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 am grieving hard, and grief includes a lot of different feelings and experiences. Yes, there is depression, but there is also anger and reflection and the chance to find joy amidst the horror. My priorities have changed. I used to want to leave a legacy for the next generation; now I want to live in defiance of the evils that have ravaged our beautiful planet. Fuck billionaires, politicians, and cowardly centrist news outlets. Fuck them in perpetuity, until they rot away in their apocalypse bunkers. I will burn bright and hot to the end–that will be my legacy.
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
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.
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
I realized I was anxious about climate change because I was depressed and not the other way around. I cannot change the world radically but I can do my part, convince others to do the same, vote for the right politicians, pressure companies and politicians to act for climate change… In a nutshell I can do a lot and being depressed or anxious doesn’t help
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.
seeing your post then this scumbag back to back really hits…: https://lemmy.ml/post/19412006
You could put more efforts towards making a systemic change rather than just affecting your own life. Protests, promoting green things at your workplace, outreach and education, etc. It’s been ingrained that individuals are the problem and they they should recycle more at home and create less waste but the root is always on things being unregulated. Even if you sacrifice some individual benefits you have been at a small systematic change would likely have a much bigger impact.
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.
View the end of humanity as a positive, the suffering machine will be over (at least until it re-evolves).
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The thing about recycling is, that it is only the second 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…
I gave up all hope that it’s going to turn out all right, and more or less stopped caring
