JTGT

Amused to death, shrugged to extinction

The "problem" is that it feels still too far away. People hear and see a bit of extremes here and there, maybe experience something bad themselves, but then it seems to go back to "normal". Most importantly, as everything around us continues with "normal" - we go to work, we shop, the Oscars are still being held, the celebrities still do their thing, sport teams still win and loose, news report on everything else, while the neighbors and friends still travel to the other end of the world, the stock market continues to rise, shopping centers are still full of food, gas is still guzzling at the station - people disconnect from the threat. Everyone still going full speed, why should I change? And then also - what should I change, after changing light bulbs, recycling and using compostable straws doesn't seem to make a dent?
That is the real issue. This society consumes, consumes a lot, and as life quality grows everywhere, even the little and not so little improvements rebound. It can't stop. It can't imagine "safe" levels. Even less transition to them. The opposite is true, everyone wants to live lavish lives, or at least "comfy". Bling bling is the ideal, just watch social networks and music idols. And thus so we continue. Until we can't anymore. But that feels so still far away. And then it's too late.

I'm for the jobs the boil-off will create.

Honestly? There's really nothing you or I can do. All you can do is enjoy life. Spend time doing the things you like, and that will make you a better you. Find a hobby that makes your life or the lives of other brighter. Plant a tree, grow vegetables. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Be kind to everyone. Even the billionaires locked inside their doom-bunkers can't outlast a full collapse.
Be good to yourself and to others.

It's nobody's fault, and it's everybody's fault. Humanity killed itself, over millennia of subtle evolution, adaptations, societal shifting of values and purposes.
We should hate all of our ancestors, as well as descendants, for as much as necessary to shift away from our fatal flaw of planet-destroying, self-destructive means.
I think that as we all begin to see and realize that we're all connected and erroneous in loathing ourselves and not fixing our issues, we'll continue to not fix the problem.
There's only a handful of people that could even rebuild the automobile factories, were they all to be sabotaged, hypothetically. Even now, most people don't know how to service and maintain automobiles, computers or cell phones, yet we all rely on them for daily assistance.
Everything is borked.
Venus by Saturday.

The brutal truth is that there's no point in life. We're playing lifetime Tic-Tac-Toe. There are no winners. You don't get a brass ring. Some people turn to (or are force-fed) religion to give meaning. Some people don't even think about whether there's a meaning. Some people just exist because of momentum. And they don't want to hurt anyone. Even though the hurt, on a universal timeline, would be like a duck-fart in the biggest hurricane imaginable.
If I could actually wrap my head around the fact that the hurt I would cause by disappearing would be ephemeral, like life itself, I'd be gone in a heartbeat. But even I can't rationalize hurting people I love, even momentarily (in the sense of the age of the universe).

It is sad that you realize we do, in fact, have it better than every other human to live, despite living in awful times.
As you go back, medical care gets worse, technology becomes more boring and less usable, racism and misogyny gets worse, child abuse gets worse, domestic abuse gets worse, bullying gets worse, general drug use gets worse, kidnapping-related crimes get worse, murders get worse and often go unpunished due to a lack of tech, homophobia gets worse, transphobia gets worse, and so much more.
So you can always find comfort in the fact that, despite everything, we are the peak of humanity, and we are doing better than everyone before us.

I don't pity those children at all, but I wish them well, even though I don't think I will have children myself because I'm a very paranoid person.
Human emotions are complex; maybe the world will suffer 10-20 years from now, but that doesn't mean those people won't find their own happiness in this suffering world. Some of them will thrive more than others. I just hope that their parents equip them well enough with the correct attitude and skills needed to go through a worsening world environment.

"REVERSE OSMOSIS" Nice, where the fuck am I gonna put that in my miniature rental unit that's smaller than most prison cells after not eating for 3 weeks to afford a setup? What about the plastic tubes that were cheaper for my landlord and companies to make that supply the same sink I do everything in my 5 foot by 5 foot washroom like it's Beijing.
Ah right, I'm totally unimportant in a world so fucking overstimulated, overindulged and overpopulated that everybody is just a number. If you fuck up, just pop out somebody else to somehow right all the wrongs you did along the way.
Don't mind me. I'll drink the plastics and die, and in the time I'm dying from the pollution in a few decades, if I'm lucky; I'll profusely say sorry as I waste away from inevitable cancer. How fucking dare I take up a bed? They'll probably just turn off the machine and toss me in a mass grave.
Just get up by your bootstraps and join in on the economic corruption. Do every mistake that lead us right to this moment in time. Ignore history, ignore everything but your base instincts; instincts that haven't been useful for so many fucking years because we can't see past anything but how things are; because nobody wants to be on this side of the fence, but it's the only side of the fence that gets to sleep with a conscience left.
Soldiers are supposed to tell you some epic story about who they killed, but a doctor who did a bad prescription is offended if you ask them, "Who did you kill?" -- the politicians get even more defensive; and the average has more excuses than there are people alive. And are quick to point to a "bigger fish" to avoid the truth of their participation in the school. Offload all self-participation with justifications on as to why you perpetuate it.
How many people have died from this kind of pollution? Where is that data? And who would fund that Data? -- who's taking a product off the shelf? Who's changing anything beyond getting rid of the last shipment to do the same shit the next day? Who isn't HUSTLING? Who preaches LESS IS MORE? Fucking nobody. People treat their pets better than they do other people.
Don't look up. Don't look down. Don't look left. Don't look right.

I was in "fuck it, let's just go extinct and get it over with" GigaDoomer Universal Suicidality for a long, long time. I've been on an internal path ever since. In a way, I think we all have to be on an internal path before we can really go on any external path. I fell into ancient Stoic philosophy, and it has been enormously helpful because it reminds me of a few things. 1) There are limits on your own reach. Wishing that you could be the hero, but the martyr who saves the world will never make it so. Look for what you can do, not what you wish you could do. 2) You have certain duties simply by virtue of being alive and a human being. You have a duty to care for yourself and those in your circle. 3) Everything in the universe is connected. Each of us is part of the larger whole. When you imagine yourself as just one moving part of a massive cosmic machine that has been running for billions of years, it takes the pressure off.

Basically, I am figuring out ways to convince myself that humanity will survive in some way and in some form no matter what happens, and by committing myself to doing right by the other lives that my life touches, I can do my part to bend the arc of the future toward real justice. p>

Yeah, no kids for me. I know where this planet and society are headed. It’s not the time to be building a family, if you ask me. We’re gonna have a hard time preserving ourselves as it is.

