this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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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?

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[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

seeing your post then this scumbag back to back really hits...: https://lemmy.ml/post/19412006

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] djsaskdja@reddthat.com 3 points 1 year ago
[–] bizarroland@fedia.io 3 points 1 year ago

I'm taking a nihilistic approach to it.

I turn off the lights when I leave a room. I'm conscientious about my water usage. I recycle.

When I find that a company is a mass polluter, I do everything in my power to not give them any of my money.

I'm doing my part.

The fact is every human being on the planet in their own personal circle could go carbon neutral and climate change would still happen because it is industrial processes and commercial shipping that are driving the great majority of carbon and methane release in the atmosphere.

It's not anything that you or I are doing, or rather, in the scheme of things what we are doing is negligible, easily absorbed by the natural cleaning processes of the planet like trees and algae and rain and time.

Our current system has incentivized pollution. There's no amount of personal choice that we as individuals can take to stop it.

What we need are politicians who acknowledge the issue and who override the objections of the vocal minority to fix them even at deleterious costs to the economy.

After all, can't have an economy when the world is dead.

[–] pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

I gave up all hope that it's going to turn out all right, and more or less stopped caring

[–] VeganicTankie@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Capitalism is the cause of climate change. Corporations are interested only in max profits. This won't change under capitalist countries, ever. Study socialism and join a local org or party that you ideologically support.

China is controlled by the communist party and its policies aren't driven by short-term profits. There are corporations but they can't go against the interests of the Chinese society, unlike the USA. Look at how China generates more clean energy than the UK total electricity output.

Don't forget to go vegan

[–] arthur@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

I became communist. It does not solve anything, of course, but gave me hope that this dystopian mess that we live in can be solved.

[–] xmunk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Cynicism, trying to do what I can personally, voting and participating in politics, and just fucking hoping we're over estimating the effects or that we'll manage to come up with the political will to mitigate the worse effects.

Also, praying to Cthulhu that boomers hurry the fuck up and kick the bucket... at least the ones that aren't cool.

Looking at Trump's climate priorities (basically, burn as much coal as possible) and the people who support them fills me with disgust... it is as greedy and uncaring as our shitty late stage capitalism and I can't comprehend existing with so little empathy or foresight. The deniers are essentially incomprehensible to me so I avoid them whenever possible and just hope they'll die off faster than sane people.

[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

View the end of humanity as a positive, the suffering machine will be over (at least until it re-evolves).

[–] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Anger, knowing they will get what they deserve more quickly than I initially thought. I'm not thinking about rich celebrities, they are just a few people. There are so many regular people who refused to modify their lifestyle even a little to mitigate the problem. They will suffer alongside me and I find some solace in that.

[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Your analysis is good but you conclusion is ... fucked up.

[–] Frozyre@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] NastyNative@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

You are not alone. The only way to stop it is to go back to regulations. Regulations have been stripped since the 80s. We need to put them all back in place, there is no reason anyone should have that much money. They are going into space and moving bridges so they can fit their yatchs disturbing hard working peoples lives. Capitalism is great but only when it’s regulated. We dont need a formal investigation to know that these people have visions that align and they will fuck everyone for their gain. Also they have underground bunkers ready for anything.

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[–] theilleists@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

100mg of ketamine every day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon.

[–] Kwakigra@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] That_Devil_Girl@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Drunemeton@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“The Skin of Our Teeth” YouTube is a stage play by Thornton Wilder. It highlights humanity’s long and storied history of careening from one disaster to the next. Each time, surviving by…the titular title!

We’ll wait until the last minute, then we’ll literally redefine Heaven and Earth, as we move them, to save ourselves.

We always have, we always will.

So you can wait for that to happen, or you can start right now by getting involved in politics. Be the voice you want to hear, encourage people to vote for candidates that will support legislation to do something about it.

That’s literally the very old saying, “You can be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution.”

[–] sping@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

We're not facing a problem, we're in a predicament.

We always have, we always will

That's a statement of religious faith. We have barely ever even existed so it's plainly nonsense, and there is no rule of the universe that we must continue to exist or that we cannot unfixably destroy our planet's ability to support us. You're just baselessly asserting "they'll think of something".

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[–] mathemachristian@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

by worrying about the rampant militarization and progressively hawkish stance of nato with overt threat towards china and russia and how i could escape this hellhole with my family instead.

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