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"I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous r
by zeruch 4y ago
"I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb."
All of those issues felt less existential (or at least had very clear points of no return that we managed to avoid going over the brink on), and climate change for many, maybe quite reasonably so, feels like we will be the proverbial boiling frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
It feels different because of the complexity and scale is no longer definable or predicated on a clear discrete set of objects (e.g. Nuclear powers, key banking systems, a hot war with defined participants) but is by global definition....everything.
It's abstract yet ever present (e.g. all the recent climate weirdness, and the disasters that have followed, both in terms of pure environmental impacts as well as economic and overall regional stability as byproducts thereof) and that becomes much more difficult to "manage"