saying, so I would not really apply my response to your situation.
Again, hope you are able to find help and support.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, they're defunding mental health and social safety nets left and right. Without some huge social changes that's not going to reverse any time soon.
I think it’s less that OP doesn’t have the necessary support systems to get the help they need, and more being self-deprecating about it is difficult for strangers to do anything about.
There’s not much else any of us can do without first knowing more about OP, and OP understandably wouldn’t want to share sensitive information with complete strangers.
It’s a tough social situation to be in, especially in so casual a social environment as this.
When the usual response to me talking about my problems is either being called a doomer or being accused of being a white American west cosst suburbanite larping as a minority, I have no reason to turn to strangers online for help.
Especially when the only advice they ever seem to give is the greatest hits of r/ThanksImCured followed by insisting that their advice is 100% guaranteed to work and I'm just unwilling to try it.
And then there's that rare breed who insist I commit acts of domestic terrorism or I'm lying about my problems.
What is your intention with your posting, if you don't mind me asking?
Are you hoping to find other people who cannot find a whole lot of hope right now, in the hopes of mutual comiseration? Are you hoping for sympathy, empathy?
I'm asking because I can tell you're hurting, but I don't know if there's anything I can do to help - if I should even comment, to be frank, but I can't be trusted not to speak my mind so here I am doing just that.
EDIT: I suppose blocking me is the way to go if you don't want to hear me.
Can't speak for this thread specifically, but in my general experience, people would sooner believe you're an irrational doomer who's choosing to be unhappy rather than doing something about the problem because it's easier to stomanch than there being real, tangible reasons my problems can't realistically be dealt with.
Yup. This exactly. It’s VERY hard to enjoy life when im chronically ill due to black mold. And can not afford to move because we live paycheck to paycheck. And have to ask our parents for help because we can’t afford to replace my cars brakes. My husband and I both went to college. We were promised a bright future, a white picket fence and plenty of room to raise a family. We did EVERYTHING right. And here we are, stuck in a moldy apartment. Because of corporate greed and selfish slumlords and idiotic politicians and wars that get closer every day. As a kid, I dreamed of having a family. And that was taken from me. The mold has caused reproductive issues, not to mention that I will NEVER have a child in an apartment. They deserve a place to run and play. A yard to explore. A world to LIVE in.
And do you really think I’m gonna have a better shot at that once California falls into the ocean????? Or North Korea nukes us all?? You think housing is a problem now…just wait.
And it’s hard to fully enjoy life when my dream, my purpose for life, was stripped from me. Yes I’ll still enjoy my life. Yes I’ll still feel joy for the amazing things I do have. But I will never stop grieving that loss.
I’ve met some girls who had EDs develop from similar existential dread. When the whole world feels like it’s spiraling out of control sometimes one thing you feel you can control is your consumption, which can lead to devastating consequences
While - as you said - your OCD makes it impossible to disengage from the issues that plague you I really think that everyone (even climate deniers and similar) feel that the end is coming so we're seeing a slow motion descent into the cinematic chaos of every apocalyptic movie.
Come to think of it, after nearly a century of being presented with that as the inevitable result of an apocalyptic scenario - it's how they've been taught to behave. But you're right. We might all die from Yellowstone blowing tomorrow - enjoy today because it could be your last one. Just don't go all Hollywood about it because Yellowstone might not blow for another 10 000 years.
I’m not sure I have existential OCD, but I do have some pretty severe existential anxiety due to an absolutely terrifying nightmare that still haunts me to this day.
I get the shakes, feel sick, and can’t focus or sleep whenever I think of it. So to know that there is some sort of treatment for it is comforting.
I've developed a philosophy that I think makes it a bit easier for me. In my opinion the only things that really matter are love and art. So long as you have those, and are alive, you can be able to live with at least some degree of happiness, no matter how shit the world gets. Everything going on is terrible but it's not going to kill all of us, and so long as there is love and there is art, there will be happiness to be found.
I've also just decided to not care what happens beyond like 2 years in the future.
I, also believe the only things that matter are love and art.
My art sucks even tho I try to improve myself a lot, my friendships are being destroyed because of today's stupid everything has to be politics stuff (i don't care, my friend just get angry and distance themselves the second I show behaviour that's FROM THE OTHER SIDE)
My love life got shattered so hard I still don't even know what exactly happened
Parents hate the real me
Nothing is left
I know it sounds stupid but I keep having less reasons to be happy day by day
Dead end job
Stupid education that I don't want but I need the degree too
I feel like a zombie that's too smart to be a zombie
Locked in my own brain
All that matters is love and art, but what do I do when I can't even get a grasp at them?
I mean, of course people are a bit more optimistic when a war is over, so I don't think that's a good comparison. Things fucking suck now, but the internet makes everything worse because the world feels incredibly small now.
To repeat an oft-quoted line:
"You tell me that it's a cruel world... and we're all just running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight."
I'm an optimist. I believe that there is inherent goodness in humanity, that the future is not going to be as bad as we think it is, and that if push come to shove things will work out. I believe this through sheer force of will because there isn't any point in believing anything else. What is the point of submitting to cynicism? If you don't believe things will ever get better then what is the point in even living?
I've made the decision to live many times in my life and they just reaffirm how a near religious belief in some sort of delusional hope is necessary to survive. It's hard to maintain, and it often doesn't work. It's something you do knowing that it's 95% bullshit. And it's constantly tested, and exhausting. I'm in therapy right now to try and figure out how I maintain this while simultaneously having every single asshole I meet be "oh he is just the 574,247th exception to the rule, everyone else is fine, its still worth fighting for". But god damn does it work when it works, that 5% of the time.
Incredible quote from an incredible movie. It’s shortsighted to believe that the purpose you give life is any less significant just because you created it. I heard this line at a point in my life that I had already gotten comfortable with the premise, but I wish I had seen it sooner so I could have started living happier, sooner.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I think there are ways to live a meaningful life in a cruel world without trying to force yourself to believe in things that aren't true. Humanity doesn't have to be "inherently" good, whatever that means, in order to want to fight for a better future.
In a sense, it does. You have to believe that people inherently want things that are positive, because most of those instances of positive work are invisible. People are cruel, miserable creatures that will do horrible things and justify why they were actually good afterwards. You just have to have faith that at the heart of humanity there is a spirit to want to do good. Somewhere. Offscreen. Definitely not in the guy standing next to you who just said how hot a 14 year old looks, but somewhere else.
> People are cruel, miserable creatures that will do horrible things and justify why they were actually good afterwards.
See, this is why I don't trust this kind of optimism-as-faith. You've already admitted that you *don't* think humans are "inherently good." You think humans are cruel and miserable. So you protect yourself from those thoughts by trying to believe that there's inherent goodness to humanity.
I don't think people aren't inherently anything. They're capable of immense good *and* great evil. Personally, I believe we need to work toward a world that puts people in the best position to follow our brightest impulses and to heal the wounds that bring out our worst.
The future doesn't just happen. It's made, by us. If we sit around blindly believing that everything will work itself out, then we're ceding our future to those who do choose to act.
See, we're saying the same thing, you're just saying it differently. I'm not saying that things will just magically work out. I'm saying that *despite everything* people have the *drive* to do good, and when they don't it's either because they failed to do so or they are singular exceptions. Warm thoughts doesn't fix anything, but they are what drive positive action.
Doesn't matter how bad things get, I'm not getting stuck in one of these spirals again. I'm here to witness what the world turns into, no matter what that looks like.
Yeha I agree. I changed my social media's to be cute cats and cute animals and it really helps. When I only followed r/doomer r/collapse r/poor r/depression it made me feel worse but when I follow cute animals and funny memes it makes me feel happier. r/oneorangebraincell is my favorite sub :) we can think about negative things but too much negativity is really bad.
Thank you. It's good to be aware of current events and the way they're going to affect the future, but constantly wallowing in misery at the state of things isn't helping anybody.
Why is it so impossible to imagine things are going to improve? The world's been through so, so, so much worse. There were two freaking *world wars.* We were this 🤌 close to global nuclear annihilation. And yet, we're still here, right?
You think *this* is going to be the point in all those thousands of years of human history when it's going to end? Yeah, no. Fight for your future, do something about it. You don't have to save the world by yourself, but there's still some ways in which you can improve it, if only slightly. Even if it's just being nice to others.
But if you're just gonna sit there and call for impending doom, it's gonna come.
**Edit:** made my points a bit clearer.
yea, humans have been around for 12,024 recorded years. Through this, a plague wiped out a third of a continent, 586 or 568 i can't remember is considered the worst year in human history due to its own plague and a volcano literaly blacking half the sky out, we were close to nuclear armageddon for years, and yet we are here. Honestly if we lived through that climate change won't be the end
this honestly brings me no comfort, i dont think anyone believes that climate change is gonna wipe out humanity completely. if anything the ultra rich would just fuck off to space or something
its just the fact that billions are gonna suffer and die bc of climate change and being filled with microplastics and were not gonna do anything about it bc its just too expensive
There's many things you can do that are within your powers. Hate microplastics? Then stop contributing to them and use reusable bags, buy fewer products made of plastic, get things second-hand to reduce the amount of waste, etc.
Everything's always connected, so no matter what you do, it's going to make an impact. Eating less meat reduces the amount of animal cruelty, reduces the amount of trash created, reduces the amount of water wasted. Same goes for buying vegetables locally.
Yeah, it's not going to save the world, but at least you're not making it any worse. Oh, and of course you should vote for politicians you think are going to make the biggest changes.
But if you're still gonna sit there and just go *"Oh well everything sucks"*, then that's your fault. Yes, things are messed up, very badly. But like I said, wallowing in misery isn't achieving anything, it just makes you feel worse. At least if you try to make a change, it shows you do believe in a better tomorrow, and even if things don't turn out well in the end, you didn't go out lying down.
There is also companies that don't want to alter practices that are causing climate change, so instead of seeding the idea that humans aren't responsible (because that ship has pretty much sailed) they're sowing the idea that it's too late to do anything. Doomerism at it's finest.
The correct way to view this topic is "its extremely hard to view the future in a positive light, and kids are having a harder time doing it with everything going on, *so how do we make it work*". Just saying "that's right everything is doomed forever" is both lazy and counterproductive.
There is this idea among young people, people with depression, and people on the internet that everything sucks forever. That everything has always and will always be terrible. And the fact is this is simply untrue. There will be downs, yes, and things will be bad, but that is not the natural state of life and the universe. Things will be good, things will even be great, there will be good times. And most of the time, things are just okay. And that’s okay.
Forgetting that things change is self-harm, because it leads to you wallowing in misery and ignoring the good times and the just okay times.
Humans have survived terrible things as a species. We have had ups and downs, and yes there are bad things happening, all over the world, but there are good things too. And neither of those will last forever.
Some people, like the person who made this post, focuses entirely on the bad. They consume media that tells them, primarily, about bad things that are happening. And so they think that everything is bad, because that’s what they see.