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades... the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of some conditions that exist in today’s society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."

This is completely backwards, climate change is a given, that war was lost without a single shot being fired

I don't believe having kids now is ethical because I know that child will experience a substantially worse life than I did, quite possibly horrific. I don't want that guilt on me. Having children would be selfish because I would get what I wanted, but doom them in the bargain to a life full of suffering.

I'm for the jobs a 2c world will provide.

We're so fucked lol

I'm at the age where I would like to start a family, but if I don't really want to be here and am afraid and informed of what's coming down the pipe, then why on earth would I bring another soul into this matrix to suffer?

I would imagine YMMV based on socioeconomic class, but I think of it like this.

If you are in the wealthy class, then I would expect your “tiredness” is associated with the fact that (1) you have access, in ways like never before, to essentially anything you would ever desire; the fatigue is likely due to a total lack of challenge. The novelty likely wears off quick when you realize (2) most people can't “come with” you on your journey through excess, so you become more lonely as a result. And of course (3) that means you have to constantly reinvent yourself and make new friends, which results in a bit of a mono-culture of people surrounding you, with little variance in attitudes or such.

For those in the “middle” class, it would be that the “tiredness” is associated with the slippage of access. (1) Everything is more expensive, and things you may have aspired to your whole life are becoming increasingly out-of-reach (home ownership, retirement, etc). (2) you see people suffering around you, but you can't soften their misery or help them because you are also treading water. (3) Acute awareness of the social divide likely forces you to take stock of which “class” you are actually in, and the dissonance likely sets in, perpetuating misery.

For those in the “low” class though, it's a different type of tired. (1) You are probably just actually mentally, and physically exhausted from having to work 2+ jobs. (2) You have no time available; not for yourself, not for your friends, not for your family, not for your hobbies. This abandonment of “self” results in a total departure from a shared identity; you are in survival mode. (3) You are actively watching those around you get consumed by the system; be it poverty, homelessness, death, sickness/ailments you can't treat, etc; people in your life are dead/dying as a disproportionate rate.

All of this fatigue is further magnified via (1) algorithms trying to showcase you what you like via various platforms based on your personality. However, while you like these things, you can never actual use/realize them as a result of aforementioned tiredness. Then you discover through (2) social media how great it appears everyone else's lives are, despite the fact that it's all captured to be as appealing as possible. You only see success outcomes, never success preparation. And then you feel insane, because (3) the dissonance between how YOU live and perceive the world is basically battered down by the actual media and news pundits. You think the world is going to shit, but then you hear anchors talking about “robust and resilient economies”, you see people around you losing jobs while HEARING about how great the jobs market is, you experience pain at every interaction of purchasing in society but are TOLD that inflation is over and things are fine. You then realize that, no matter what anyone tells you, this society is first and foremost about #1, and folks like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the constant, endless reminder that this is the world you live in, and these are the people who run it.

“Tiredness” might not be the right word, but it does encapsulate that sentiment of hopelessness and despair, broadly, better than most.

Science has treated extending the duration of life as the goal rather than improving the quality of life, and so it has produced a glut of extra years of life with nothing left to live for. We should be aiming for longer stretches of quality living in good health, with the option of a peaceful sendoff at the end, before things become miserable.

Are you saying this so called collapse of the biosphere will effect my quarterly profits?

Yeah ok, it's a bit of a problem not being able to breathe or drink water but our GDP growth is the real concern.

I'm 23 and have more or less given up on a decent future. As far as I see it, right now is more or less the peak of my life, and I've got 3-5 more years before shit really starts hitting the fan. As for what I'm doing about it, I'm mostly just trying to live in the moment and focus on what matters most to me, namely, friends, family, and building community. I am also way less invested in my job, despite currently working in a relatively high-paying field (software / tech). Some part of me wants to save up enough money to fuck off into the woods, but I know I can't survive alone, and as it stands now, I don't have the resources or community to start an off-grid commune. Gonna keep living in the moment and hopefully have a few more good years before I'm really struggling to survive. There is no chance I have kids, and my biggest hope now is that my parents will still be able to retire and enjoy the rest of their time on earth, even if my future won't be as good as theirs.

The important thing is that the ones making the decisions to cook the world are also making a LOT of money on a balance sheet, and they'll always be able to buy bigger and better AC units.

And we act like this when the lights are on. Imagine how much debauchery and misery will be spread once the power goes out and law disappears.
We're conscious beings living in this reality. Whether this is a gift or a curse is debatable to me at this point, seeing what I've seen.

The French government is afraid of and works for the French populace. Americans are afraid of their government, and with good reason. They don't even pretend to work for us. They serve their donors and only their donors, which are corporations and the .01%. The ruling class has spent 40 years and billions of dollars making sure we are uneducated, docile, and easily swayed by propaganda. That is why the French riot while Americans fight over drag shows and an indicted orange ex game show host.

Yeah, the goal isn't to "Ban TikTok" The goal is to give the government a back-door into every device and screen you use, your phone, PC, tablet, tv, whatever and give them the ability to not only monitor everything you're doing all the time but also remotely remove anything from your device that they don't like. It's the "you get zero privacy on your digital devices and we get to delete/install stuff on your device at any time" law.
And as part of that any attempt to set up a digital device or use a network connection that avoids those back doors is literally illegal, so you're legally required to give up control and let Big Brother into all of your devices and destroy any sense of privacy you might have thought you had. And that's without even worrying about hackers breaching the system to steal all the back door keys so that everyone's complete device hard drives and hardware are available to criminals and spies to be plundered at will. It won't be long before they use this access to spy on you through your camera, listen to you through your microphone, and constantly monitor you for any excuse to charge you with a crime so you can be thrown in prison as slave labor for the Prison Industrial Complex.
The RESTRICT Act is the most dystopian legislation I've ever seen in my life and it's a raw power grab to deny all privacy to every user of technology. And the legislators are selling themselves out as well as their own families by supporting it

"Uh therapist ma'am, I feel like spending half my waking life under the thumb of some asshole, with both of his hands up my ass and in my pocket is a piddling existence not fit for my worst enemy"
"Oh that's ok, you're just bUrNtOuT, you just need to touch grass and rekindle your love of working"
Bring on the nukes! Posadism now!

Millennials and younger have known nothing but war, repeated “once in a life time” economic disasters, an increasingly dire climate crisis, mass extinctions, exponential cost of living increase, and a corrupt plutocratic global capitalist hegemony that is hell bent on further consolidating power and entrenching the status quo. Makes it tough to want to do things like procreate and live into old age.

