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I find that the impending climate cataclysm is really starting to affect me and my day to day life in the form of crushing depression and anxiety. It's such a h

I find that the impending climate cataclysm is really starting to affect me and my day to day life in the form of crushing depression and anxiety. It's such a huge, nebulous, threatening issue that I can't even begin to think how we go about mitigating it (as preventing it entirely seems like a dead horse to flog at this point). I'd be really curious to know if anyone else is feeling like this? And how you may have gone some way to alleviating it through positive means? I'm always looking for practical things I can do to contribute towards a solution, even if they're small (e.g. vegan diet, strict recycling, cycling/walking nearly everywhere and so on). But it feels like a drop in the ocean. And it's really starting to weigh heavy on me mentally, as trivial as that may seem in the grand scheme of things where the future of our species might be a stake.

mercer 8y ago
I'm doing very few of those things, and while it weighs on me, I think the net effect on my happiness is a drop in the bucket compared to any efforts to affect my direct surroundings positively. Do you do volunteer work, or anything in that direction? It might feel insignificant, but it's important to remember you're human, and likely to be affected more by 'direct' things, however pointless they might seem in the grander scheme. The way I see it, it's a bit like putting on your own oxygen mask first. I've been burned out on working on 'bigger things', and in hindsight I wish I'd made sure to have 'smaller things' alongside to provide me with positive energy.
- ablation 8y ago
  You make a good point. I think most of the paralysis and dread I feel comes from the fact that this is such a huge issue. I've applied to volunteer at some conservation charities (Sea Shepherd, etc.) and am waiting to hear back how I can be useful to them. I just can't shake the dread and negativity that comes over me whenever I think about it.
androidgirl 8y ago
I'm also really starting to feel the weight of it. I collect fossils, and it recently crossed my mind that the coral fossils in my collection may be all that's left of corals by the end of my lifespan. I've also given up on the idea of raising children, as much as I want to be a mother, because it doesn't seem right. It's a heavy weight, what helps me avoid it is just immersing myself in work. Hardly positive.
- ablation 8y ago
  I feel the same on the raising children point. I want to be a father, and my wife wants children too, but I feel as though it would be unfair - cruel, perhaps - to bring them into a society that could be a generation or two away from collapse. What sort of future would they have? It's a wrenching argument I have with myself that eats away at me deeply.
rv-de 8y ago
I totally understand your feelings. My main approach is that I try to embrace and accept doom. It's going to come anyway. I also don't believe there is any real value in a survival of the human race. The end was always going to come - and it actually will. For individuals today, for families tomorrow and for society next week. I don't know if this way of thinking works when you have children, though. I don't have. And I assume then by principle of induction your chronological horizon of relevance is approaching infinity. Psychologically it is soothing to live by the concept of being the change you want to see in the world.
Diederich 8y ago
Pardon the wall of text. This ended up being longer than expected; jump to the bottom for the concrete suggestions if you want to skip the personal context that follows. > anyone else is feeling like this I've been closely following environmental concerns for a couple of decades now; over 15 years ago, I felt there was a non-trivial (and ever growing) chance that the climate would, in my lifetime, end the lives of at least hundreds of millions of people. I posted about it on LiveJournal early in the millennium. > crushing depression and anxiety Unlike most, my struggle with negative emotions around this topic started in full force at a time when the science was far less certain than it is now. That always presented me a useful mental backstop: overriding negative emotions with the understanding that my intuitions were not strongly correlated and cross verified. So I went forward, keeping an eye on things, but assuming that my emotional conclusions were going to be proven wrong. This is, I suppose, a concrete form of manufactured hope. (A lot of the collapse obsessed crowd use the term 'hopium'. The urban dictionary definition doesn't quite convey the meaning expressed.) When I was in my teens and twenties, I was very environmentally focused, but it was all fairly local stuff. I worked with Greenpeace and Earth First for example. As the possibilities of a future systemic collapse increased over time, and I started a family, I released my passion for local environmental concerns, exchanging it for a passion to maximize chances for the best possible outcomes for my family, especially my son. That remains my strategic passion. From some people's perspectives, it is selfish, and I understand that point of view. Based on my ongoing research and readings, the probability for civilization ending climate change in the next 30 years might be passing 50%. The story we're responding to here is one of many. If you look deeper, you will find that a growing percentage of climate scientists have passed the point of 'frantic' and are now entering the realm of depression and intellectually paralyzing anxiety. etc etc etc. TL;DR: ....how do I maintain a positive mental state? It's not easy, but I am pretty successful at it. Many sibling replies are concrete, practical and useful, so consider those. My passion for coming up with to protect my family's future is my take on that. I'll