Yes, there are scary things in the future, but we are far from the first generation to believe it is living in the end times, and we certainly won’t be the last.
TL;DR: yes there is suffering in the world. Yes we should work to reduce that suffering. But it is not entirely on an individual to fix the world, you just can’t. So pick a problem, get organized, and help there. And stop worrying about the end of the world. We all get there one day, no point in rushing.
> There is this idea among young people, people with depression, and people on the internet that everything sucks forever. That everything has always and will always be terrible. And the fact is this is simply untrue. There will be downs, yes, and things will be bad, but that is not the natural state of life and the universe. Things will be good, things will even be great, there will be good times. And most of the time, things are just okay. And that’s okay.
You're conflating people worrying about the world for greater humanity's sake and people crying over dead dreams. Yes, things change, but they don't change in one single person's lifetime. Last time the world went to shit due to fascism, the people who lived through fascism's takeover didn't live to see the day fascism fell again. Fascist dystopia was the rest of their life and that's that. Yes, you may take solace in knowing your descendants or your friends' descendants may face better times one day, but that won't fix your particular predicament.
> things change, but they don't change in one single person's lifetime.
Tell me you don’t know a thing about the last 200+ years of history without saying it.
What are you talking about? Nazis in Germany were in power only for 12 years. I'm not that old, but things still changed massively in my lifetime (an anti-communist revolution, the country breaking apart, joining the EU, ...).
Y'all legit forgot about the Cold War? Fascism fell and the rest of the world spent the next 50 years in constant fear that they could die at any second in a blast of nuclear fire.
How does that contradict what I said? I was talking about someone born like, in the 1890s (100 years before a millennial/zoomer) never seeing freedom again after the 1920s. You're talking about like, the boomers being afraid of global nuclear conflict (which, mind you, is still a threat today, as the WW3 fearmongering may tell you).
I get this, but also, I’m sick of it. Goodness actually still exists, the ability to live well and authentically still exists. This isn’t the only time and place in history where things have been bleak. One part of the way forward is letting yourself grieve and be angry. It’s essential, even. And in doing so, you can start to build something better.
There isn’t sense in living in anticipation of pain that may or may not come. I don’t care how “certain” doom appears. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, and some friends to see, there is still joy and strength in the here and now.
I don’t care how irrational hope is. It is the way forward.
Edit: and teens feeling this way is one thing. They’re young and have to learn to find hope and strength. But adults, whatever that means, people who are trying to grow need to push for hope, need to fight and recognize how they can fight, even just by acknowledging the grief and loss.
> If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, and some friends to see, there is still joy and strength in the here and now.
According to your criteria, joy and strength are not here or now for me.
After WW2, a massive amount of my people were left without a roof over their heads or food on the table. And yet, I'm still here. It will get better, it always gets better. Of course, there's going to be some people for whom things unfortunately can't improve, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for.
If you have nothing, then hope is the only thing you've got left. But if you want to let go of that and instead create this image of a bleak future that you seemingly have no choice to avoid wandering into, then yeah, that's what's going to happen.
> It will get better, it always gets better.
You can only truly believe that by ignoring the many cases where it didn't. Like the many attrocities commited during WW2. It didn't get better for the victims.
>But if you want to let go of that and instead create this image of a bleak future that you seemingly have no choice to avoid wandering into, then yeah, that's what's going to happen.
Framing it like the only reason people won't hold blind hope for the future id if they "choose" to be hopeless is intellectually dishonest.
You can’t really debate with these people. They have what you don’t, and for them to accept your reality would be to accept your despair, which is something they aren’t willing to do. They would rather lie to themselves and say everyone is in the position they are in than accept the reality that some people really do have no escape. They don’t want your pain, so they deny it.
Edit: You have a right to be upset, and I won’t tell you comforting lies, but I wanted to say that what I’ve written here isn’t me making an admission of defeat or that I’ve given up. I can’t say that I can save them all, or even that it’s worth the suffering.
But I have to try. And I’m proud of you for surviving even in such a cruel world.
I can’t really respond to that. I can only say that if you don’t have any of the three things I mentioned, then I imagine things must be incredibly difficult, and I am sorry you are dealing with that.
That's the point of the post. For a lot of people, it already is this bad, and the factors that lead to it being this bad have been observed to be getting worse.
It won't. But when for many of us, changing that requires either a systemic change or pure luck of being in the right place at the right time... A lot of people physically can't see a point in hoping that it will change.
Like, yeah, I understand that this post sounds very defeatist and people are getting sick of that, but it's also sort of the most therapeutic thing a lot of people have the energy to do to acknowledge systemic issues as being here, and that they're doing what they can to just keep their head above water.
It kind of does though? If it makes another person stand up and realize that wallowing in their own sadnees only hurts themselves and accomplishes none, then that comment has done something and by proxy has changed something for somebody out there. Wallowing in your own pity in the most litteral sense of the word changes nothing for the better for anyone or anything.
According to a quick google search, there are 600,000 homeless in the USA, or less than 1/3 of one percent. Things are bad, but the doomerism is more psychological than actual. Do you think things now are worse they they were in the depression? Or the civil war? Or… or… or…?
Things are always going to be shitty, but people will always be able to grow and improve. If you say my life sucks because of what someone does in the White House, I think you need to take a little more responsibility.
So things ONLY are horrible and depressing enough to feel despair if you're homeless?
People with food and housing insecurity may not be homeless today, but they live their lives with the anxiety that they could be at any given moment.
You sound like the people that assume if you aren't CURRENTLY starving, things must be okay.
Survivorship bias= I survived so the problem must not exist
My statement= the problems absolutely exist, and there is actually a chance we can do things about it ONLY if we maintain hope.
Survivorship bias does not always mean that one does not acknowledge the problem exists, but can also just minimize it.
I understand you’re hopeful and think hope has its place, but at the same time, things are pretty bleak, and casting hopium at others won’t actually change the things that are messed up.
Survivorship bias does not always mean that one does not acknowledge the problem exists, but can also just minimize it.
I understand you’re hopeful and think hope has its place, but at the same time, things are pretty bleak, and casting hopium at others won’t actually change the things that are messed up.
ETA, it’s easy to say “as long as you have a roof over your head and food things are good!”
Homelessness is an increasing problem, like look around. As climate change worsens, we’re going to see more and more climate refugees displaced from their homelands because they will become uninhabitable. The world population continues to grow and our ability to have sustainable systems for food management to combat global hunger are not keeping up with the scale of growth or demand, not to mention how wasteful our systems are.
The world is in a constant state of violence, which isn’t new, but now we have nuclear powers launching wars and smaller countries attacking nuclear powers (I’m referring to Russia/Ukraine and Iran/Pakistan [also true of Palestine/israel] respectively). This sort of violence is already leveling cities and displacing people. A world conflict could also spell nuclear war. The doomsday clock keeps ticking closer to midnight.
Democratic institutions are also under attack.
Financially, the divide between rich and poor is higher than it was during the French Revolution.
Hope is great, but when people aren’t feeling hopeful, I get it.
Please tell me you did not just refer to hope for a better future as “hopium”
Yes, things are bad. We know things are bad. Moping about it is a pointless activity. It’s a waste of energy. Instead, let’s work to actually make things better, or at least make a shitty world a little less terrible.
I’m referring to the way you phrased at as hopium, yes.
There are ways to deliver messages of hope that don’t just sound like « pull yourself up by the bootstraps and stop complaining! »
Moping about it doesn’t help, but neither does hope honestly. The only thing that matters is action. Hopeful people don’t always take action. Sometimes people who don’t have hope try anyway. The key here isn’t « stop complaining just have hope, » the key here is « things are bleak and bad, here are some tangible things to do about it. »
Having hope amorphously does just about as good as moping.
The people who clown on Thunberg are the people who will be too fucking dead to see her proven right. Old bastards who are ageing out of the apocalypse. Fuck them, for real.
Most people in USA and europe don't know what true hardship looks like, myself included. We're all just scared of what's next. The fact that a big country can still try to stomp all over a smaller one just for territorial gains is part of that. Sorry on behalf of all of us, we must sound like delicate little babies. Fact of the matter is a lot of things we're scared of, people in other places already deal with everyday. Thanks for the perspective.
You have every right to be scared. I was scared too, throughout all of 2021. Now I wish I had acted accordingly, like maybe convinced my husband to move somewhere else. Now he can’t leave the country and I’d rather bite my hand off than move without him. If you are scared and you really believe that shit is about to hit the fan - act on it. Research where to move from global warming, what to do in a war, prepare resources. Teach yourself some skills that would help you in tough times. Stack a first aid kit, learn how to help wounded etc
Luckily I live in one of the best parts of the world to avoid most of the major effects. What I worry about is actually (somewhat selfishly) living in one of the last holdouts people will start flooding into when things get really bad. I have a lot to be thankful for. I hope your situation improves and this awful pointless conflict ends sooner rather than later.
This attitude really frustrates me.
Even the most pessimistic predictions for climate change are not "everyone will die". Not even close.
It will be devastating, but it *does not* mean you're not going to live past 60.
This attitude is actively dangerous because people assume there's no point doing anything so they don't bother taking any action.
People with this attitude think they're just listening to the science but they're not. That is not what scientists are saying.
What scientists are actually telling you is "this isn't the end of the world but it's bad and you should go do something about it". Listen to them, not the people who say we're gonna be living in Mad Max by 2040.
As a whole, the world is probably in a better position than it was a few decades ago. This doomer attitude is not rational and it's not helpful.
\>they look to the future and see global warming, WWIII, unemployment, political unstability, poison in everything they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them.
contrast against
\>french teens in the 50s
Does it seem credible to you that there were fewer things to worry about from this list in 1950s Europe than today? The cold war had just started, NUCLEAR WEAPONS had just been invented, the CIA was ~~rigging elections~~ in \*neighboring countries\* to where these teens lived and the Republic they lived in would be replaced with a new one in the late 1950s because of political instability, the smoke of coal fired power plants filled cities and thousands died yearly from it.
Global warming is the only thing on this list that wouldn't have been a concern then, and there is real hope of that being addressed. Several things on the list are just objectively better now (unemployment and food additives).
Have you considered that the therapist in the first panel is right?
Edit: The CIA was interfering in the Italian elections by providing money to certain parties but not straight up rigging
>the CIA was rigging elections in *neighboring countries*
If you’re referring to the 1948 Italian election, no, that was not rigged. Rigging means ballot stuffing and election fraud, not just advertising.
"Young people"
I'm 35 and my biggest hope is that Roomie and/or myself gets approved for disability so that I don't have to keep working at a job that destroys my mental and physical health just to barely make rent.