“Declining air pollution in China, which blocks the sun, was also increasing heating, he said.”
Ah, the world is a complicated place.

We are all pandas in a zoo with captains of industry poking us and telling us to breed and make more pandas for the zoo.

Ain't happening, mate.

Generation Alpha and beyond have absolutely nothing to look forward to. There will be no stable, happy society for that generation when they finally become fully realized adults. Just a lot of suffering, a lot of anger at us older generations, and a lot of heartbreak watching their world slowly end.

He clearly knows like we all do but it's a bridge too far to actually change the economy from neoliberal capitalism although he also states the economy must change. Frankly though I can't imagine people coming together to do what needs to be done. Have humans ever voluntarily changed their whole way of life? When that sort of thing happened historically it was due to outside pressures-like war or drought or something. We are in a catch-22. We have to reorganize our economy and change to de-growth and local sustainable production so we don't collapse, yet that will probably not happen unless we collapse. Can anyone see their way out of this conundrum?

Individualism is the core of capitalism. If you're not ahead of everyone, you're behind someone else. It's a constant rat race to the top, because those left at the bottom have nothing and are seen as nothing. Everything has to be about building individual wealth, so you can actually afford to survive. When does it change?

In retrospect, giving the financial industry the ability to conjure an unlimited amount of money out of nowhere to do whatever they want, may have been a small misstep.

We would rather alter the SUN than end capitalism.
I think we are better off letting humans go extinct. Really.

We can selectively open a micro aperture that will illuminate 2000 square feet anywhere on the earth surface.

We have three plans available:
Bronze tier = enough light to grow plants in your yard
Silver tier = generate ambient heat island effect to raise your surface air temperature 2 degrees Celsius (add-on extra degrees @ $1000/month per each degree)
Gold tier = undimmed light

Act now and we'll throw in a bonus Latitude Modifier™, which uses our proprietary lensing technology to refocus light simulating equatorial exposure levels (available for anyone 50 degrees latitude or lower)

Their plan is hyper inflation causing wage and debt slavery. It's much worse than just a recession. They want everyone to become poor so they can be enslaved more easily. They want to make it so people have to choose between being a slave or starving to death. If people aren't poor, they can resist slavery... And that will get in the way of profit... That's capitalism for you. Capitalism being in favor of most people accumulating money and resources is one of the biggest lies in human history. If you love capitalism, then you better also love being poor and having no freedom otherwise you are living in your own fantasy world.

[historian voice] It has always sucked ass to be alive

I don't understand how one can still consider one's self "revolutionary" after everything one supports is both promoted and encouraged by every single mainstream media outlet, every single mainstream clothing brand, academic institutions, city administrations, governments themselves (although sometimes clearly to a shallow degree because politicians don't believe in anything), and even the church in certain places. Your "acab" and "antifascist action" stickers on your laptop do not make you a morally superior revolutionary hero; you supporting and buying into every single cocksucking narrative shown to you by the latest trendy shows on Netflix do not make you a "critical thinker". Your rainbow-themed shopping bag doesn't make you a brave activist. You are a self-obsessed, narcissistic default product of consumer culture. You don't truly believe in anything because you're not even capable of it. You just suck off the next trend to validate your own petty self.

Everyone has accepted, but won't admit, that we have decided to party off the cliff. We don't wanna give up our current comforts. Life is hard enough for most people, and it's too hard to cooperate in this. We don't care about our kids or the future. We have collectively decided to sacrifice all that to make the most of today.

If these idiots start a global thermonuclear war, I'm going to be really upset.

Ffs there is no pleasing you people. First you complain about police being to passive at Uvalde. Now that they're taking a more active role in murdering children it's still not enough.

What do we have to look forward to?
GTA 6; Mutually Assured Destruction

I've reached a point where I'm so self-aware of the reality of situations that I'm just constantly numb because I know no matter how much people do or say: the people in control and in power positions won't do anything that comes anywhere close enough to help this situation. They do a PR project here and there to make it look like they are getting into addressing the situation, but they aren't. Everything is so slow, so cumbersome, and so tedious with bureaucracy/geopolitical legislation nonsense that it basically makes the simplest, most straight-forward stuff unattainable to achieve. *I swear, a group of normal, average people who are passionate and knowledgeable about things would be a million times better and more efficient at controlling and running this situation than anything we currently have going on in the world.* I'm honestly a very optimistic and dreamy person who loves to think about all these amazing things we COULD do. I just get frustrated with how modern-day society is, honestly. That's all.

The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor

- Voltaire

Gotta love the industrial revolution; humanity has been propelled vastly in a short amount of time, just to stall like a plane and begin crashing down. Exposure to microplastics, metals, and chemicals is absurdly high, and this shit will slowly corrode humans with disabilities and diseases. That's just the cherry on top of everything else going on.

Everything is collapsing, but that's a good thing. We need to resist, consume only what we need, and maybe engage in some amount of geoengineering since we have nothing to lose. Use your endless despair and fight like there is a tomorrow! Love and rage

Ignorance is bliss. Eat your microplastics. Pay your rent. Work to die. Business as usual.

"The planet will survive; the question is, will we?"

None of us will, not into perpetuity. We don't have the tech to terraform a whole planet.
This is extinction, the survival dream is just fantasy. This will wipe us out because the tech we would need to just survive cannot exist in a bubble: raw materials, processing, food, water, machined precision replacement parts, chemical processing, etc.
We live or die together, there is absolutely no escaping it for rich people or those in government. The only way out is to come together, and they will kill us all and themselves before they do that.

"People who have studied been indoctrinated by neoliberal economics will explain that the price we pay is not related simply to the average cost of producing the energy plus a reasonable an unregulated profit, but to the marginal cost of supplying the last most expensive unit and using any excuse to gouge the consumers. If the price of gas goes up, we pay more for energy coming from wind, and so we should be taking to the streets with pitchforks and torches."
Just needed to do some light editing there.

Another good example is just using GDP. The current global GDP is ~$94 Trillion and it needs to grow by around 3%. We need to add $2.8 Trillion in output each year (that compounds), but just next year we need to add the equivalent of an entire French economy. France is a huge landmass, hugely complex, and consumes an insane amount of resources. But we just need to find another one each year forever going forward, and if not, it all comes crashing down. This seems like a completely logical system...

I keep my kid's room 4° C higher than the rest of the house and they are not allowed to use their bathroom sink because I sold those water rights to Nestle. They gotta learn how the world works from an early age.