just add a few paragraphs of perspective, which is, for me, the most potent tool. I know nothing to very little about the people who post on Hacker News. Even given that lack of information, I'll comfortably insist that each of us here has at least a 90% chance of living better, more comfortable, more healthy, more amazing lives over the next 20 years than 99.9% of all humans who have ever lived, including those alive today. That is my perspective: no matter what happens in the future, I have lived and will most likely continue to live (for quite a few years) a life of enormous beauty and possibilities. Unless (though well informed!) depression and anxiety about possible futures fucks it up for me. Also: there's still a very good chance that the terrible futures we're concerned about won't come to pass, either for heretofore unknown natural reasons, or perhaps because we talking monkeys will get our shit together and start fixing things. (For the record: I don't have any solid ideas about what those fixes might be or how they might play out, but that is a limit on my own imagination and understanding, not on possible realities.) In short: I'm aware of no ways that crushing anxiety and depression will improve my life.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
No, I really don't have these big feels about this. I have a totally different set of big feels. I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I eat less meat than most Americans and have for a long time. I have few possessions. I have a serious medical condition, as does one of my sons, that is supposed to cost $100k+ annually for medical care alone (for each of us). Pursuing alternative remedies has eliminated all medical expenses and also dramatically reduced other costs, such as food expenses, because my body works better these days. Me and my sons being healthier saves us and the world millions of dollars over our lifetimes. And if you assume the cost of that medical care in any way correlates to burden on the earth's resources, then presumably we have shrank our environmental footprint tremendously. So I'm making as much difference as I think I can make on a personal level. I do wonder if I can make a difference more out in the world, but that seems very unlikely. I'm an environmental studies major, though I never completed my degree. I would like to do more, career-wise, about environmental issues. But I have a very serious credibility problem. I was a homemaker for a lot of years, so, clearly, I can't know dirt, never mind my 6 years of college and 5+ years at a corporate job. People think I'm making up the whole 'I have a dread disease and I'm getting well with diet and lifestyle' thing. Etc. ad nauseum. I occasionally start little websites to try to put out good info that's actionable for individuals and blah blah blah. It never gets any real traction. I don't get taken seriously and can't further develop anything since I don't have engagement. I'm basically talking to myself in my little corner of the internet like a crazy person, which does not lead to anything of substance. I made my peace a long time ago with the fact that I can only do as much as I can do. The road needs to rise up to meet me. There has to be fertile ground or it won't go anywhere, no matter how awesome the seeds of ideas are. At this point, it's a bit hard for me to really get all upset about this in part because I was treated so horribly by so many people while I was homeless. The world didn't give a flying fuck about me and often heaped verbal abuse upon me on top of callous indifference under circumstances where that callous indifference should have helped land me in a grave. It didn't. I'm still here. But I kind of feel like if people really are this desperate, then they can try "the crazy thing" and maybe wonder if that woman with that incredulous story isn't just full of shit and maybe has something to contribute. And if people would rather hurtle to their doom than consider the possibility that I know something useful, whatevs. We are all just dust in the wind anyway. And karma can be a bitch, I hear. (shrug)
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
I person stopped caring and I think many people are starting to feel the same. While the issues are the most important to our lives and future generations, I feel totally hopeless in humanity. We simply cannot and will not organize on a broad enough level to do anything about it. It will probably take a series of miracles to make any serious impact on improving our situation even though solutions are dead simple. One google search will turn up many viable solutions to global warming but since we are dealing with deeply flawed creatures called humans, we are screwed. At this point, I don’t know that I care at all. I will die. My offspring will die. Perhaps human extinction is the ultimate cleansing that needs to happen. But then again, who cares if Earth remains habitable. Who cares if by some odd chance the only planet in the universe to support complex life (highly unlikely) loses that life? What are we on universal scale if NOTHING. perhaps a being that cannot stop a stoppable and foreseeable suffering should seize to exist. Isn’t this what evolution is all about? The fit survive the unfit parish. Don’t get me wrong, I love my fellow human beings. We have overcome some amazing challenges on personal and societal scales but perhaps we have met one we are not capable of overcoming? 1 or 0, we struck out.
abootstrapper 8y ago
Read Hans Rosling’s ”Factfullness.” It’s the antidote to that crushing feeling of hopelessness. Though admittedly, it feels like I need to constantly reread it to stay hopeful.
- skosch 8y ago
  Unfortunately, Hans Rosling's research has dealt with the last few decades, which saw massive socioeconomic improvements that humanity bought on environmental credit. The next few decades are going to be about whether or not we will be able to pay back that debt.

