picture unrelated but it makes me happy to look at
climate doomerism
How do you cope with the impending climate collapse? I try so hard to just keep on going one day at a time but sometimes I get so deep in the darkness I have to go out and grab a coffee or something to keep my kid from seeing my mood and asking what's wrong.
I don't see the world being a good place for them to live by the time they're an adult and I feel intense guilt for bringing them into such a world. I've got plenty of arguments against antinatalism, I have plenty of theoretical reasons why people should continue to have children (only the fash having kids seems like a bad thing) but at the end of the day I feel like they will resent having been born when they find out that I was well aware of the state of the world at the time.
Sorry for the bad vibes.
If you don't have kids and reply I might get upset but I'll try to just ignore you
I've been in the doomer position with this in the past, but with time I've also chosen to consider the way nature and humans as a part of it are far more resilient than we think. I mean I know we are fucked, but nobody knows what will happen. How we might adapt or survive.
And that there has always been struggle, but people have still been born, lived and loved, died. Some young and some old, but living and being human is alone "worth it". Basically life is shit, but without shit no flowers would ever grow.
And to be fair these existential crisis are in many ways beyond our control so we can only work with what we can actually do, locally and side by side with our comrades. It's both very real and not real for the everyday life.
My kid has grown up into a wonderful human who wants to change the world for the better. The world is better with him in it is my very biased opinion. He has hope so I try to have it too.
But the struggle remains the same as it has always been, we work to change this, we never stop. If we fail, we at least tried. Everybody dies, what matters is the trying. Cringy as it may be.
People in war zones wake up every day and go on living and have kids, that is how we are.
Something for me to really chew on. Obviously i know this inherently but it's truly a testament to, as you said, resilience of the human spirit. Thank you for the reply.
I’ve been struggling a lot lately with feeling like everything’s going to hell, and it feels a bit embarrassing to admit, but your comment actually got me a little teary. You hit on a lot of issues I’ve been struggling with in a very realistic way.
My dad had an incredibly doomed outlook on life, and spent most of my childhood either sombrely telling me he regret having children because the world was terrible and only getting worse, or howling about how the four horsemen were coming and we would burn because we were all sinners. I don’t want to pass the fear and hopelessness that his way of thinking and acting instilled in me onto my son, and it's a strong motivator to work on my mindset. Like you, I’m of the biased opinion that the world is a better place with my son in it, and I want him to grow up knowing I feel that way, and with hope of making meaningful change, rather than being paralysed into inaction right from the get go.
I’m slowly reaching a place where l can let myself feel the disappointment and fear, but try to counter it with the knowledge that feeling totally hopeless means I won’t make any good change, however small. It's reassuring to know so many of us are together in those feelings, but persevere regardless.
For me a lot of the despair is actually grief, sadness and also legitimate anger at how the generations past have let it come to this. Just last night before bed this incredible very abnormal snowfall started where I live and I felt that deep grief and anger. The feeling of powerlesness and inability to change this is tied to it. It's the struggle under the dictatorship of the few that you feel in your gut.
And the backdrop to that is the deep love and affection I feel for my kid, the way I desperarely want the world to be better for him and for all kids and all people. It's the disappoinment and anger I often feel towards people like my own parents who lived in a very "fuck you got mine" way and then resorted to apathy and nihilims and saying shit like "it's the job of the next generations to save us". I get why they are like this, but I refuse to accept it. They should have known better, there is always a choice to do better.
These boomers and liberty hippies have passed on this vibe of how history has ended and now we are all to just slowly learn to accept suffering and decline. It's a part of the same capitalist crap that told budding Marx readers like me that I am an utopian idealist and how stuff like that would never work "in the real world". Everything and everyone around us is programmed to dooming like this and that is why nothing ever changes. And it's no wonder it feels desperate sometimes, we are told constantly that it is. The most popular scifi is dystopian, we are fed stories with bad endings day in and day out.
Take away peoples hope, you take away a lot of what makes us human. The ruling class gets this imo.
Solidarity.