No problem, some enterprising entrepreneurs will just Techno-Innovate©®™ us into utopia. We'll grow all of our food in labs and warehouses. Where will all the energy and raw materials we'll need come from? Doesn't matter. You see, with Technology©®™ we can just create energy and matter out of nothing. "But wait," you might be asking, "doesn't that violate one of the fundamental laws of the universe?" Don't worry about it, doesn't matter. Nothing can stop Innovation! ©®™

lol capitalism will be over in “2 decades or so” anyway, there will probably scarcely even be fish left in the sea at that point.
If the oceans are doing that bad, imagine what the land is lookin' like...
We're gonna be so upset when we find out firsthand that “Survival of the Fittest” means more cockroaches & molerats than it does man.

You can know the pain is coming, you can understand what pain is, but you are never fully prepared when the pain finally arrives.

Thanks to global warming, micro plastics, pfas and the coming economic collapse I won't live long enough to need to worry about retiring 😎.

The way this is (not) being handled, my next bet is the corporate media just keeps labeling it a gay disease as it spreads to the rest of the population at large. They'll continue to deny, lie, stonewall (pun intended), and gaslight all the while as the far right treats it as a ripe political opportunity to breed anti-LGBT sentiment.
What better way to force gays back in the closet and into straight relationships? Plus, they get the added benefit of a marginally higher birth rate and new parents desperate enough to to accept low-paying shit jobs.
That is until it mutates to something as lethal as the higher mortality strain, or even OG smallpox. Then, with the continued covid immune degradation, a good percentage of us all die and society truly collapses.

"Step 1 in the conservative pandemic playbook is always make it an others disease,
"It's a disease spread by gays/Chinese/African people and I have stopped it by stopping these people!" Is the canned response any Donald Trump type politician would say by a country lead by conservatives.
Eventually though disease spreads because it doesn't care about religion, sexual orientation or race.

"Only gay people get it" is a convenient way for governments to kill 2 birds with 1 stone of one: demonizing a minority group while simultaneously two: downplaying the severity so they don't have to actually act on preventing its spread and potentially damaging ThE eCoNoMy.

Unregulated capitalism says: “Killing customers for profit is totally cool.”

Probably the best thing that could happen for the future is the human species is running out of oil. But a lot of people will suffer in the short term.

I think the big problem, especially with the pandemic now, is that there are no social spaces besides the internet. Most social spaces in my childhood were based on money like going to the mall. Even those are slowly being destroyed. The only free place I can think of are libraries and maybe parks but if you are a teen or brown or something, people might push you out. I would love to quit using insta but that's where I DM my few friends.
Honestly, the most community I feel is on places like the collapse sub or talking to people about current events on twitter or tumblr. I'd love for in-person communities and groups to be as prevalent as they were decades ago, but capitalism will simply not allow that.
Sure constantly hearing the news and reading people's reactions is definitely unhealthy but at least I feel apart of something.

"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."

- William Shakespeare, Richard III

THIS SHIT ISN'T NEW.



We're in a corporate fascism free fall hiding behind a Christian theocracy. Religion has ever been the tool to control the ignorant masses, and slashing education budgets all around the country has ensured the latter half. This has been in the making for some time. Since Reagan I'd imagine.

Can't wait to die in the climate wars. It'll be great remembering all the lying grifting pieces of shit that got us to this point of mass extinction and pain all because of their greed and obsession over a 2000 year old fiction book. Fuck this.

Lol you gotta just laugh at this point. Civilization is absolutely fucked and the only debate at this point is when and not if. This is basically a huge green light for energy generators to pollute at will. They are gonna abandon all pretense for the already weak measures regulating emissions. Anyone who tries to offer optimism with regards to climate change is just a fucking bullshitting liar at this point and I have no more patience for them.

Government: Violence isn't the answer!
Also Government: Uses violence against the people.

We're going to back to the times when state lines determined whether you had human rights.

"Boy everyone in this country is running around yammering about their fucking rights. 'I have a right, you have no right, we have a right.'
Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but... there's no such thing as rights. They're imaginary. We made 'em up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They're just imaginary. They're a cute idea. Cute. But that's all. Cute...and fictional."
"Rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter."

- George Carlin

It may take another 5-10 years but this begins the societal collapse in America. I look at it like our society is a cracked window, and the cracks have been spiderwebbing for decades, today the first big piece of glass fell from the frame.

"Clarence Thomas writes, in a concurring opinion, that the Supreme Court should reconsider Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell — the rulings that now protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage."

They are telling us what comes next. Contraceptives and what little rights queer people have obtained. This isn't going to end there though.

"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"

- Sinclair Lewis

"Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers"

- George Carlin

Jokes on the supreme court, I'd unalive myself before I had a kid. Now you down 2 more essential workers

People need to cut it out with this "by 2050", "by 2100" nonsense. The problem is right now, it's not some far away thing in the future that we don't need to worry about.
But I guess it's pointless to even argue at this point. The oil companies won. Their marketing budgets planted the right seeds and the brains have such deep grooves it's impossible to undo at a mass level.

We currently live in a world of excess and abundance. (for some more than others) but abundance all the same. Austerity is going to hit us hard and will feel very brutal compared to all the stuff we currently have access too.
Food/resource [prices] will continue to go up, utilities (mainly electricity) will start to be rationed/turned off at times. It will be harder and harder to have more. Everyone (besides the uber wealthy) will be downgrading. For those who are already at the bottom, they will start to riot/crime will go up/drug abuse will go up. Natural disasters will hit harder and put more pressure on third world countries, they will start with the first of the real political revolutions. More and more people in climate unstable rural environments will migrate to large cities, putting pressure on their infrastructure. Thus in turn putting pressure on our supply chains that have resources all over the world. Prices for goods will go up even more. Some things will become scarce or impossible to get. The military will most likely be sent out to protect the supply lines in decaying countries.
I live in the PNW why? because we have hydropower and lots of water, even with times of drought, we still have lots of water. The fires will come for forested towns, but our bigger valley cities will be more resilient from climate changes forces. Except for the social havoc, we are already feeling that now.
Collapse is gradual, it'll take time for things to break down. There are a lot of, thankfully? delusional people who will continue the status quo and keep things running until the last second. Keep those wheels chugging. For better or for worse. Find a lifeboat community and a way to keep your expense down. Get a bike/ebike, learn how to grow at least some food/veggies. How to conserve water. How to consume less, how to consume sustainable. Enjoy and be grateful for what you have now.
Civilization has collapsed before and I think has evolved into something better (even with how terrible the world is). We are headed for the dark ages, hopefully a renaissance will brew with technology that is not oil dependent. But before that we will have a lot of death chaos and destruction.
You are actually in a good spot where you are at. Compared to say Africa, Australia, India, Pakistan, or areas of South America. Hot places bound to get hotter with large populations. Those will be some of the first areas to collapse. British columbia won't feel the true intensity of collapse until the effect of those countries start to ripple. When you hear about millions of people dying/becoming destitute/migrating. That's probably when the real extreme climate change's starting point begins. We aren't there yet. Probably will be within your lifetime but not as soon as everyone here would like.

