I started getting sad about climate change two years ago after seeing Planet Earth and many documentaries. I completely changed my lifestyle to reduce my part and put significant effort into it.
But seeing rich celebrities who use as much as a common man’s lifetime resources in a week or two, and others who barely put in any effort to combat it, and corporations fucking the entire planet for quarterly profits, barely any efforts towards fighting it even though we had known about its consequences 30-40 years ago, I get this feeling that my efforts are even worth it.
Slowly, I told myself that evolution failed itself by giving a bit more individual selfishness over community/species survival. Just like human beings, Earth’s time has started to end. Its death is inevitable. Everything should come to an end. Only if evolution had given a bit more thought to species survival, we would be in a much better place.
How do you all deal with this?
Notice how public discourse goes round & round in a lively show, but never seems to get anywhere?
This is strawman public discourse, and its largely by design.
Stop thinking, worrying and especially talking about climate change.
Instead talk about pollution & poison
Everyone can see it. It can’t be denied or handwaved or debated away.
STOP POISONING OUR AIR, WATER AND SOIL.
WE NEED THEM TO BREATH, LIVE AND GROW OUR FOOD. (duh)
But that’s not how carbon dioxide works. It isn’t individual poison - our bodies don’t give a shit whether it’s 350 ppm or 450 ppm. The planet does though.
The planet does
The planet which happens to be where we live and borrow atoms from to make our physical bodies?
Poisoning the planet is poisoning ourselves.
Where do you think that CO2 is even coming from? It doesn’t magically teleport into the air. It’s coming from the very pollution sources we’re talking about. In one year ~89% of CO2 pollution came from emissions sources which are harmful to us and other life.
Stop poisoning ourselves == stop poisoning the planet.
The mentality that we can somehow magically separate one from the other suits the polluting industries very well.
I started to care about it until I learned and discovered that we aren’t dealing with recyclables as well as we should. We’ve been hampering people for decades to recycle, recycle and recycle. Some good have came from recycling, it has. But damn, we’re not really doing enough as people think and it’s a damn shame that truth is just shelved so we can keep lying to people about recycling.
I as an individual, realize I can only do so much, but I feel it is still in the responsibility and accountability of big corps and other companies that need to really step up more since they’re bigger than me. I just think it’s irresponsible of them to have it fall on the shoulders of average joe to clean everything up, when BP barely lifts a finger to fix it’s own shit. How is it entirely my fault about how bad climate change has getting?
So you know what, I’ll still take some of my own responsibility, yet until I see these corps and companies work double time to fulfill their end of the table, I’m just going to be a little lax on it.
The thing about recycling is, that it is only the third of the 3 Rs. The first one is Reduce and that’s also the one that would have the most effect, but nobody wants that…
Take a break from the internet for a bit. I got offline as much as possible for two weeks a few months ago and it did wonders for my mental health.
Unfortunately this is some of the best advice. I think different people are more susceptible to existential anxiety - or moreso anxiety over things that will never be able to change or control. Some people can channel that emotion into advocacy, volunteer work, etc while others mentally drown in thought loops. As rude as it sounds, sometimes it really is a ‘touch grass’ type of thing. You HAVE to watch out for your own mental health and oftentimes that means disconnecting from triggers and focusing on your own life and interests. Play a game, watch something, read a book, go to the zoo, meet up with friends - live in the moment and outside your head. I also recommend using the internet purposefully and not just to kill time - use social media for discovery and research of specific topics and not for just general consumption.
This is the way.
Social media will jump from one super important and stressful thing that we all need to lose sleep over to the next with or without us. Yes, these things might be important, but a lot of online activism seems to be about who can scare more people into supporting X, Y, or Z with zero regard for the reader’s mental health, the rhetoric used, or even being 100% factual.
It doesn’t hurt to disengage every so often.
By not having kids
This is my solution. I’ve said it before, but think it should be repeated. The global population was half of today’s when I was born. 4 billion instead of the current 8+ billion.
That means if half the population disappeared today, we’d just be back where we were in 1975.
Not having kids is the best thing I can do for both the environment, and myself.
Has the added benifit of leaving me as a passive observer who doesn’t have a biological need to care about the future.
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I console myself that I am getting older and won’t see the worst of it.
and personally I’m choosing not to bring more life into the planet right before the large event.
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all i can do is my best, and then my part will be over.
i try not to focus on what comes next as the future is too amorphous to worry that much about. humans are resourceful, and weve been in tighter spots. genetic analysis points out that at one point in our evolutionary past we were down to something like 15k individuals.
even if the world temps raise drastically and billions die, i believe humans will live on
The same way to deal with depression about anything. Depression is an illness that renders one incapable of helping themselves or others and debilitates people from contributing to the solution to the problems which contributed to the depression. Depression should be treated as an illness to be cured before anything else.
As far as being not being depressed by events beyond one’s control, it requires effort since even being aware and concerned by such problems of this magnitude is highly unnatural and highly unintuitive. It is necessary to consciously come to peace with the world and humanity as it is. The universe is chaotic and we have as much control over the collective will of billions of completely ignorant and afraid people as we do over natural disasters just with less ability to predict when issues will occur. Although it is the case that we have a good grasp of the environmental issue, we have absolutely no grasp of how get plutocrats not to behave like plutocrats having no care for anything or anyone other than increasing their personal fortunes meaninglessly or to get the majority of people to understand the degree to which it is a problem that we continue to allow this. Being upset that humans are failing to achieve stable societies just as we have always failed for the entire 10,000 years we have been trying to achieve them is having unrealistic and unfair expectations of our species. Everyone is trying their best and no one knows what they’re doing really. It may be scarier to consider how much less agency people have than they believe they have initially, but it does allow one to have the comfort of more consistently helpful expectations of oneself and others.
seeing your post then this scumbag back to back really hits…: https://lemmy.ml/post/19412006
Considering the fact that corporations make up about 70% +/- of all the solution and climate destruction, and the fact that politicians are bribed by said corporations to ignore the problem, there’s little we can actually do about it except voting.
I’ve accepted that humanity is fucked. Once you get past the existentialism, things get easier. It helps if you’ve had a bunch of estasential crises before this one.
“Evolution had given a bit more thought to species survival”.
… that’s not how evolution works, unfortunately. It requires us to do the thinking.
The earth will be fine. It’s us that are fucked
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Well, I don’t really think our own species is likely to be ended by this one, but when it comes to death and loss, I think you’ve hit on the right perspective. Everything ends; things are finite in space and finite in time. If you like causality that’s actually a feature, not a bug, because everything happens all the time if there’s an infinite amount of it.
People saying do nothing, I’m saying do something!
Get out start a community. If one already exists join it. Find ways to improve your community.
Go vegan.
There are so many things you can do. Don’t accept doing nothing, be a stubborn fuck and do something to alleviate the sadness.
“There are so many things you can do. Don’t accept doing nothing, be a stubborn fuck and do something to alleviate the sadness.”
Good words to live by. :)
Go vegan.
Any climate activist who isn’t vegan is just a virtue signalling poser.
if it were effective at reducing industrial impacts you might be right.
spotted the valor stealing hypocrite