mercer 8y ago

I'm doing very few of those things, and while it weighs on me, I think the net effect on my happiness is a drop in the bucket compared to any efforts to affect my direct surroundings positively. Do you do volunteer work, or anything in that direction? It might feel insignificant, but it's important to remember you're human, and likely to be affected more by 'direct' things, however pointless they might seem in the grander scheme. The way I see it, it's a bit like putting on your own oxygen mask first. I've been burned out on working on 'bigger things', and in hindsight I wish I'd made sure to have 'smaller things' alongside to provide me with positive energy.

ablation 8y ago
You make a good point. I think most of the paralysis and dread I feel comes from the fact that this is such a huge issue. I've applied to volunteer at some conservation charities (Sea Shepherd, etc.) and am waiting to hear back how I can be useful to them. I just can't shake the dread and negativity that comes over me whenever I think about it.

androidgirl 8y ago

I'm also really starting to feel the weight of it. I collect fossils, and it recently crossed my mind that the coral fossils in my collection may be all that's left of corals by the end of my lifespan. I've also given up on the idea of raising children, as much as I want to be a mother, because it doesn't seem right. It's a heavy weight, what helps me avoid it is just immersing myself in work. Hardly positive.

ablation 8y ago
I feel the same on the raising children point. I want to be a father, and my wife wants children too, but I feel as though it would be unfair - cruel, perhaps - to bring them into a society that could be a generation or two away from collapse. What sort of future would they have? It's a wrenching argument I have with myself that eats away at me deeply.

rv-de 8y ago

I totally understand your feelings. My main approach is that I try to embrace and accept doom. It's going to come anyway. I also don't believe there is any real value in a survival of the human race. The end was always going to come - and it actually will. For individuals today, for families tomorrow and for society next week. I don't know if this way of thinking works when you have children, though. I don't have. And I assume then by principle of induction your chronological horizon of relevance is approaching infinity. Psychologically it is soothing to live by the concept of being the change you want to see in the world.

Diederich 8y ago

Pardon the wall of text. This ended up being longer than expected; jump to the bottom for the concrete suggestions if you want to skip the personal context that follows. > anyone else is feeling like this I've been closely following environmental concerns for a couple of decades now; over 15 years ago, I felt there was a non-trivial (and ever growing) chance that the climate would, in my lifetime, end the lives of at least hundreds of millions of people. I posted about it on LiveJournal early in the millennium. > crushing depression and anxiety Unlike most, my struggle with negative emotions around this topic started in full force at a time when the science was far less certain than it is now. That always presented me a useful mental backstop: overriding negative emotions with the understanding that my intuitions were not strongly correlated and cross verified. So I went forward, keeping an eye on things, but assuming that my emotional conclusions were going to be proven wrong. This is, I suppose, a concrete form of manufactured hope. (A lot of the collapse obsessed crowd use the term 'hopium'. The urban dictionary definition doesn't quite convey the meaning expressed.) When I was in my teens and twenties, I was very environmentally focused, but it was all fairly local stuff. I worked with Greenpeace and Earth First for example. As the possibilities of a future systemic collapse increased over time, and I started a family, I released my passion for local environmental concerns, exchanging it for a passion to maximize chances for the best possible outcomes for my family, especially my son. That remains my strategic passion. From some people's perspectives, it is selfish, and I understand that point of view. Based on my ongoing research and readings, the probability for civilization ending climate change in the next 30 years might be passing 50%. The story we're responding to here is one of many. If you look deeper, you will find that a growing percentage of climate scientists have passed the point of 'frantic' and are now entering the realm of depression and intellectually paralyzing anxiety. etc etc etc. TL;DR: ....how do I maintain a positive mental state? It's not easy, but I am pretty successful at it. Many sibling replies are concrete, practical and useful, so consider those. My passion for coming up with to protect my family's future is my take on that. I'll just add a few paragraphs of perspective, which is, for me, the most potent tool. I know nothing to very little about the people who post on Hacker News. Even given that lack of information, I'll comfortably insist that each of us here has at least a 90% chance of living better, more comfortable, more healthy, more amazing lives over the next 20 years than 99.9% of all humans who have ever lived, including those alive today. That is my perspective: no matter what happens in the future, I have lived and will most likely continue to live (for quite a few years) a life of enormous beauty and possibilities. Unless (though well informed!) depression and anxiety about possible futures fucks it up for me. Also: there's still a very good chance that the terrible futures we're concerned about won't come to pass, either for heretofore unknown natural reasons, or perhaps because we talking monkeys will get our shit together and start fixing things. (For the record: I don't have any solid ideas about what those fixes might be or how they might play out, but that is a limit on my own imagination and understanding, not on possible realities.) In short: I'm aware of no ways that crushing anxiety and depression will improve my life.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