Well, for a while, I've come to the conclusion that while good may not win, evil will always destroy itself
There is something comforting to me, that we may have reached the end of civilization, just as authoritarians have perfected social control.

BOE by 2026. Based on Professor Eliot Jacobson and more.
It's why they are flying empty planes by subsidized airlines: AEROSOL COOLING MUST GO ON!
Fuck.

I feel sad. Maybe a little angry. This Earth is so beautiful. How could we treat our home like that? It's shameful. Its embarrassing. I feel like a kid who knows i fucked up so bad that whatever punishment is coming my way, I will accept.
I feel lied too. I bought into the American dream. We worked our butts off. Always trying to make the next money move. We pay our taxes. We try to be good citizens. We try to be good neighbors, only to feel fucked and taken advantage of at every corner. We bought into the idea that we Americans are the best, we help other people in the world when that's a huge LIE. We aren't a country we are one giant money hungry corporation that will fuck any other poor country over for a thicker bottom line. Who are we any more? We are nasty to each other. We are judgmental rude and hostile to each other!! I don't even recognize my fellow citizens.
We brought three kids into this world. This hostile fucked up world. I can't say I would change a thing because they are our everything but I really had NO idea a decade ago. I was totally still riding the green movement high. Feeling like we were going to make positive changes and the earth would be that utopia I've always dreamed if. But NOPE. My kids will likely be teens when shit goes down at the rate we are going. That is terrifying to me. We are doing our best to teach them self sufficiency survival skills and earth stewardship but the best thing I can give them is mental and spiritual resilience. Acceptance of death and suffering is the first key. Everything falls a way after that and things become much easier to accept as they come. All I know is we will face them together and I'm thankful we have eachother in these times.
Even if it isn't the total apocalypse coming down the line for us the fact that the quality of life for Americans is dwindling is alarming. My fellow spoiled Americans could use a reckoning but the way I've seen some of these people act over their precious steak not being cooked properly at a restaurant......things are going to GO OFF when they realize their entitlement doesn't get them very far when their money doesn't have value and there is no more steak for them.

I love how people don't understand that we are, globally, addicted to our current lifestyle, and that it will take some really horrendous stuff to happen to wake... If we ever do. I want the Star Trek future more than most, and live a pretty environmentally friendly life, but a few billion people are going to die before we change more than a symbolic amount.

If there's anything the ongoing pandemic has taught me, it's that the world will never come together with a single purpose for any reason. The world is too big and diverse, and corporations just want to "get while the gettins good!" It's terribly sad, yes, but humans are generally reactive, not so much pro-active. All I see for the future is bigger social divides, more climate disasters, and more angry reaction by the ever-increasing class of have-nots of the world. It's going to be a terribly difficult time, so much so that I'm not sure the human species will survive.

Everybody grab your mud boots and mosquito zappers because we're heading back to the carboniferous period 😎

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll empty the seas by 2050 and we'll all die.

Entire human species are delusional trash apes myself included. Any resistance to the status quo will get you killed or ground into dust by the legal and judicial higher castes. I'll just watch till it implodes

Jon Penney outlines a new framework for understanding "chilling effects" on speech.
"With digital surveillance and censorship on the rise, the amount of data available online unprecedented, and corporate and governmental actors increasingly employing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and facial recognition technology (FRT) for surveillance and data analytics, concerns about “chilling effects”, that is, the capacity for these activities “chill” or deter people from exercising their rights and freedoms have taken on greater urgency and importance. Yet, there remains a clear dearth in systematic theoretical and empirical work point. This has left significant gaps in understanding. This article has attempted to fill that void, synthesizing theoretical and empirical insights from law, privacy, and a range of social science fields toward a more comprehensive and unified understanding.
I argue that conventional theories, based on fear of legal or privacy harm, are narrow, empirically weak, cannot predict or explain chilling effects in a range of different contexts, and neglect its productive dimensions—how chilling effects shape behavior. Drawing extensively on social science literature, I argue that chilling effects are best understood as a form of social conformity. Chilling effects arise out of contexts of ambiguity and uncertainty—like the ambiguity of public or private sector surveillance—but have deeper psychological foundations as well. In moments of situational uncertainty, people conform to, and comply with, the relevant social norm in that context. Sometimes this means self-censorship, but most often it means more socially conforming speech or conduct. A theory of chilling effects as social conformity has important normative, theoretical, and empirical advantages, including greater explanatory and predictive power, clarifying what chilling effects theory is for and what it produces, as well as providing a basis to navigate competing and differing chilling effect claims. It also has implications, I argue, for constitutional standing as well as the First Amendment chilling effects doctrine."

If you point out the ways to address the obstacles, people attack you. They aren't concerned about solutions. They care about enforcing BAU even at the cost of genocide. Even those who call themselves collapse-aware, right here in this sub. I'm pretty sure that is why we've made no progress in the past 80 years. People are insisting that we do more of the same - same laws, same borders, same parties, same leaders, same consumerism, same exploitation, same governments, same oppression - but that's only going to get us all killed. The only kind of action that people are willing to approve of is greenwashing. It's like, if a potential solution means a single person might lose an ounce of privilege then it's better off that we all die. And the conversations we're having totally erase the millions of people who are already experiencing collapse.
Maybe once the famine and de jure dictatorships come, people will get their heads out of their asses and realize the violence they've been committing by chaining us all to the sinking ship. Until then, where do the scientists drink? I need to commiserate with people who aren't genocidal maniacs.