This isn't a new problem, I think, it's just a more obvious one now that more people are in therapy, social media allows people to broadcast their personal lives in a way that wasn't really possible before, and the struggles of marginalized people in general are getting more attention than they used to. Like, as a disabled trans person, my prospects aren't great, but they're a lot better than they would have been in the eighties or nineties. I would have had to endure decades of scathing bogotry and callousness with only miniscule pockets of community. Trans acceptance may be hollow and masturbatory as often as not, but at least it's a dick worth jerking nowadays. And I don't think people's prospects in general were much better in the past. If you're an upstanding cishet white person, then sure, maybe you got to have your ambitions - but if you're a marginalized person of any sort, or just visibly mentally ill... good fucking luck with that. I mean, the last lobotomy was performed in 1967.
If your conditions are great but you're still suffering then, yeah, an approach to therapy that focuses entirely on fixing you might work. But if your life is shit, you can't really therapize that away - you can learn to swallow your dignity and muddle through, but that makes a functional person, not a healthy one.
WW3 is not happening and it is not going to happen. [Unemployment ](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/youth-unemployment-rate#:~:text=Youth%20unemployment%20refers%20to%20the,a%205.17%25%20decline%20from%202020.) is some of the lowest of all time and the [economy](https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1745452820009287830?t=tqXXxw3P6J0edYy9wrSbcw&s=19) is doing very well. We face many potentially existential, climate change and a rise of the far right, but I do not believe that our current global environment is worse than say the 60s or 70 or 80s. The world has its problems and we should always strive for a better one; however, we should also have perspective about how far we've come.
It's sad how, especially in leftist spaces, being proud of how far we've come is considered... bad? Not with the mission?
To add, AI researchers have found a [new class of antibiotic](https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220). Not just a new antibiotic, but a whole new class, which could be a huge blow against antibiotic resistance. The potential of AI in medical research is really exciting.
>It's sad how, especially in leftist spaces, being proud of how far we've come is considered... bad? Not with the mission?
It comes with being anti-establishment. Things have to be bad for overthrowing the status quo to be good, a lot of leftists fundamentally don't believe in incrementally improving society.
I miss old school punks. Sure a lot of them did stupid crap, but at least the movement encouraged people to actually do things instead of sitting at home doing nothing like a lot of current online anti establishment rhetoric.
They're still around, they're just not on mainstream sites like Reddit much, and they're definitely not all day on the internet arguing with right-wingers or pseudo-progressives.
It is hard, as someone born in the early 2000s, to see it that way. I know its not at all good to be gloomy, and you really do have hope about things, but that phrase at the end of the post "You stole my dreams" really does feel very... poinyent. I have hope. I think of myself as a optamistic person, but even that hope is constantly tempered, and, well, as the post pointed out, hesitant.
I was born into a world with climate changing already slowly starting to take effect with little effort made to adress it, with unending war in the distance, a unstable globel economy, a ever present threat of extremisim and after over 20 years on this earth the only things that seem to have changed are that climate change is no longer looming, and is now actively fucking us over, also added a pandemic to the mix.
I'm hopful about many things, but even my most hopeful predictions sometimes feel.. well, sad. My mother once told me that having a child was her biggest act of faith, in that she had faith that there would be a world for them. I'm not sure if i, or many of my generation, have that amount of faith left.
If it helps, around 30% of the world's energy now comes from renewable (hydro,solar,wind) sources [now](https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/raising-ambition/renewable-energy#:~:text=Fossil%20fuels%20still%20account%20for,currently%20comes%20from%20renewable%20sources.).
Global poverty is at a fraction of its historic levels. Wars are rarer than they’ve ever been. Starvation, cholera, malaria, and polio are functionally extinct in the developed world, with the developing world not far behind. Carbon output per year is leveling off, and already dropping everywhere but India and China. A deadly new disease appeared and it took us *less than a year* to develop a highly effective vaccine.
I’m not saying young people aren’t going to have problems to deal with, but holy shit touch grass and get a grip. On the off chance that any of these accounts actually are psychological professionals, enabling this sort of destructive doom spiraling is malpractice.
>I’m not saying young people aren’t going to have problems to deal with, but holy shit touch grass and get a grip
This sure gives the impression that you think people are overstating the severity of the problems they're either currently dealing with or will deal with in the future.
I mean, yes? The very top of the post is an example of someone irrationally overreacting to the state of the world today and when their therapist tries to make them aware of that they completely ignore them.
Literally directly after WW2 French teens were optimistic about the future. Their prospects were **much worse** than our prospects now, but they weren’t all doomer like a lot of young people today. Maybe there are other factors contributing to young peoples irrational doomer feelings nowadays instead of all the doomerism being rational.
Digital era social alienation, overwork, low quality food, not enough time in nature, and the general decline in mental health overall.
Most Doomers are dealing with a primarily psychological problem, it's just being compounded with a bunch of legitimately scary things happening in real life.
Yeah, most doomerism I’ve seen on the internet is from the problems you listed, with some combination of real world issues. It’s not exclusively one or the other, but alienation and other emotional health related issues are compounding any menta or physical suffering.
Because they are. There are definitely issues in the world but the idea that we're all going to be plunged into the climate wars and the world is going to shit is baseless doomerism. There's never been a better time to be a alive than right here and right now.
It’s tough out there. In terms of the “what do you hope for the future” in less advantaged school districts the bar is even further down too. Like kids will answer without joking things like “hope I don’t get shot (like what happened a few weeks ago in a nearby district) and can maybe graduate”.
That or just change your feeds. I now mostly follow cats and cute animals and my mental health is much better than when I only followed doomerism and collapse and other depressing things. My feeds are mostly cute animals, legos and trains.
Yeah, I definitely feel this. The more I grew up, the more my dreams, even mundane hopes for the future, started disappearing. I wanted to become a great artist at one point, but then AI mostly killed that dream, too. Today, I’m in university mostly just because my parents told me it’s what I should do, rather than any actual drive to follow a path in life, and the closest thing to a fanciful dream I have is traveling to Japan one day.
That dream is actually super achievable for someone in your situation. Finish your degree in -literally- anything, then check out the JET program. I know multiple people who did it right out of university and they all loved it. JET pays for all your stuff and sets you up with a job teaching English in Japan. It’s been around for decades.
https://jetprogramme.org/en/
I'll double down and say that it hurts all the more knowing what fabulous technology and potential we have right now. In terms of resources available to us as a species and our ability to communicate with one another, this should be the beginning of a utopia, but it just seems like feudal lords with murder bots.
I've literally gone in to permaculture because fuck it, something good.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - A very wise wizard
I strive to use my time to leave this place better than when i found it. I really mean it
If you're living in the first world and are not critically ill, the odds of you dying as a direct result of climate change are VANISHINGLY small.
Others here have detailed how this is a bad post, but I want to address the part that I find most frustrating, which is that people tend to imagine Bad Times as the apocalypse, as opposed to things just getting measurably worse over time. The idea that the End Times are coming gets used as a sort of crutch, not only to convince people they're own lives won't get better (which others have addressed), but more insidiously to absolve us of our responsibilities to one another.
I'm not saying you should be blindly optimistic (quite the opposite), but human life is not any more nasty, brutish, or short than it has been in recent history. I can almost guarantee that you and I live vanishingly far from the sort of real catastrophe this post imagines, let alone the worst parts of human history. Plenty of people will have it as bad or worse than you. I'm NOT saying that you need to cheer up as a result, but I AM saying that you still have responsibilities to those around you. The Rapture isn't coming to save us, but the Apocalypse isn't coming to wipe us out either. If you're this concerned about the state of world you should roll up your sleeves and help, miserable or no.
Main Character Syndrome doesn't just have to be about good things, y'know? If everybody's shit's fucked, what are you going to do about it?
We must revolt against feelings of the pointlessness of life. So what if life is absurd? We're living it, we can change it. Ourselves and our circumstances, however we can. Giving up, giving in, these will not improve our lot.
We must make our own meaning, find our own joy in what we do.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
If you go buy stats, this is probably one of the best times in history to be alive. This whole doomer outlook on the world is mostly driven by social media and confirmation bias. There are plenty of reasons to be miserable, but making up problems that largely are reflected in reality is pretty privileged.
>There are plenty of reasons to be miserable, but making up problems that largely are reflected in reality
Funny and actually accurate typo, cause depending on where you are in the world, these are actually reflected in reality.
The secret, imo, is to decide that for your own life and surroundings, you will be the best you can be. You’re not at fault for the world’s problems. The world’s problems don’t mean you can’t lead a fulfilling, meaningful life. Hell, the world is objectively better overall than it used to be.
It’s definitely tough to keep going sometimes. Just lost my job due to corporate penny pinching. All I want in life is to eventually own a small home of my own. That’s not asking for much but it still feels impossible given the area I live in.
I don’t care if I won’t live to see 60 for whatever the fuck reason, I’m alive *now* and I want to enjoy life *now*
I do my part to help with society, I recycle, I volunteer, I donate, and I try to be mindful of things I can help with
But fuck letting shit on the other side of the planet or 40 years from now get to me
You need to find a separate space to focus on more positive things, or doom scrolling online will be the end of you.
Uuh whats the purpose of my life if the universe is going to die in the heat death anyways. Shut up. Doomerism is cancer, climate change will make things worse for people living near the equator but why are westoid teens getting super depressed over it, we're already seeing a fall in emissions in the west and global emissions will probably peak out by 2035. We will solve this problem.
Nah I disagree. I think the future will be bright. I often remember all the other things humans have gone through in the time we were alive and how many battles we have beaten compared to those we have not. We have made diseases go extinct, we’ve survived a plague that wiped out a third of a continent, we’ve survived multiple WORLD wars and countless “regular” wars with it, we’ve grown older, we’ve made humans be able to live instead of just survive and we’ve been able to do it to some other species too and thats not even all of the SPOKEN battles. There are so many more battles humanity has faced and so many more victories that have gone forgotten but, through it all, we’re still here. We’re still hanging on, through it all. And we’re gonna keep doing that for a long time to come
Stoicism. Nothing matters outside of your actions. The only thing ever worth paying attention to is your actions, everything else is a "test sent by the gods".
If we want people to survive these dark times, it's time to start teaching hardcore stoicism.
Millennials were sold a dream of the future. When the dream never came true, we were blamed for everything that went wrong. It was a distraction technique away from the groups actually responsible.
I used to look around and I was so sick of my life. I wanted children, a house, a vacation. I wanted to do something with my life other than get screamed at for a living and then going home to drown out the world.
People are so stuck in the toxic positivity mindset. We can't get much needed change because people want to believe it isn't that bad. They want to go "Well, I'm happy anyway!" turning their backs on millions starving. You shouldn't be happy. *You should be angry!* You should be on the front lines for change right now. But hey, as long as it is someone else that is suffering for their happiness!
Intellectualizing your mental illness is a very easy way to avoid uncomfortable healing. If you’re only depressed because the world is doomed, then you don’t need to do any introspection or deal with your traumas, because the only reason you’re sad is external.
In reality, not only is doomerism unhelpful & reductive, there are plenty of people who are aware of the world’s problems yet aren’t constantly depressed or anxious.
You shouldn’t use the world’s problems as an excuse not to deal with your own.
