A quote: "I am having an increasingly difficult time convincing myself that it's worth doing anything about, because everyone is being ridiculous." Indeed they

A quote: "I am having an increasingly difficult time convincing myself that it's worth doing anything about, because everyone is being ridiculous." Indeed they are. But there's a flaw in your thinking. The people you see around you are the offspring of people who, when confronted with perfectly terrible circumstances -- starvation, disease, the cruelty of nature -- said, "Hey -- let's make babies!" The many others who reacted to the mindlessness and cruelty of the universe by deciding not to produce more suffering, who chose not to have children, by so doing eliminated themselves from the equation. We don't get to meet those who acted reasonably in an unreasonable universe, we only meet those who decided to commit themselves to increase the world's level of suffering. The Nazis, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, between them murdered about 40 million people, often in the most horrible ways, and rationalized their behavior in various twisted ways. People are able to read the history of (as just one example) the Holocaust, where perfectly acceptable, intelligent people were rounded up and systematically murdered in the millions, and when they get done reading this terrible history, people decide to make babies. It's the children of those paragons of rationality we see around us. So I have to ask -- why are you surprised by the outcome?