this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don't get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn't mean there's nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
The bad is starting to look more and more like an impending global societal collapse with every passing day though
Yeah I don't know about "par for the course"
What other generation had the threat of scientifically proven ecological collapse looming over them?
This is a pretty specific thing, but the general "we're all doomed" vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that... well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.
Imagine how you'd feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.
None of this is to say that today's challenges aren't real and serious. Just that we're not the first to face such challenges.
I think the doom is real, but we're all looking at it through 6" x 3" magnifying glasses that condense all the shit into one giant nugget, and then the easy thing is to comment on that nugget because, well it's right there, and last winter was unseasonably warm and there were some pretty catastrophic wildfires, and the ocean is doing weird shit, and it's easy to think that that's all there is, but you can still take a walk in the woods on a sunny day, and say hi to some people, and maybe make a friend.
For now
The greatest and silent generations saw some shit
And the stupid fucks still decided to have kids.
By your logic, the first humans should've stopped having kids and died out the first time they faced any sort of existential issue. Life's hard yo, that doesn't mean it's not worth living.
It really isn't worth living.
No matter how easy, hard, successful or failure of a life you live, the end result is identical.
That's life. What value you assign it is up to you to decide. Philosophy is how I find my value, for others it's religion. Ultimately, that's something you have to figure out for yourself.
oh fuck off with this anti natalist bullshit. do you not watch movies because they have an ending too?
I get to remember that ending.
But go ahead and have kids so you can watch em slave for wage massa, Pay 10 grand a month to rent a Pod, and deal with 150°F winters yeah boiiii life is sooo goOoOd!!!
Fuck outta here, sadist.
Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I'd say this parameter is a little arbitrary.
The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).
In 535AD, during Justinian's reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.
It's not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.
The ozone layer depletion was a very serious threat. The solutions were a lot easier though.
At least for me, that was ongoing when I was in elementary school, so I'd still count that as part of "this generation"
Gen Z and younger at least got to not have to worry about that though, you're right
Find the good in eat. We can finally get rid of society's parasites. Landlords
I mean, they literally thought WW1 and WW2 would start the apocalypse.
Nuclear armageddon was a daily fear of the Cold War, and almost happened several times.
The difference now is that we know all we need to do to ruin Earth for human life is to do nothing.
This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.
The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just "stay calm and carry on", we're totally fucked. Inaction isn't going to save us this time. We can't put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.
I think that's a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.
Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they're largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.
It won't, but it will sustain profits, and that's what terrifies me: we're gonna watch the world burn so some rich bastards get an even better return instead of doing something to save our species. sorry about your future kids, profit margins and people wanting to roll coal seemed more important at the time.
Yeah I think that nails it. That fear of nothing changing except the slow crumble getting worse while we watch more people metaphorically drown in the onslaught of horrors.
Excellent point.
You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn't happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.
Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it's pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that's always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it's not on any scale we haven't been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).
I'm not saying I disagree with you, I'm merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it's by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don't know what we don't know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.
This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It's all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.
I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.
... and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.
Most generations don't need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn't a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we're fucked.
Another thing that is worse is how we havent had anything recently to inspire hope. The Higgs Boson would have been the Millenial/Gen Z equivalent of the moon landing if the public hadn't been so distrusting of physics because of string theory evangelists.
For me, the first world (i.e. the part of the world allied with the US) had a common enemy to get behind and that allowed people to live in peace for 1.5 generations or so. When the USSR collapsed, that bogeyman suddenly disappeared and the infighting started nearly instantly.
I think the Internet is partially to blame.
The negative stuff happening in the world seems to spread so much faster and get so much more publicity that it's easy to end up in a constant negative spiral
Yeah I think you're dead on. I'm evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we've never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.
These days, we're aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don't create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness.. :p
What's interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it's that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won't be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
its literally in their name too: 'baby boomers'. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now
Dunno, man. Boomers in my home country went through such shit time that they think that becoming literal nazis still isn't the worst thing to happen in their lifetime. They did get free housing before that, though, so I'm not sure they actually had it worse overall...