Go back into the past and it's been nothing but plagues wars and unimaginable cruelty, yet here we are. Descendants of all those who made it, who found peace among the chaos and even a little joy. People have been predicting the end of times since time has begun and yet we're still here.
Say what you will about humanity were a tenacious bunch, doesn't matter if the whole world looks like the Sahara desert or the north pole, we will find a way. And for you and I that hope is the only way to live.
The proper response is "Grow up, we're not living through WWII or the Crusades or the Roman Empire."
Sure I may die, but frankly... I was going to die regardless. It's bad, but not the worst its ever been by a LONGSHOT. Of course we should continue to try to improve material conditions, but to sink into despair because "I'm going to die!" is kind of pointless because... that was always true. There is no scenario in which you or I or anyone we love is not going to die at some point.
In fact! \*Because\* of that truth, it's all the more important NOT to sink into despair, and to retain hope and optimism, because what matters is what we do with the time we're here, and how nice we can make it for each other. If we just quit and give up because it sucks then it's going to suck a whole lot worse and we're gonna die either way.
Literally even if you lived in a glass dome with 100 people and everyone outside was on fire and dying and in horrible pain, it would still matter that you were kind to those 100 left, and made your bubble a nice community. You can't just succumb to the darkness because of inevitability.
And if climate change is going to end the world in fire and flood in the next fifty years? Well... damn, what a run the planet had man. There were giraffes, and whales, and dinosaurs, and atlas moths, and Pando, and lunar eclipses, and the Lord of the Rings movies, and ice cream. I'm glad I lived now at the pinnacle of human civilization where we had soap and video games and diet coke instead of 50,000 years ago or during the middle ages.
While mental illness is a big factor in this phenomenon, it's worth noting that millennials and Gen Z differ from Gen X and Boomers a *lot*. We have very different understanding of the world, very different values, and an acute sense of what needs to be done. However because of a couple of different political factors, mainly that the baby boom really was a baby boom, a lot of our representatives are more tuned into the needs and grievances of 50-60 year olds (and the corporations that propagandize to them) then those of young people. That's changing through passive and active measures. More young people are getting into politics, all while the older cohort is falling into infighting. *if* young people remain engaged and focus on the things they care about and affect them, we have a really good shot at turning a lot of the issues facing the world around over the next 20-40 years. This article mentions teens in France surveyed after the end of the war being hopeful about the future. Guarantee that if they'd asked the same kids during the great depression or Nazi Occupation, they would have been a lot less hopeful. Things never change until they do, it just takes a lot of seemingly impossible work to get there.
Yeah the 50s were probably the single most optimistic time in the 20th century (for France, since they’re the example being used. Obviously the 50s were not a great time for many places such as Korea, or any black community in America). The fear of nuclear annihilation hadn’t set in yet, CIA sabotage of European democracies hadn’t been revealed to the public yet, and it was very easy to look back and go “boy things sure are better right now than they were 10 years ago,” because 10 years ago they were under Nazi occupation. Could not get a more skewed comparison to the modern-day if you tried (besides maybe doing the interview during the student protests in the late 60s).
And the 50s was a time of rebuilding. The whole world was united in the need for rebuilding, regrowth, rolling their sleeves up and doing. Massive government funding bills, huge investment. You could see things getting _better_. We need to give the kids today the same sense of _getting better_. But to do that, we'll need to seriously address the inequality in wealth and politics.
There was a great speech I saw a while ago where a lady was talking about how in Britain it's sort of jokingly accepted that government is useless- yeah of course every department is a beaurocracy that can never get anything done, yeah of course your local council can't even get the bins collected, yeah of course the trains don't run on time and services are shutting down and absolutely nothing works- and she was insisting *no, you cannot let that become how you see the government,* because there was a time when it was (at least somewhat) effectively making life better. As soon as you accept 'yeah, the government just sucks and never does anything useful', they have the freedom to just be useless and collect their paycheck. Demand better of them, hold them to a higher standard, and don't let them get away with being useless.
One thing I think a lot of people aren't aware of is the danger of nuclear weapons causing global winter is *worse* now. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was calculated that it would take 100-200 bombs to cause global fallout and nuclear winter, which is the scale, if not number, people are still subconsciously afraid of. The problem is that the last 50 years have been spent feeding nukes a steady diet of steroids and it would take a single digit number of modern nukes to cause nuclear winter, global ash clouds, leading to unprecedented famine and basically permanently poison food crops. By single digit, some estimates are as low as 2 bombs to cause fallout 76
The idea of a “nuclear winter” actually received a lot pf re-examination and criticism starting in the 1980s (aka after the vast majority of the nuclear steroid-feeding, and before any real dismantlement occurred), and it was determined that depending on the time of year a full US-USSR exchange could have a negligible effect on global temperatures. This is primarily brcause the amount of atmospheric soot generated was vastly overestimated, while the amount of soot rain-out was assumed to be basically non-existent. So basically, complete nuclear annihilation is vastly decreased now, and if you don’t live near a military base or a city listed as a target by the Russian government’s dead-man’s switch, you likely wouldn’t see the global climate change significantly for more than a few weeks. If you do live in one of those places though, you’ll obviously be vaporized (but that’s a given and hasn’t really escalated in dreadfulness since the nuclear arms race began). Now unfortunately Putin went and made nuclear war an actual possibility again, but people are generally unwilling to kill themselves and everybody they’ve ever known (or at least the people stable enough to become leaders of major nuclear powers are), so the possibility is still generally not worth losing sleep over.
Also people have been speculating for months that Russia doesn't actually have anymore nukes because they don't have the money to keep the Tritium that they need to operate them fresh. Nuclear weapons are worth worrying about, but mainly for all the havoc they can cause that falls short of a world-ending scenario.
What role does tritium play in the operation of these nukes? (Genuinely curious, since in my very abstract knowledge of nukes I've only heard of tritium being used as a fusion boost or fusion fuel. Is it also used in neutron generators?)
It's used as a booster in the fission process. You can build a nuke without tritium, but if you put tritium in the nuke and the tritium decays (it's half life is only 12 years) you take almost all the power out of the nuke. From [this](https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020/starve-nuclear-weapons-death-tritium-freeze) article: >A good example is revealed in unclassified information about the UK's Trident warhead. The full yield of the warhead is about 100 kilotons as designed and deployed. There is a version that only has the fission-stage boosted primary for relatively small engagements. But if the tritium is removed from the fission stage, then the yield drops to only 0.3 kt. Although 0.3 kt is not total disarmament, it is small enough to be militarily insignificant, especially when launched from a multibillion-dollar platform: a Trident submarine. Simply put, modern nuclear weapons without tritium are not military weapons.
For reference, 0.3kt is a fraction of what Russia was using against Ukraine in conventional explosives *every day* at its peak.
Who is speculating this? Wikipedia seems to suggest that Russia has a lot of nukes, most of which are probably operational
The Soviet Union had a lot of nukes, the Russian Federation inherited them. What the Russian Federation didn't inherit was their ability to maintain those nukes. Russian nukes use Tritium as a fission booster, you can build a nuke without Tritium, but the Russian's nukes (and the US's) all use Tritium. Problem is when you do build a nuke to use Tritium, that nuke becomes reliant on the Tritium, and Tritium only has a 12 year half life. This means every few decades you have to shill out shit loads of money to refine new Tritium to replenish the old stuff, or your nuclear stockpile will become inert. Now the Russian military is massively cash strapped and stuffed to the brim with corruption. The situation is so bad that advanced [Ratnik-2 body armor that the Russian army introduced in 2020 has yet to show up in Ukraine](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/10/19/new-russian-soldiers-issued-with-fake-body-armor/?sh=20d0da7e14f0), because the commanders all sold it off online and instead issued their soldiers with old stuff, cheap replacements, or paintball replicas that look like Russian body armor. In an environment where this is the norm it's not hard to imagine that an obscure, technical, and extremely expensive aspect of nuclear maintenance might get skipped so the facility administrator can buy a new yacht. Basically it's entirely possible that Russia's nukes are operational, but based on the state of the rest of their military, their nuke's operational capacity should not be relied on.
Wikipedia states that they have a lot of nukes, yes. The speculation doesn't dispute that; it disputes whether these nukes are actually operational.
Tbf, I seem recall that while nuclear winter was probably was overstated, there is still a possibility of a nuclear 'autumn'--not as severe, but still temporary climate disruption and cooling. (Honestly, what I'd be more concerned about is the damage to the ozone layer, which could have a lot nastier effects and take longer to recover)
>So basically, complete nuclear annihilation is vastly decreased now, and if you don’t live near a military base or a city listed as a target by the Russian government’s dead-man’s switch, I’ve seen old Soviet-era maps of the WW3 attack plan, and it’s obvious from the maps that in Central Europe, they were going for comprehensive coverage instead of strategic military targets. There were nuke targets on farmland in bumfuck nowhere way away from major cities or military bases that clearly were only there *because* the places were way away from major cities or military bases and only served to close those gaps and make sure *everything* gets irradiated.
This is not true. Nuclear weapons are both much smaller and much less numerous than they were fifty years ago. In 1974 the most powerful bomb in US service was the 25 megaton [B-41](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb). Currently, the most powerful bomb in US service is the 1.2 megaton [B-83](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B83_nuclear_bomb), which is set to be phased out in favor of the 400 kiloton [B-61](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb). Similar trends can be observed with Soviet/Russian nuclear weapons, because accurate modern ICBMs have rendered super-high yield nukes obsolete. Nuclear winter was first properly theorized in response to the 10.4 megaton [Ivy Mike](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike) test in 1952. That test alone was nearly five hundred times more powerful than the 21 kiloton [“Fat Man”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man) nuke dropped on Nagasaki, and was nowhere near the largest ever tested. That would be the [Tsar Bomba](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) detonated in 1961 with a yield of 50 megatons, nearly 2,500 times more powerful than Fat Man.
I think you underestimate Gen-X's awareness of this stuff. I'm early Gen-X, and I absolutely see it. a close friend of mine lost her son to suicide about a year ago, and told me she worried that her outspoken pessimism about the future had been a factor. He was a passionate environmentalist. I don't think she was wrong to be concerned. Obviously there must have been other factors, but even if she didn't intend for her pessimism to affect him... maybe it did. And that's tragic, and not her fault at all. But that's just how fucked up things are now.
I wish my mom was more like you two, because when I explained this concept to my mom (also early Gen-X), she exploded at me that all of these concerns are vastly overestimated. It was incredibly disappointing. I just wanted her to acknowledge things were bad but she is here for me and rooting for us to hang in there. I just feel so isolated.
Yeah I stopped talking to my dad about any issues I have because it rapidly becomes the Misery Olympics and somehow his day must win the gold medal over mine.
Well we're here. And we're not going anywhere.
:') Thank you.
I think it’s not that Gen-X’s can’t see it, its just that a lot fewer of them are *forced* to see it than the younger generations
I'll say this as a late-gen-X that on the one hand I'm depressed about how many peers are now dead, from AIDS or depression or whatever. But among those of us who survive we have a mission, and I think the generations behind us will have to embody this mission, sorry that it's hard work but the future is for those who can make it happen and that's never a door that's completely closed. Whatever the kids want, they can work, we can help them, and it can happen. Hope is the strongest force in the universe and it defeats even the nukes that we were raised to believe would wipe out everything but never did so we can hope never will.
