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The poor dears! In our day we only had the threat of nuclear war to worry about. And Acid rain. And Chernobyl. And...

• etrautmann 8y ago
  These existential concerns are still relevant, now with climate change too
• PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Apart from being threatened by those and additional dangers, where there used to be "at least" genuine ignorance and hybris, now many people can't even overcome the peer pressure and/or their fear in order to not belittle these things (and that includes pseudo-intellectual rationalizations for not really doing anything, with lip service to "grave concerns" or whatever), and have to pretend to have dreams and successes on solid ground -- when they to are just on a raft cobbled together with duct tape, in an ocean that could be drained as a whole by random strangers before you can say "whoops". I suspect that can make people sick at a level they don't even have access to. I can't "prove this" and I wouldn't even try, but for me personally, the fact that the sun could explode or whatever, and the asinine things people do and go along with, are in completely different ballparks. I can easily make peace with my mortality, I can not make peace with what people do. That's why I think people can become very sick because of what people do, even though everything ends eventually, anyway, regardless of what anyone does. Nuking ourselves, and the suns in the universe giving out, those might have the same end result for us, but it still feels different to think about each scenario. One is a bit sad, but still peaceful, the other is just horrible and insane and leaves a gaping wound.
• rchaud 8y ago
  The "So what? in my day, things were much harder" argument doesn't hold because your parents' generation likely suffered through the Great Depression and WW2. Chernobyl sounds like child's play by comparison.