No, I really don't have these big feels about this. I have a totally different set of big feels. I gave up my car more than a decade ago. I eat less meat than most Americans and have for a long time. I have few possessions. I have a serious medical condition, as does one of my sons, that is supposed to cost $100k+ annually for medical care alone (for each of us). Pursuing alternative remedies has eliminated all medical expenses and also dramatically reduced other costs, such as food expenses, because my body works better these days. Me and my sons being healthier saves us and the world millions of dollars over our lifetimes. And if you assume the cost of that medical care in any way correlates to burden on the earth's resources, then presumably we have shrank our environmental footprint tremendously. So I'm making as much difference as I think I can make on a personal level. I do wonder if I can make a difference more out in the world, but that seems very unlikely. I'm an environmental studies major, though I never completed my degree. I would like to do more, career-wise, about environmental issues. But I have a very serious credibility problem. I was a homemaker for a lot of years, so, clearly, I can't know dirt, never mind my 6 years of college and 5+ years at a corporate job. People think I'm making up the whole 'I have a dread disease and I'm getting well with diet and lifestyle' thing. Etc. ad nauseum. I occasionally start little websites to try to put out good info that's actionable for individuals and blah blah blah. It never gets any real traction. I don't get taken seriously and can't further develop anything since I don't have engagement. I'm basically talking to myself in my little corner of the internet like a crazy person, which does not lead to anything of substance. I made my peace a long time ago with the fact that I can only do as much as I can do. The road needs to rise up to meet me. There has to be fertile ground or it won't go anywhere, no matter how awesome the seeds of ideas are. At this point, it's a bit hard for me to really get all upset about this in part because I was treated so horribly by so many people while I was homeless. The world didn't give a flying fuck about me and often heaped verbal abuse upon me on top of callous indifference under circumstances where that callous indifference should have helped land me in a grave. It didn't. I'm still here. But I kind of feel like if people really are this desperate, then they can try "the crazy thing" and maybe wonder if that woman with that incredulous story isn't just full of shit and maybe has something to contribute. And if people would rather hurtle to their doom than consider the possibility that I know something useful, whatevs. We are all just dust in the wind anyway. And karma can be a bitch, I hear. (shrug)

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago

I person stopped caring and I think many people are starting to feel the same. While the issues are the most important to our lives and future generations, I feel totally hopeless in humanity. We simply cannot and will not organize on a broad enough level to do anything about it. It will probably take a series of miracles to make any serious impact on improving our situation even though solutions are dead simple. One google search will turn up many viable solutions to global warming but since we are dealing with deeply flawed creatures called humans, we are screwed. At this point, I don’t know that I care at all. I will die. My offspring will die. Perhaps human extinction is the ultimate cleansing that needs to happen. But then again, who cares if Earth remains habitable. Who cares if by some odd chance the only planet in the universe to support complex life (highly unlikely) loses that life? What are we on universal scale if NOTHING. perhaps a being that cannot stop a stoppable and foreseeable suffering should seize to exist. Isn’t this what evolution is all about? The fit survive the unfit parish. Don’t get me wrong, I love my fellow human beings. We have overcome some amazing challenges on personal and societal scales but perhaps we have met one we are not capable of overcoming? 1 or 0, we struck out.

abootstrapper 8y ago

Read Hans Rosling’s ”Factfullness.” It’s the antidote to that crushing feeling of hopelessness. Though admittedly, it feels like I need to constantly reread it to stay hopeful.

skosch 8y ago
Unfortunately, Hans Rosling's research has dealt with the last few decades, which saw massive socioeconomic improvements that humanity bought on environmental credit. The next few decades are going to be about whether or not we will be able to pay back that debt.