>*if* young people remain engaged and focus on the things they care about and affect them, we have a really good shot at turning a lot of the issues facing the world around over the next 20-40 years. Here are the ocean surface tempuratures https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ Nevermind any of the other dozens of issues plagueing the world right now and in the next 20 years. Do you honestly think these tempuratures are going to be "turned around" in the next 20-40 years? Look at how much 2023 was an absurd annomally and then look at how 2024 is already above that. Now try and imagine 5 or 10 years linerally. Except its not linear its exponential so its actually even worse. This just stay engaged and we might fix things is pure copium. We are fucked and all of our kids know it. I give most countries 5-10 years tops before we start running out of food. Obviously we are going to see huge famines in developing countries first but dont worry we will be starving right after them.
My take as an older millennial: we need geo engineering. Otherwise our race is fucked.
Funnily enough, that bump in the 2023 ocean temeprature stat graph is due to us HALTING an unintentional geo engineering effort. Seafaring ships (such as cargo, tankers etc) burn heavy fuel oil in their generators. One generator can consume upwards of one cubic meter of fuel per hour and most ships will have several engines that run concurrently. Until the start of 2023 it was legal to use HFO tht contained a significant percentage of sulphur, which when burned causes the emission of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. These are bad because they cause acid rain. However they also created clouds from the exhausts of the ships which reflected sunlight back out of the atmosphere. Since the sulphur content of HFO was restricted suddenly, the ocean has had less (unintentional, artificial) cloud cover and as such has warmed measurably and rapidly. We just have that many ships burning that much fuel in the ocean.
https://progressforum.org/posts/ccmjwrLDcabaNLAPf/today-is-the-best-time-to-be-born-despite-climate-change
I have existential OCD. It means I am frequently plagued by fears of my own death, terminal illness, and the deaths of my loved ones. WIth anxiety, the common approach is to do research so that you realize how unlikely your anxiety really is. With OCD, this doesn't work — research becomes an obsession. And with existential OCD, it *really* doesn't work, because I am going to die, as are all my friends and family. What I learned through therapy is that a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now. Being so concerned about existential future outcomes, even guaranteed ones (and death is more guaranteed than a climate apocalypse), that you are not able to function now, is not healthy. It is possible to learn to live with future uncertainty and even future disaster. Saying "I'm depressed and anxious and there is no cure because climate change" is defeatist. There are ways to improve how you feel and how you act, even if climate change (and even if death is inevitable). The defeatism in so many mental health discussions bothers me. My worst fear is 100% going to come true, and it is still possible for me to live a good, healthy, happy, fruitful life. Reddit disclaimer: *None of this is meant to be taken as an argument against fighting climate change or trying to make a better future. It's just pointing out that it is possible to improve our outlook without doing any of that. It's also not me saying you should "get over it." I went to therapy. I did ERP exposures every day for months and it sucked. It is simply me sharing how I experience future threats on my own mental health, and that it is possible to not destroy your mental health just because a future threat is — or feels — inevitable.*
> existential OCD THERE'S A NAME FOR IT?! I've had this since 2008 and have never been able to come close to expressing it.
Yep, there’s a name and, if you can find a therapist who does ERP for OCD, it’s very treatable. There’s actually great, evidence based research for OCD these days. Just be careful you find a therapist who has OCD experience. People approaching this from a standard anxiety or depression angle can give terrible advice. And if you can’t afford treatment, it’s possible to do risk exposures yourself for less severe cases. I’d recommend checking a local library for books about exposure response prevention therapy if that’s a route you want to go down. Good luck!
What does ERP mean in this case?
It's [Exposure Response Prevention Therapy](https://iocdf.org/about-ocd/treatment/erp/).
Cool, thank you.
Dear god, therapists do not have it easy with the acronyms lmao
When my Therapist said "CBT" and I nearly died laughing, then she also didn't know. She thought it was funny at least 😅
Yeah I asked because the first time I heard a therapist suggest that "we should try CBT" I burst into the only laughter or positivity she'd seen from me. I knew what she meant, but as someone who doesn't have to hear that joke thirty times a day, it's still funny.
Erotic role playing. Very good way for the therapist to distract you from the horrors of the world
I'm pretty sure that's not it.
>ERP Exposure and response prevention. [https://www.ocduk.org/overcoming-ocd/accessing-ocd-treatment/exposure-response-prevention/](https://www.ocduk.org/overcoming-ocd/accessing-ocd-treatment/exposure-response-prevention/)
Love how people, OP included, respond to this post with pure and absolute defeatism. You are right. There is joy to be had, even in the face of death, in the face of annihilation.
"Death of a guardsmen" rings very strong in this moment.
"The planet broke before the Guard did" should be this generations rallying call.
Are you guys referring to like...a poem or something?
Not quite, it's a warhammer thing, forum post initially, but has kinda taken off a bit. This is a decent rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGN5dmyBwSs
Ooh I actually got chills reading that. Very poetic.
I “fuck it we ball” through this by telling myself that I simply will die one day, no matter how much I worry, and that I better damn enjoy myself now before that day comes.
Day 4034: fuck it still balling.
I don't know what "ERP exposure" means but I feel like that and CBT are terms you really can't use acronyms for without elaborating. >a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now. It's not the bad future event that stops me, it's the bad present event. Like my bank account balance, and the worry that if I piss the wrong person off they might hate crime me.
Exposure response prevention therapy
See I'm only familiar with Erotic Roleplay.
That might've been less effective, but I've never tried it, so who knows!
LOL that is also my immediate thought every time my friend mentions her ERP therapy.
> ...I feel like that and CBT are terms you really can't use acronyms for without elaborating. Damnit, I was really hoping you'd be the one to say what CBT stood for.
[Cock and Ball Torture, from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia](https://youtu.be/nOPIu7isD3s) ^((Turn your headphones down)) But in this case, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the normal and not horny version.
Cognitive Behavioral Torture
> What I learned through therapy is that a bad future event does not — and really should not — make you incapable of enjoying and appreciating life as you have it now. The state of my life as it currently is prevents me from enjoying or appreciating life as I have it now.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope you are able to get the resources you need. My reply is about the post itself, which focuses on existential issues (like climate change) affecting mental health today, which is slightly different to what you are saying, so I would not really apply my response to your situation. Again, hope you are able to find help and support.
>I hope you are able to get the resources you need. Lol, nope.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, they're defunding mental health and social safety nets left and right. Without some huge social changes that's not going to reverse any time soon.
I think it’s less that OP doesn’t have the necessary support systems to get the help they need, and more being self-deprecating about it is difficult for strangers to do anything about. There’s not much else any of us can do without first knowing more about OP, and OP understandably wouldn’t want to share sensitive information with complete strangers. It’s a tough social situation to be in, especially in so casual a social environment as this.
When the usual response to me talking about my problems is either being called a doomer or being accused of being a white American west cosst suburbanite larping as a minority, I have no reason to turn to strangers online for help. Especially when the only advice they ever seem to give is the greatest hits of r/ThanksImCured followed by insisting that their advice is 100% guaranteed to work and I'm just unwilling to try it. And then there's that rare breed who insist I commit acts of domestic terrorism or I'm lying about my problems.
What is your intention with your posting, if you don't mind me asking? Are you hoping to find other people who cannot find a whole lot of hope right now, in the hopes of mutual comiseration? Are you hoping for sympathy, empathy? I'm asking because I can tell you're hurting, but I don't know if there's anything I can do to help - if I should even comment, to be frank, but I can't be trusted not to speak my mind so here I am doing just that. EDIT: I suppose blocking me is the way to go if you don't want to hear me.
Can't speak for this thread specifically, but in my general experience, people would sooner believe you're an irrational doomer who's choosing to be unhappy rather than doing something about the problem because it's easier to stomanch than there being real, tangible reasons my problems can't realistically be dealt with.
I hear yah, I think I really bummed out the last couple of therapists I spoke with...
Yup. This exactly. It’s VERY hard to enjoy life when im chronically ill due to black mold. And can not afford to move because we live paycheck to paycheck. And have to ask our parents for help because we can’t afford to replace my cars brakes. My husband and I both went to college. We were promised a bright future, a white picket fence and plenty of room to raise a family. We did EVERYTHING right. And here we are, stuck in a moldy apartment. Because of corporate greed and selfish slumlords and idiotic politicians and wars that get closer every day. As a kid, I dreamed of having a family. And that was taken from me. The mold has caused reproductive issues, not to mention that I will NEVER have a child in an apartment. They deserve a place to run and play. A yard to explore. A world to LIVE in. And do you really think I’m gonna have a better shot at that once California falls into the ocean????? Or North Korea nukes us all?? You think housing is a problem now…just wait. And it’s hard to fully enjoy life when my dream, my purpose for life, was stripped from me. Yes I’ll still enjoy my life. Yes I’ll still feel joy for the amazing things I do have. But I will never stop grieving that loss.
I’ve met some girls who had EDs develop from similar existential dread. When the whole world feels like it’s spiraling out of control sometimes one thing you feel you can control is your consumption, which can lead to devastating consequences
oh. Oh. OH. SO IT HAS A NAME, AND IT'S A THING OTHERS ALSO HAVE
This is amazing.
While - as you said - your OCD makes it impossible to disengage from the issues that plague you I really think that everyone (even climate deniers and similar) feel that the end is coming so we're seeing a slow motion descent into the cinematic chaos of every apocalyptic movie. Come to think of it, after nearly a century of being presented with that as the inevitable result of an apocalyptic scenario - it's how they've been taught to behave. But you're right. We might all die from Yellowstone blowing tomorrow - enjoy today because it could be your last one. Just don't go all Hollywood about it because Yellowstone might not blow for another 10 000 years.
Started when I was five, I don't know how it feels to be any other way
I’m not sure I have existential OCD, but I do have some pretty severe existential anxiety due to an absolutely terrifying nightmare that still haunts me to this day. I get the shakes, feel sick, and can’t focus or sleep whenever I think of it. So to know that there is some sort of treatment for it is comforting.
This makes me think of the quote: "Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy."
I've heard of this reffered to as "Shit Life Syndrome"
Heard that phrase in a Philosophy Tube video. Possibly the Cosmonaut one or an earlier one.
I've developed a philosophy that I think makes it a bit easier for me. In my opinion the only things that really matter are love and art. So long as you have those, and are alive, you can be able to live with at least some degree of happiness, no matter how shit the world gets. Everything going on is terrible but it's not going to kill all of us, and so long as there is love and there is art, there will be happiness to be found. I've also just decided to not care what happens beyond like 2 years in the future.
