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Meh. These "tragedies" are often irrelevant and often the only time you will ever encounter them will be in some news article written by a hand-wringing doomer.

Meh. These "tragedies" are often irrelevant and often the only time you will ever encounter them will be in some news article written by a hand-wringing doomer. Willfully ignoring the news is amazing for mental health. The benefit of cutting the constant stream of doomerism out of one's life cannot be overstated - it's a benefit that far exceeds whatever minimal value to society you could provide by tuning into the news.

rocqua 5y ago
Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law. That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet. These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly. How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
- helloworld11 5y ago
  Also speaking from a European perspective. Virtually all of those problems you mention do exist to some extent, but have existed in many worse forms before. Life in Europe is today objectively, by almost all objective measures, better than at any time in its very long history and it continues to improve in most ways (even with events like the Ukraine invasion). In case you do have children, barring a truly black swan type catastrophe, the overwhelming likelihood is that their contexts when they're adults, in Europe or otherwise, will be still better than those of us today. It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.

rocqua 5y ago

Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law. That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet. These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly. How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?

helloworld11 5y ago
Also speaking from a European perspective. Virtually all of those problems you mention do exist to some extent, but have existed in many worse forms before. Life in Europe is today objectively, by almost all objective measures, better than at any time in its very long history and it continues to improve in most ways (even with events like the Ukraine invasion). In case you do have children, barring a truly black swan type catastrophe, the overwhelming likelihood is that their contexts when they're adults, in Europe or otherwise, will be still better than those of us today. It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.