It is so fucking crazy now how you can wake up consistently to mild temperatures and boom suddenly it's nearly 100 degree temps out there. And then of course you start hearing about the record breaking fires which happen every year now. It was so bizarre to fall asleep looking at pictures of yellow skies from a few states over, and then waking up to also finally feel some of that heat. That quickly. In my area, it used to be like... every few years you'd hear about a bad one. Now it's constant, starting in May, it's like "Oh shit, here we go again" and the fear of fire is there until Fall. Oh, but now we're really into hurricane season! And those are getting worse too. So if you don't lose your house in a fire (talk about a burnout in more ways than one), maybe a huge tree will crush it! And these were never legitimate concerns for me until the past few years. I used to be able to run in the Summer. Now it's more often getting to be this uncomfortably dry muggy heat that you can barely breathe in. Or maybe I'm just getting old and out of shape lol. I seriously question my own judgment sometimes. Like is my perception influenced by confirmation bias? Or has the heat really gotten that much worse that quickly? It's scary.

The new American dream is to flee the country.

O weh! hinweg! und laßt mir jene Streite
Von Tyrannei und Sklaverei beiseite.
Mich langeweilt's; denn kaum ist's abgetan,
So fangen sie von vorne wieder an;
Und keiner merkt: er ist doch nur geneckt
Vom Asmodeus, der dahinter steckt.
Sie streiten sich, so heißt's, um Freiheitsrechte;
Genau besehn, sind's Knechte gegen Knechte.

The philosophy of antinatalism has made a step further in this. Unfortunately, people don't even consider such stuff. It usually takes a mental illness to understand the truth. 'Cause if everyone would be able to understand it, there would be no humanity. And it sounds like something bad, but it really isn't, because there would be no one to care about it.

As someone who wishes he was never born, please consider how your kid will feel when they are ripped from comfortable oblivion and forced to suffer decades of struggle.

Don't cry because it happened, smile because it's over.

Say "doomer" in the cadence of ungha bungha three times in a supermarket bathroom with the lights off and a candle lit while spinning. Nothing will probably happen but there's a small, miniscule chance they walk in and say "doomer" with you and start talking about the modern world ending due to usury and fiat currency

They always say "Stop doomscrolling" but have you seen the quality of the doom lately?

The world works within the boundaries of rules. Gravity pulls apples to the ground, so one can create a model of how that works and predict falling objects. One will find that more complexity going on when exploring the boundaries of this model, that everything is accelerated with 9.81m²/s to the earth. So you adjust your model for specific scenarios like high altitudes to match the observations. You learn about gravitational constants and when exploring further edge cases about the space-time-continuum. For most practical use cases you don't need to take into account that there is special relativity for predicting trajectories of apples. The predictive error is quite small with such an easy model, but knowing about it is essential for understanding how the world works.
Complex systems like singular humans, government entities or whole societies are not bound by such precisely definitive rules but you can observe patterns in their behavior. Everybody has these models consciously or not. I don't need to know the whole complexity of a human/government/other entity to make basic predictions on their behavior.
The classification of conspiracy theories is quite easy: If it the model does not offer predictive capability, is not falsifiable or cannot be proofen true with any means, chances are high that it is of conspiratorial kind. It is pseudoscience. Also there are some common patterns in most conspiracy theories that help as an heuristic. But without knowing the theory itself one can't classify it.

Yes, we're already in a runaway system. What is baked in is enough to trigger feedbacks so severe that warming will primarily come from the feedbacks rather than anthropomorphic causes removing our ability to control or influence the situation. It is as if we have pushed the first domino, after which the rest fall on their own. The idea was to stop before our finger tipped the first one. Many who don't understand the physics say that it is a spectrum and that 2 degrees is better than 3 etc. not understanding that there's no scenario where we reach 2 and it doesn't trigger 3 then 4 then unthinkable amounts of warming. Many will call you a doomer for acknowledging this. The dominant culture likes to describe things as they wish them to be rather than as what they are. So I do understand why people think that saying it is too late to stop it means you are somehow rooting for it. It is as if we have jumped out of a plane while failing to pack a parachute and the optimists are yelling that we should be flapping our arms to save ourselves. I'm sure you understand this, just typing for any third party readers.

I think a lot of people don't realize how comfortable the US government is with having a massive population of uneducated citizens. The uneducated are much easier to manipulate, which usually works in a governments favor.

Collapse is a moot point because we live with the possibility of doom awaiting us at every corner anyway. Whether you die in a blaze of glory sacrificing yourself so your family can escape roving bandits, drown in a flood, burn in a forest fire, get heat stroke, or simply slip and break your neck walking down the steps one day.. the end result is always the same. Eternal nothingness.
So just try to enjoy it while you have something. Anything left at all. Soon enough you will shrug off this mortal coil one way or another. That's the inevitable part. Living is optional and what you make of it is what counts. Try to work less if you can. Go for a walk thru the woods. This may be your soul's one and only chance to feel and experience a world still relatively full of flora and fauna. Just experience and stop caring about proving so much. Whoever you're trying to impress, wherever on the social hierarchy they sit, those people will be dust one day just like you. No matter who they are now. No matter what we think all this was supposed to mean. In the end we'll be grains of dust just intertwining and blowing all the same. Also dying while knowing the world you're leaving behind was fucked anyway is a bit comforting. Is that a selfish way to feel? Yeah. Don't shame my source of solace. You'll ruin my last day. Just let people create their own reality. Don't waste one more second preoccupied with how things should be. Cuz things are fucked and we know that. So focus on how they still are for you. Once it gets worse? Recalibrate. Until you can't. Then it's time. But hopefully you feel it was worth it and did some things you wanted.
If you're gonna live, nothing to worry about. Gonna die? Well, then you certainly have nothing to worry about. Is that an oversimplification? Maybe. But why let it get more complicated than that? Don't listen to any noise about what you're supposed to be or do. Give yourself to what matters in your heart. Not what you're convinced you want.

"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - George Carlin.

I own nothing, where is my happy?

Sounds like you are wondering what the point of your sacrificing is, when everyone else is dancing down into Hell.
You plant a tree, Bolsanaro cuts down a forest. You cycle to work, 200 SUVs pass by, choking you. You weed by hand, and someone dumps thousands of barrels of DDT into the sea. What is the fucking point? I can only come up with reasons that will not make things better: To be a good ancestor. To know it is not your fault. To know that in a geological blink of an eye, Gaia will be fine.
We are in the worst period: when the curve starts slipping. We know what we could have had, we know what is slipping through our fingers. Later generations will grow up in a brutal world, but it will be normal to them. I hope you can find joy in the small spaces.