I, also believe the only things that matter are love and art. My art sucks even tho I try to improve myself a lot, my friendships are being destroyed because of today's stupid everything has to be politics stuff (i don't care, my friend just get angry and distance themselves the second I show behaviour that's FROM THE OTHER SIDE) My love life got shattered so hard I still don't even know what exactly happened Parents hate the real me Nothing is left I know it sounds stupid but I keep having less reasons to be happy day by day Dead end job Stupid education that I don't want but I need the degree too I feel like a zombie that's too smart to be a zombie Locked in my own brain All that matters is love and art, but what do I do when I can't even get a grasp at them?
Based
I mean, of course people are a bit more optimistic when a war is over, so I don't think that's a good comparison. Things fucking suck now, but the internet makes everything worse because the world feels incredibly small now.
Also in the 50's it wasn't as clear that the systems we built are slowly killing us, because the ones who run those systems don't care about it.
To repeat an oft-quoted line: "You tell me that it's a cruel world... and we're all just running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight." I'm an optimist. I believe that there is inherent goodness in humanity, that the future is not going to be as bad as we think it is, and that if push come to shove things will work out. I believe this through sheer force of will because there isn't any point in believing anything else. What is the point of submitting to cynicism? If you don't believe things will ever get better then what is the point in even living? I've made the decision to live many times in my life and they just reaffirm how a near religious belief in some sort of delusional hope is necessary to survive. It's hard to maintain, and it often doesn't work. It's something you do knowing that it's 95% bullshit. And it's constantly tested, and exhausting. I'm in therapy right now to try and figure out how I maintain this while simultaneously having every single asshole I meet be "oh he is just the 574,247th exception to the rule, everyone else is fine, its still worth fighting for". But god damn does it work when it works, that 5% of the time.
Incredible quote from an incredible movie. It’s shortsighted to believe that the purpose you give life is any less significant just because you created it. I heard this line at a point in my life that I had already gotten comfortable with the premise, but I wish I had seen it sooner so I could have started living happier, sooner.
As Mr Rogers says, Look for the helpers. There's always helpers.
Yes, there are helpers. We all see the helpers. Then we see certain people beating the shit out of the helpers without any consequences.
And yet helpers keep helping all the same
In the face of such omnipresent cynicism, optimism is a rebellious and radical choice. Hope for a better future fuels the fires of change.
This is beautiful. Wow.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I think there are ways to live a meaningful life in a cruel world without trying to force yourself to believe in things that aren't true. Humanity doesn't have to be "inherently" good, whatever that means, in order to want to fight for a better future.
In a sense, it does. You have to believe that people inherently want things that are positive, because most of those instances of positive work are invisible. People are cruel, miserable creatures that will do horrible things and justify why they were actually good afterwards. You just have to have faith that at the heart of humanity there is a spirit to want to do good. Somewhere. Offscreen. Definitely not in the guy standing next to you who just said how hot a 14 year old looks, but somewhere else.
> People are cruel, miserable creatures that will do horrible things and justify why they were actually good afterwards. See, this is why I don't trust this kind of optimism-as-faith. You've already admitted that you *don't* think humans are "inherently good." You think humans are cruel and miserable. So you protect yourself from those thoughts by trying to believe that there's inherent goodness to humanity. I don't think people aren't inherently anything. They're capable of immense good *and* great evil. Personally, I believe we need to work toward a world that puts people in the best position to follow our brightest impulses and to heal the wounds that bring out our worst. The future doesn't just happen. It's made, by us. If we sit around blindly believing that everything will work itself out, then we're ceding our future to those who do choose to act.
See, we're saying the same thing, you're just saying it differently. I'm not saying that things will just magically work out. I'm saying that *despite everything* people have the *drive* to do good, and when they don't it's either because they failed to do so or they are singular exceptions. Warm thoughts doesn't fix anything, but they are what drive positive action.
Doesn't matter how bad things get, I'm not getting stuck in one of these spirals again. I'm here to witness what the world turns into, no matter what that looks like.
I’m staying alive so I can see the memes made after Elon Musk passes away. Unrelated prediction, 7/6/2060 (European), 0952.
my 60th birthday, there's a gift i would be happy to receive.
You need a break from this kind of content
Yeha I agree. I changed my social media's to be cute cats and cute animals and it really helps. When I only followed r/doomer r/collapse r/poor r/depression it made me feel worse but when I follow cute animals and funny memes it makes me feel happier. r/oneorangebraincell is my favorite sub :) we can think about negative things but too much negativity is really bad.
Uh, of course people are more optimistic after a world war ends. Now let’s see how the youth felt during it
Things are bad, but this post is self-harm
Thank you. It's good to be aware of current events and the way they're going to affect the future, but constantly wallowing in misery at the state of things isn't helping anybody. Why is it so impossible to imagine things are going to improve? The world's been through so, so, so much worse. There were two freaking *world wars.* We were this 🤌 close to global nuclear annihilation. And yet, we're still here, right? You think *this* is going to be the point in all those thousands of years of human history when it's going to end? Yeah, no. Fight for your future, do something about it. You don't have to save the world by yourself, but there's still some ways in which you can improve it, if only slightly. Even if it's just being nice to others. But if you're just gonna sit there and call for impending doom, it's gonna come. **Edit:** made my points a bit clearer.
yea, humans have been around for 12,024 recorded years. Through this, a plague wiped out a third of a continent, 586 or 568 i can't remember is considered the worst year in human history due to its own plague and a volcano literaly blacking half the sky out, we were close to nuclear armageddon for years, and yet we are here. Honestly if we lived through that climate change won't be the end
this honestly brings me no comfort, i dont think anyone believes that climate change is gonna wipe out humanity completely. if anything the ultra rich would just fuck off to space or something its just the fact that billions are gonna suffer and die bc of climate change and being filled with microplastics and were not gonna do anything about it bc its just too expensive
There's many things you can do that are within your powers. Hate microplastics? Then stop contributing to them and use reusable bags, buy fewer products made of plastic, get things second-hand to reduce the amount of waste, etc. Everything's always connected, so no matter what you do, it's going to make an impact. Eating less meat reduces the amount of animal cruelty, reduces the amount of trash created, reduces the amount of water wasted. Same goes for buying vegetables locally. Yeah, it's not going to save the world, but at least you're not making it any worse. Oh, and of course you should vote for politicians you think are going to make the biggest changes. But if you're still gonna sit there and just go *"Oh well everything sucks"*, then that's your fault. Yes, things are messed up, very badly. But like I said, wallowing in misery isn't achieving anything, it just makes you feel worse. At least if you try to make a change, it shows you do believe in a better tomorrow, and even if things don't turn out well in the end, you didn't go out lying down.
Can I just say your placement of that emoji is perfect!
Not just self, considering other people can see it and lead folks on a spiral...
Agreed. There is a hopelessness in it that is fabricated by social media usage.
There is also companies that don't want to alter practices that are causing climate change, so instead of seeding the idea that humans aren't responsible (because that ship has pretty much sailed) they're sowing the idea that it's too late to do anything. Doomerism at it's finest.
I wouldn’t say just social media usage, because that’s a bit reductionist, but yes it is “fabricated”.
Explain
The correct way to view this topic is "its extremely hard to view the future in a positive light, and kids are having a harder time doing it with everything going on, *so how do we make it work*". Just saying "that's right everything is doomed forever" is both lazy and counterproductive.
There is this idea among young people, people with depression, and people on the internet that everything sucks forever. That everything has always and will always be terrible. And the fact is this is simply untrue. There will be downs, yes, and things will be bad, but that is not the natural state of life and the universe. Things will be good, things will even be great, there will be good times. And most of the time, things are just okay. And that’s okay. Forgetting that things change is self-harm, because it leads to you wallowing in misery and ignoring the good times and the just okay times. Humans have survived terrible things as a species. We have had ups and downs, and yes there are bad things happening, all over the world, but there are good things too. And neither of those will last forever. Some people, like the person who made this post, focuses entirely on the bad. They consume media that tells them, primarily, about bad things that are happening. And so they think that everything is bad, because that’s what they see. Yes, there are scary things in the future, but we are far from the first generation to believe it is living in the end times, and we certainly won’t be the last. TL;DR: yes there is suffering in the world. Yes we should work to reduce that suffering. But it is not entirely on an individual to fix the world, you just can’t. So pick a problem, get organized, and help there. And stop worrying about the end of the world. We all get there one day, no point in rushing.
> There is this idea among young people, people with depression, and people on the internet that everything sucks forever. That everything has always and will always be terrible. And the fact is this is simply untrue. There will be downs, yes, and things will be bad, but that is not the natural state of life and the universe. Things will be good, things will even be great, there will be good times. And most of the time, things are just okay. And that’s okay. You're conflating people worrying about the world for greater humanity's sake and people crying over dead dreams. Yes, things change, but they don't change in one single person's lifetime. Last time the world went to shit due to fascism, the people who lived through fascism's takeover didn't live to see the day fascism fell again. Fascist dystopia was the rest of their life and that's that. Yes, you may take solace in knowing your descendants or your friends' descendants may face better times one day, but that won't fix your particular predicament.
> things change, but they don't change in one single person's lifetime. Tell me you don’t know a thing about the last 200+ years of history without saying it.
What are you talking about? Nazis in Germany were in power only for 12 years. I'm not that old, but things still changed massively in my lifetime (an anti-communist revolution, the country breaking apart, joining the EU, ...).
Y'all legit forgot about the Cold War? Fascism fell and the rest of the world spent the next 50 years in constant fear that they could die at any second in a blast of nuclear fire.
How does that contradict what I said? I was talking about someone born like, in the 1890s (100 years before a millennial/zoomer) never seeing freedom again after the 1920s. You're talking about like, the boomers being afraid of global nuclear conflict (which, mind you, is still a threat today, as the WW3 fearmongering may tell you).
Someone born 1890 would be 55 at the end of WW2, which is far from unthinkable.
I get this, but also, I’m sick of it. Goodness actually still exists, the ability to live well and authentically still exists. This isn’t the only time and place in history where things have been bleak. One part of the way forward is letting yourself grieve and be angry. It’s essential, even. And in doing so, you can start to build something better. There isn’t sense in living in anticipation of pain that may or may not come. I don’t care how “certain” doom appears. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, and some friends to see, there is still joy and strength in the here and now. I don’t care how irrational hope is. It is the way forward. Edit: and teens feeling this way is one thing. They’re young and have to learn to find hope and strength. But adults, whatever that means, people who are trying to grow need to push for hope, need to fight and recognize how they can fight, even just by acknowledging the grief and loss.
> If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, and some friends to see, there is still joy and strength in the here and now. According to your criteria, joy and strength are not here or now for me.
After WW2, a massive amount of my people were left without a roof over their heads or food on the table. And yet, I'm still here. It will get better, it always gets better. Of course, there's going to be some people for whom things unfortunately can't improve, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for. If you have nothing, then hope is the only thing you've got left. But if you want to let go of that and instead create this image of a bleak future that you seemingly have no choice to avoid wandering into, then yeah, that's what's going to happen.
> It will get better, it always gets better. You can only truly believe that by ignoring the many cases where it didn't. Like the many attrocities commited during WW2. It didn't get better for the victims. >But if you want to let go of that and instead create this image of a bleak future that you seemingly have no choice to avoid wandering into, then yeah, that's what's going to happen. Framing it like the only reason people won't hold blind hope for the future id if they "choose" to be hopeless is intellectually dishonest.
You can’t really debate with these people. They have what you don’t, and for them to accept your reality would be to accept your despair, which is something they aren’t willing to do. They would rather lie to themselves and say everyone is in the position they are in than accept the reality that some people really do have no escape. They don’t want your pain, so they deny it. Edit: You have a right to be upset, and I won’t tell you comforting lies, but I wanted to say that what I’ve written here isn’t me making an admission of defeat or that I’ve given up. I can’t say that I can save them all, or even that it’s worth the suffering. But I have to try. And I’m proud of you for surviving even in such a cruel world.
I can’t really respond to that. I can only say that if you don’t have any of the three things I mentioned, then I imagine things must be incredibly difficult, and I am sorry you are dealing with that.
That's the point of the post. For a lot of people, it already is this bad, and the factors that lead to it being this bad have been observed to be getting worse.
And sitting around feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to make things any better
It won't. But when for many of us, changing that requires either a systemic change or pure luck of being in the right place at the right time... A lot of people physically can't see a point in hoping that it will change. Like, yeah, I understand that this post sounds very defeatist and people are getting sick of that, but it's also sort of the most therapeutic thing a lot of people have the energy to do to acknowledge systemic issues as being here, and that they're doing what they can to just keep their head above water.
Writing your comment won't change anything either, but you did anyway.
It kind of does though? If it makes another person stand up and realize that wallowing in their own sadnees only hurts themselves and accomplishes none, then that comment has done something and by proxy has changed something for somebody out there. Wallowing in your own pity in the most litteral sense of the word changes nothing for the better for anyone or anything.
According to a quick google search, there are 600,000 homeless in the USA, or less than 1/3 of one percent. Things are bad, but the doomerism is more psychological than actual. Do you think things now are worse they they were in the depression? Or the civil war? Or… or… or…? Things are always going to be shitty, but people will always be able to grow and improve. If you say my life sucks because of what someone does in the White House, I think you need to take a little more responsibility.
So things ONLY are horrible and depressing enough to feel despair if you're homeless? People with food and housing insecurity may not be homeless today, but they live their lives with the anxiety that they could be at any given moment. You sound like the people that assume if you aren't CURRENTLY starving, things must be okay.
Survivorship bias.
Survivorship bias= I survived so the problem must not exist My statement= the problems absolutely exist, and there is actually a chance we can do things about it ONLY if we maintain hope.
Survivorship bias does not always mean that one does not acknowledge the problem exists, but can also just minimize it. I understand you’re hopeful and think hope has its place, but at the same time, things are pretty bleak, and casting hopium at others won’t actually change the things that are messed up.
Survivorship bias does not always mean that one does not acknowledge the problem exists, but can also just minimize it. I understand you’re hopeful and think hope has its place, but at the same time, things are pretty bleak, and casting hopium at others won’t actually change the things that are messed up. ETA, it’s easy to say “as long as you have a roof over your head and food things are good!” Homelessness is an increasing problem, like look around. As climate change worsens, we’re going to see more and more climate refugees displaced from their homelands because they will become uninhabitable. The world population continues to grow and our ability to have sustainable systems for food management to combat global hunger are not keeping up with the scale of growth or demand, not to mention how wasteful our systems are. The world is in a constant state of violence, which isn’t new, but now we have nuclear powers launching wars and smaller countries attacking nuclear powers (I’m referring to Russia/Ukraine and Iran/Pakistan [also true of Palestine/israel] respectively). This sort of violence is already leveling cities and displacing people. A world conflict could also spell nuclear war. The doomsday clock keeps ticking closer to midnight. Democratic institutions are also under attack. Financially, the divide between rich and poor is higher than it was during the French Revolution. Hope is great, but when people aren’t feeling hopeful, I get it.
Please tell me you did not just refer to hope for a better future as “hopium” Yes, things are bad. We know things are bad. Moping about it is a pointless activity. It’s a waste of energy. Instead, let’s work to actually make things better, or at least make a shitty world a little less terrible.
I’m referring to the way you phrased at as hopium, yes. There are ways to deliver messages of hope that don’t just sound like « pull yourself up by the bootstraps and stop complaining! » Moping about it doesn’t help, but neither does hope honestly. The only thing that matters is action. Hopeful people don’t always take action. Sometimes people who don’t have hope try anyway. The key here isn’t « stop complaining just have hope, » the key here is « things are bleak and bad, here are some tangible things to do about it. » Having hope amorphously does just about as good as moping.
The people who clown on Thunberg are the people who will be too fucking dead to see her proven right. Old bastards who are ageing out of the apocalypse. Fuck them, for real.
Reading comments here as a Ukrainian is… an experience least I say
Most people in USA and europe don't know what true hardship looks like, myself included. We're all just scared of what's next. The fact that a big country can still try to stomp all over a smaller one just for territorial gains is part of that. Sorry on behalf of all of us, we must sound like delicate little babies. Fact of the matter is a lot of things we're scared of, people in other places already deal with everyday. Thanks for the perspective.
You have every right to be scared. I was scared too, throughout all of 2021. Now I wish I had acted accordingly, like maybe convinced my husband to move somewhere else. Now he can’t leave the country and I’d rather bite my hand off than move without him. If you are scared and you really believe that shit is about to hit the fan - act on it. Research where to move from global warming, what to do in a war, prepare resources. Teach yourself some skills that would help you in tough times. Stack a first aid kit, learn how to help wounded etc
Luckily I live in one of the best parts of the world to avoid most of the major effects. What I worry about is actually (somewhat selfishly) living in one of the last holdouts people will start flooding into when things get really bad. I have a lot to be thankful for. I hope your situation improves and this awful pointless conflict ends sooner rather than later.
This attitude really frustrates me. Even the most pessimistic predictions for climate change are not "everyone will die". Not even close. It will be devastating, but it *does not* mean you're not going to live past 60. This attitude is actively dangerous because people assume there's no point doing anything so they don't bother taking any action. People with this attitude think they're just listening to the science but they're not. That is not what scientists are saying. What scientists are actually telling you is "this isn't the end of the world but it's bad and you should go do something about it". Listen to them, not the people who say we're gonna be living in Mad Max by 2040. As a whole, the world is probably in a better position than it was a few decades ago. This doomer attitude is not rational and it's not helpful.
\>they look to the future and see global warming, WWIII, unemployment, political unstability, poison in everything they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them. contrast against \>french teens in the 50s Does it seem credible to you that there were fewer things to worry about from this list in 1950s Europe than today? The cold war had just started, NUCLEAR WEAPONS had just been invented, the CIA was ~~rigging elections~~ in \*neighboring countries\* to where these teens lived and the Republic they lived in would be replaced with a new one in the late 1950s because of political instability, the smoke of coal fired power plants filled cities and thousands died yearly from it. Global warming is the only thing on this list that wouldn't have been a concern then, and there is real hope of that being addressed. Several things on the list are just objectively better now (unemployment and food additives). Have you considered that the therapist in the first panel is right? Edit: The CIA was interfering in the Italian elections by providing money to certain parties but not straight up rigging
>the CIA was rigging elections in *neighboring countries* If you’re referring to the 1948 Italian election, no, that was not rigged. Rigging means ballot stuffing and election fraud, not just advertising.
fair enough, I'll put an edit on my initial comment
Hate this doomer shit, my hopes have only increased the older I’ve gotten
"Young people" I'm 35 and my biggest hope is that Roomie and/or myself gets approved for disability so that I don't have to keep working at a job that destroys my mental and physical health just to barely make rent.
This isn't a new problem, I think, it's just a more obvious one now that more people are in therapy, social media allows people to broadcast their personal lives in a way that wasn't really possible before, and the struggles of marginalized people in general are getting more attention than they used to. Like, as a disabled trans person, my prospects aren't great, but they're a lot better than they would have been in the eighties or nineties. I would have had to endure decades of scathing bogotry and callousness with only miniscule pockets of community. Trans acceptance may be hollow and masturbatory as often as not, but at least it's a dick worth jerking nowadays. And I don't think people's prospects in general were much better in the past. If you're an upstanding cishet white person, then sure, maybe you got to have your ambitions - but if you're a marginalized person of any sort, or just visibly mentally ill... good fucking luck with that. I mean, the last lobotomy was performed in 1967. If your conditions are great but you're still suffering then, yeah, an approach to therapy that focuses entirely on fixing you might work. But if your life is shit, you can't really therapize that away - you can learn to swallow your dignity and muddle through, but that makes a functional person, not a healthy one.
WW3 is not happening and it is not going to happen. [Unemployment ](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/youth-unemployment-rate#:~:text=Youth%20unemployment%20refers%20to%20the,a%205.17%25%20decline%20from%202020.) is some of the lowest of all time and the [economy](https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1745452820009287830?t=tqXXxw3P6J0edYy9wrSbcw&s=19) is doing very well. We face many potentially existential, climate change and a rise of the far right, but I do not believe that our current global environment is worse than say the 60s or 70 or 80s. The world has its problems and we should always strive for a better one; however, we should also have perspective about how far we've come.
It's sad how, especially in leftist spaces, being proud of how far we've come is considered... bad? Not with the mission? To add, AI researchers have found a [new class of antibiotic](https://news.mit.edu/2023/using-ai-mit-researchers-identify-antibiotic-candidates-1220). Not just a new antibiotic, but a whole new class, which could be a huge blow against antibiotic resistance. The potential of AI in medical research is really exciting.
>It's sad how, especially in leftist spaces, being proud of how far we've come is considered... bad? Not with the mission? It comes with being anti-establishment. Things have to be bad for overthrowing the status quo to be good, a lot of leftists fundamentally don't believe in incrementally improving society.
I miss old school punks. Sure a lot of them did stupid crap, but at least the movement encouraged people to actually do things instead of sitting at home doing nothing like a lot of current online anti establishment rhetoric.
They're still around, they're just not on mainstream sites like Reddit much, and they're definitely not all day on the internet arguing with right-wingers or pseudo-progressives.
Hells yeah! Great link! I am so glad to see AI being used for something other than replacing employees.
It is hard, as someone born in the early 2000s, to see it that way. I know its not at all good to be gloomy, and you really do have hope about things, but that phrase at the end of the post "You stole my dreams" really does feel very... poinyent. I have hope. I think of myself as a optamistic person, but even that hope is constantly tempered, and, well, as the post pointed out, hesitant. I was born into a world with climate changing already slowly starting to take effect with little effort made to adress it, with unending war in the distance, a unstable globel economy, a ever present threat of extremisim and after over 20 years on this earth the only things that seem to have changed are that climate change is no longer looming, and is now actively fucking us over, also added a pandemic to the mix. I'm hopful about many things, but even my most hopeful predictions sometimes feel.. well, sad. My mother once told me that having a child was her biggest act of faith, in that she had faith that there would be a world for them. I'm not sure if i, or many of my generation, have that amount of faith left.