Basically watch this video:
Now follow this logic.
1: Russia is at Ukraine border
2. Russia has a set of demands
3. USA and nato resonded NO
4. Ukraine is asking for aid and military equipment
5. The video explains that they are spending 5 bilion a day proping up the economy due to capital flight due to the news

Now given the truths above and the fact war is imminent. How can we stop the capital hemorrhage? Publicly state evrything is fine. “Dog in burning room meme” So they are saying everything is fine, but asking for aid? Pick one. Do you follow yet? They are saying everything is fine for thier own citizens to not freak out and pull money and leave. So investors stop pulling out money. Literaly like Beirut. Its days away from capital control. Think of mohammed al sahhaf. The iraqi minister of info talking about how they were kicking usa's ass and they were winning the desert storm. Its PR damage control.

Everything is fine people. All is well. I spoke to LORD BEZOS yesterday through his lossless AI equivalent entity, as he no longer associates with mere mortals for ego intensification purposes, and he said the following enigmatic™ statement: "Where for art thou that hath doubt my utter supremacy and large dickness!? How dare thy! The world is my oyster and I shall consume it all! Die mere mortal, DIE immediately and at my pleasure! Serve me! Service my knob! You are all slobs! Die die die die die die---"

Sorry, the AI equivalent crashed shortly after beginning its' answer. That's all I have.

Hi, your tesla neural chip recently noticed you crossed Reddit street between block 1200 and 1300. Google maps show a valid crosswalk was available 15 meters from the area you crossed. A jaywalking fee was assessed by Home County Precinct 23. To make life easier we've deducted the fine from your Tesla account and paid Home County Precinct 23. Please note this does not include Tesla processing fees or overdraft fees your personal bank may assess. To opt out of Tesla Neural texts simply think STOP or text STOP to 211653.
How'd we do? Let us now in a brief survey! Http neural link . Com generic blue text.

The vast majority never understood that renewables were never a solution. Hard numbers tell the story, CO2 rising and could be said exponentially. Oil, coal and gas are being used as fast as can be produced. If not for “renewables” the industrial world would have peaked 15 years ago.
Renewables are extending our ability to burn FF's. They have enabled “the system” to stay viable. The electricity generated by “renewables” has created a false sense of plenty. The waste we are generating while we attempt to extend our tenure is astronomical and not even factored. Giant wind generators, hundreds of billions of solar panels and used batteries are not renewable. The towers when decommissioned will be and are just laid on the ground. Used solar panels have no use, they get taken to the dump or are gathering dust in yards. Batteries by the trillions will and are contaminate massive swathes of land and water.
All the while plastic continues it's inexorable rise of destruction. Nano and micro plastics are found everywhere. It's in the blood of practically every living creature.

Collapse is not inevitable.
Collapse is not imminent.
Collapse is here.
We are collapsing.
Right now.

(Disclaimer: The following comment partially turns into a rant towards potential unfit parents. Not you specifically.) ---
The beginning of collapse starts with not being able to afford shit. The first years of serious collapse can be painless if you're rich. Financial wealth and independence is the one thing that can insulate everyone from collapse for at least the beginning of it. I think it's the most important thing you can focus on.
I'm not raising a kid to be a damn wage slave. And I'd raise them of course to be a caring person, so for sure, I wouldn't raise them to care about everyone in this current world where: 1. Everyone is struggling, so no one can help anyone anymore. and 2. Any job helping others is unappreciated, ineffective, corrupt, or all of the above. Investing or whatever it is that can make us regular people money, better learn it. If you're a parent, this should be mandatory. I'm not letting a future kid wage slave their way through. That's fucked up. And mind you, I'm considering even professionals burdened by debt and chained to their profession for decades a wage slave. All of us and future generations deserve at minimum, at least a debt-free schooling for whatever they like, like past generations. So all the riches that you need (now) for the same debt-free college/grad school experience that the older generation had, hope you can give that to them. I would want a future kid to have the money to be themselves, even in collapse, so that at least they have their world to find comfort in. No rich: no passion projects, no independent ideas of truly helping groups related to your personal favorite causes. No money for true mental health. No money to own a home. At the very least, don't be, the kick-your-kid-out-at-eighteen without even the financial preparation and warning that a lot of stereotypical (READ: stereotypical), dumbfuck boomer parents that can't do 1st grade math and still don't know how to right-click a mouse* have been.
I'm not a parent, cause I would never be a parent without being a millionaire to prepare for all that's coming, so this is all I got. People avoid doing the math of all the finances required. I hate that. It's literally denial, and in the context of something as serious as collapse, I personally view personal finance denial while collapse-planning to be seriously off-putting character trait. Like, “We've tried nothing (but family love and wonderful hopes and dreams), and we're all out of ideas! (because finances doesn't feel as warm and fuzzy a topic, and there's a stigma with discussing and evaluating where your finances stand compared to others).” (That is not you, by the way. Just saying it to say it.)
College. High school. House. No debt for them. Travel money to help them see the world “before”, before the “after” starts coming. Good medical coverage. Good mental health support system. Good tech set-up or whatever to sustain prolonged period stuck at home, if need-be. And enough independence financially, so they can find solace in at least themselves and their passions and loves while everything else is burning down. Free time, autonomy, and money to be able to help those they want to help in their own way and not feel like they're failing in that regard.
If you don't havethe money to guarantee this stuff to them. If you don't have the money, and you don't have the self-awareness and strength of character to admit that you need to change that, & instead focus on your love/hopes/dreams fantasyland, & refuse to find ways to start acquiring wealth now because it's an extra struggle (which means they'll struggle like you, only worse).
If you don't see that all the beautiful parts of the world and all the great (and still possible) experiences in the world/in humanity that we are told as stories as kids to dream and hope for are all only accessible now with enough money. Then do not be a fucking parent.
You will struggle through Collapse, and your kids will struggle through Collapse, but you don't want to struggle as much as you can to make as much money as possible to help your kid? Seriously, you want to be a parent with that specific weakness in your character? Are you sure? That doesn't make sense. You are mentally ready to prepare and struggle through parenting during the COLLAPSE OF THE WORLD, but you won't take on new and hard personal, financial, out-of-your comfort zone, self-awareness, introspective-type struggles? Even for the financial independence your collapse-experiencing kid? That's fucking weak. Oh, ok, it's because you have no choice in collapse, so you'll take it. But if you have a choice to not struggle, even if it's for your kid, you'll choose not to. Because of all the feelings about parenthood and hope and love and humanity and beauty. “Look at all these things that I cling to and prioritize that mean absolute dick when you don't have money.(Again, not you, but just saying.)
The world is still beautiful. Love is beautiful. Art, hope, community, music, family, and all that jazz are beautiful and worth living for. But with collapse coming, to me, anyone who ignores how finances fit into this world and thinks only about the above is a fucking idiot, and I think their view on the world is not as beautiful anymore. Because now it's a sign of naive, head-in-the-clouds, thinking that is unfit for parenting. No kid deserves to be cursed to ride your denial-train. We all have time to save and make more than now. Everyone will have different ceilings of course, but we can all still save and make more compared to now with 18 years of parenthood in preparation. So do it. If you can't prepare them adequately for collapse, then don't do it. It should really be that simple. So if the kid will be exceptional and have enough money like you, then yes. If you're lonely and need a kid, but you're actually a crab in a bucket that will teach their kid to be ok with what you're ok with, even if it's not enough for the future, because “I learned to, so I'm hopeful and sure they will, too.” Fuck you for being so fucking selfish. If you're going to do your best, which includes even things that are hard for you now that you will do because it will help them, which includes struggles and challenges that are not familiar to you (because we can all “work as hard as we can” with stuff we know and are good at. But what if you don't do things that could be better for them.)…
If you're really going to do your best, and you won't let your own personal hang-ups and issues stop you from doing what you are capable of learning to do to prepare your kid for collapse… well, even if you might fail at certain things, if you're going to do your best, then I think statistically, you and some population of future parents out there can make it work.
The family that prepares for collapse together and learns about collapse together stays together, I guess.
Good luck.