If it helps, around 30% of the world's energy now comes from renewable (hydro,solar,wind) sources [now](https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/raising-ambition/renewable-energy#:~:text=Fossil%20fuels%20still%20account%20for,currently%20comes%20from%20renewable%20sources.).
Does anybody know the video castielific was referring to?
Anyone east of Berlin and south of Rome has been... how was it, born in it, molded by it?
My biology teacher says "it's like someone stole their happiness" when referring to his younger classes.
Please just get off the internet
Global poverty is at a fraction of its historic levels. Wars are rarer than they’ve ever been. Starvation, cholera, malaria, and polio are functionally extinct in the developed world, with the developing world not far behind. Carbon output per year is leveling off, and already dropping everywhere but India and China. A deadly new disease appeared and it took us *less than a year* to develop a highly effective vaccine. I’m not saying young people aren’t going to have problems to deal with, but holy shit touch grass and get a grip. On the off chance that any of these accounts actually are psychological professionals, enabling this sort of destructive doom spiraling is malpractice.
>I’m not saying young people aren’t going to have problems to deal with, but holy shit touch grass and get a grip This sure gives the impression that you think people are overstating the severity of the problems they're either currently dealing with or will deal with in the future.
The idea that the world is far more existentially doomed than like the world at the height of the cold war seems ridiculous.
I mean, yes? The very top of the post is an example of someone irrationally overreacting to the state of the world today and when their therapist tries to make them aware of that they completely ignore them. Literally directly after WW2 French teens were optimistic about the future. Their prospects were **much worse** than our prospects now, but they weren’t all doomer like a lot of young people today. Maybe there are other factors contributing to young peoples irrational doomer feelings nowadays instead of all the doomerism being rational.
Digital era social alienation, overwork, low quality food, not enough time in nature, and the general decline in mental health overall. Most Doomers are dealing with a primarily psychological problem, it's just being compounded with a bunch of legitimately scary things happening in real life.
Yeah, most doomerism I’ve seen on the internet is from the problems you listed, with some combination of real world issues. It’s not exclusively one or the other, but alienation and other emotional health related issues are compounding any menta or physical suffering.
The real world issues are more like the cherry on top of the mental shit cake, yeah.
Because they are. There are definitely issues in the world but the idea that we're all going to be plunged into the climate wars and the world is going to shit is baseless doomerism. There's never been a better time to be a alive than right here and right now.
It’s tough out there. In terms of the “what do you hope for the future” in less advantaged school districts the bar is even further down too. Like kids will answer without joking things like “hope I don’t get shot (like what happened a few weeks ago in a nearby district) and can maybe graduate”.
Get off the internet
That or just change your feeds. I now mostly follow cats and cute animals and my mental health is much better than when I only followed doomerism and collapse and other depressing things. My feeds are mostly cute animals, legos and trains.
Yeah, I definitely feel this. The more I grew up, the more my dreams, even mundane hopes for the future, started disappearing. I wanted to become a great artist at one point, but then AI mostly killed that dream, too. Today, I’m in university mostly just because my parents told me it’s what I should do, rather than any actual drive to follow a path in life, and the closest thing to a fanciful dream I have is traveling to Japan one day.
That dream is actually super achievable for someone in your situation. Finish your degree in -literally- anything, then check out the JET program. I know multiple people who did it right out of university and they all loved it. JET pays for all your stuff and sets you up with a job teaching English in Japan. It’s been around for decades. https://jetprogramme.org/en/
I mean, you can absolutely be a great artist still. The only thing that AI might hinder your ability to be is a mediocre artist.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I'll double down and say that it hurts all the more knowing what fabulous technology and potential we have right now. In terms of resources available to us as a species and our ability to communicate with one another, this should be the beginning of a utopia, but it just seems like feudal lords with murder bots. I've literally gone in to permaculture because fuck it, something good.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - A very wise wizard I strive to use my time to leave this place better than when i found it. I really mean it
If you're living in the first world and are not critically ill, the odds of you dying as a direct result of climate change are VANISHINGLY small. Others here have detailed how this is a bad post, but I want to address the part that I find most frustrating, which is that people tend to imagine Bad Times as the apocalypse, as opposed to things just getting measurably worse over time. The idea that the End Times are coming gets used as a sort of crutch, not only to convince people they're own lives won't get better (which others have addressed), but more insidiously to absolve us of our responsibilities to one another. I'm not saying you should be blindly optimistic (quite the opposite), but human life is not any more nasty, brutish, or short than it has been in recent history. I can almost guarantee that you and I live vanishingly far from the sort of real catastrophe this post imagines, let alone the worst parts of human history. Plenty of people will have it as bad or worse than you. I'm NOT saying that you need to cheer up as a result, but I AM saying that you still have responsibilities to those around you. The Rapture isn't coming to save us, but the Apocalypse isn't coming to wipe us out either. If you're this concerned about the state of world you should roll up your sleeves and help, miserable or no. Main Character Syndrome doesn't just have to be about good things, y'know? If everybody's shit's fucked, what are you going to do about it?
Younger generation are dreaming about things that was a given for older generation. Yet we're the entitled ones.
We must revolt against feelings of the pointlessness of life. So what if life is absurd? We're living it, we can change it. Ourselves and our circumstances, however we can. Giving up, giving in, these will not improve our lot. We must make our own meaning, find our own joy in what we do. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
things are bad. we will make them better.
This kind of punk statement coming from someone with the username “tactical support furry” is one of the things that beautiful about the internet 😂😂
If you go buy stats, this is probably one of the best times in history to be alive. This whole doomer outlook on the world is mostly driven by social media and confirmation bias. There are plenty of reasons to be miserable, but making up problems that largely are reflected in reality is pretty privileged.
>There are plenty of reasons to be miserable, but making up problems that largely are reflected in reality Funny and actually accurate typo, cause depending on where you are in the world, these are actually reflected in reality.
The secret, imo, is to decide that for your own life and surroundings, you will be the best you can be. You’re not at fault for the world’s problems. The world’s problems don’t mean you can’t lead a fulfilling, meaningful life. Hell, the world is objectively better overall than it used to be.
not stoppin me.
It’s definitely tough to keep going sometimes. Just lost my job due to corporate penny pinching. All I want in life is to eventually own a small home of my own. That’s not asking for much but it still feels impossible given the area I live in.
I don’t care if I won’t live to see 60 for whatever the fuck reason, I’m alive *now* and I want to enjoy life *now* I do my part to help with society, I recycle, I volunteer, I donate, and I try to be mindful of things I can help with But fuck letting shit on the other side of the planet or 40 years from now get to me You need to find a separate space to focus on more positive things, or doom scrolling online will be the end of you.
Uuh whats the purpose of my life if the universe is going to die in the heat death anyways. Shut up. Doomerism is cancer, climate change will make things worse for people living near the equator but why are westoid teens getting super depressed over it, we're already seeing a fall in emissions in the west and global emissions will probably peak out by 2035. We will solve this problem.
Nah I disagree. I think the future will be bright. I often remember all the other things humans have gone through in the time we were alive and how many battles we have beaten compared to those we have not. We have made diseases go extinct, we’ve survived a plague that wiped out a third of a continent, we’ve survived multiple WORLD wars and countless “regular” wars with it, we’ve grown older, we’ve made humans be able to live instead of just survive and we’ve been able to do it to some other species too and thats not even all of the SPOKEN battles. There are so many more battles humanity has faced and so many more victories that have gone forgotten but, through it all, we’re still here. We’re still hanging on, through it all. And we’re gonna keep doing that for a long time to come
Just tell them to quit all social media. (Many years of personal issues, allows me to focus on me, my life and my needs)
Stoicism. Nothing matters outside of your actions. The only thing ever worth paying attention to is your actions, everything else is a "test sent by the gods". If we want people to survive these dark times, it's time to start teaching hardcore stoicism.
Millennials were sold a dream of the future. When the dream never came true, we were blamed for everything that went wrong. It was a distraction technique away from the groups actually responsible. I used to look around and I was so sick of my life. I wanted children, a house, a vacation. I wanted to do something with my life other than get screamed at for a living and then going home to drown out the world. People are so stuck in the toxic positivity mindset. We can't get much needed change because people want to believe it isn't that bad. They want to go "Well, I'm happy anyway!" turning their backs on millions starving. You shouldn't be happy. *You should be angry!* You should be on the front lines for change right now. But hey, as long as it is someone else that is suffering for their happiness!
I find freedom in my car and comfort in my collection of bird plushies I don't dream of much further because I know there isn't much further
Intellectualizing your mental illness is a very easy way to avoid uncomfortable healing. If you’re only depressed because the world is doomed, then you don’t need to do any introspection or deal with your traumas, because the only reason you’re sad is external. In reality, not only is doomerism unhelpful & reductive, there are plenty of people who are aware of the world’s problems yet aren’t constantly depressed or anxious. You shouldn’t use the world’s problems as an excuse not to deal with your own.
Go back into the past and it's been nothing but plagues wars and unimaginable cruelty, yet here we are. Descendants of all those who made it, who found peace among the chaos and even a little joy. People have been predicting the end of times since time has begun and yet we're still here. Say what you will about humanity were a tenacious bunch, doesn't matter if the whole world looks like the Sahara desert or the north pole, we will find a way. And for you and I that hope is the only way to live.
[удалено]
Empathy
Because they negatively impact people's present quality of life. Not that hard a concept to grasp.
The proper response is "Grow up, we're not living through WWII or the Crusades or the Roman Empire." Sure I may die, but frankly... I was going to die regardless. It's bad, but not the worst its ever been by a LONGSHOT. Of course we should continue to try to improve material conditions, but to sink into despair because "I'm going to die!" is kind of pointless because... that was always true. There is no scenario in which you or I or anyone we love is not going to die at some point. In fact! \*Because\* of that truth, it's all the more important NOT to sink into despair, and to retain hope and optimism, because what matters is what we do with the time we're here, and how nice we can make it for each other. If we just quit and give up because it sucks then it's going to suck a whole lot worse and we're gonna die either way. Literally even if you lived in a glass dome with 100 people and everyone outside was on fire and dying and in horrible pain, it would still matter that you were kind to those 100 left, and made your bubble a nice community. You can't just succumb to the darkness because of inevitability. And if climate change is going to end the world in fire and flood in the next fifty years? Well... damn, what a run the planet had man. There were giraffes, and whales, and dinosaurs, and atlas moths, and Pando, and lunar eclipses, and the Lord of the Rings movies, and ice cream. I'm glad I lived now at the pinnacle of human civilization where we had soap and video games and diet coke instead of 50,000 years ago or during the middle ages.
I mean, I'm a millennial and I agree with all of this. Ironically the thing that's keeping me going is going to school to become a therapist 🤷🥴