I'm not sure what everyone was expecting. Global pandemics are not pleasant. Somehow people are surprised that a global health crisis is bad. Yeah, it's bad. Pandemics are bad. It's been especially bad in the United States, because the US system is only meant to work when no bad things ever happen. The US economy was built on the assumption that no one ever gets sick, that supply chains are never disrupted, that workers never get burned out, that resources will always be abundant, that store shelves will always be fully stocked, etc. Those are the assumptions that we built our economy on and we're surprised when a disaster comes along and the system breaks. We're dumb dumbs.

We have tried nothing and we are out of ideas.

People do not want to know precisely because they do not want to change their habits. For some people, they have already put a large amount of time and effort into a plan for the future, career, family, beach house, whatever. They have gone to school, worked hard, spent irreplaceable time to get towards a goal, and now to think that they might not be able to have what they want is inconceivable for them.
There are many examples of things like this, but it all boils down to the same thing. People are already invested in life being a certain way. They will ignore/refuse anything that makes that life impossible to continue.
It's no different for a company. Shareholders are used to profits at a certain level of growth over time. They will not stand for drastic reduction. Any corporate officer who does not perform to meet that growth will be replaced before they can damage it.
Same for governments. Officials have to make sure that the money does not stop flowing, because as soon as it does that official will not be reelected. To keep the money flowing they must meet the expectations of those who make the money flow.
There will be no real change. There was mever going to be real change. Global society will not stand for such a disruption. And, as a result, it will come crashing down.

Interview with Dave Hunt

22. Your views, as you said once, are not as extreme as those presented in Anaal Nathrakh mindset, but which one are those that you share? In your views, are we, human beings, condemned to live futile existence, with no hope (in religious/theological/teleological sense) and rather catastrophic predictions for future (pandemia, climate change etc.), also in political sense (wars, enslavement, bellum omnium contra omnes etc.), with no real happiness that we can feel or just with ephemeral fulfilment - but with suffering, that is more real (or just real)? Or things may be a bit better than just described? Is there any glimmer of hope (even if it's just illusion, which is positively affecting our lives)? I'm basically asking about any positivity in your thinking.

I think there's a tendency to see some kind of dilemma here. Not just with us, with other performers or artists or whatever, too, but we're a good example. It's that either the world is as it appears in Anaal Nathrakh and I'm a coward or charlatan or something for not making that my guiding principle in life. Or, on the other hand, the Anaal Nathrakh way of looking at the world is rubbish, really, just a contrived and basically dishonest distortion. But in fact I don't think that dilemma exists - those aren't actually the options.
I share most of the aspects of the world view of Anaal Nathrakh. I genuinely do think that human life is worthless in anything like a ‘cosmic' sense. I genuinely do think that there is something fundamentally, definitively human which is awful, vain, cruel, jealous and, as far as I can use the word seriously, evil. And I genuinely do think that there's every chance that life for some or all of us may ultimately end horribly. I think that's a fair survey of the Anaal Nathrakh mindset, the preoccupations and gleeful accusations it involves and so on, right?
I just don't necessarily share them to the same extent. Or in some cases, I don't stop at the Anaal Nathrakh point, instead I go on further and reach a conclusion with different implications. So for example with nihilism, I do think that on a cosmic scale, there's no point in anything and the universe doesn't care about any of us. That view has scared the crap out of many people, whether philosophers, poets, priests or just normal people. And it makes for some effective and compelling emotions to channel into music. But in my personal life I consider it almost like a gift, in the way religious people might use the term gift - because if there's no god and the universe doesn't care - if nothing matters in any objective sense, that means that the value and meaning which *we* perceive in and confer upon things *ourselves* is far more important. Our cares and concerns - be they subjective or collective, depending on the matter at hand - are the most important level of valuing that exists. Now I don't mean that all value judgements are of equal weight or importance - that's a different thing entirely - but there is no higher source of value than that conferred by human beings. In that way, relativism is a variety of nihilism. But it's one that can withstand its own realisation - it enables one to say ‘nothing ultimately matters, but I don't care, because I have plenty of things I care about, even if they don't matter to the universe!'. In a weird way, nihilism thus becomes quite hopeful.
And even if I am convinced that wherever there are humans and the possibility for being awful creatures, some among us will be awful, that doesn't mean I have to hate every person I encounter. So for example I think the Milgram experiment teaches us something vital about what people are, and it shows us as really quite pathetic and yet horrific things. But that doesn't have to be what informs my every interaction with others. Ok, there's an extra leap that the demonic side of Anaal Nathrakh sometimes makes that says ‘and as a result, humanity deserves to be destroyed'. I don't make that leap as matter of course in daily life. But I'd still want to say it's a valid way to feel, to some extent, some of the time. It's no different than how, say, a British person might learn about aspects of the history of the British empire and feel ashamed to be British - that doesn't mean they must immediately kill themselves or murder the queen. I can feel sometimes - I think a lot of us feel sometimes - that the earth should be sent crashing into the sun. And I can create music that expresses that feeling, and other people can find it satisfying to hear that expression. But it doesn't follow that all of us who might get something out of that should immediately start working on a massive system of rockets to get the job done.
As far as I'm concerned, the animating principles behind Anaal Nathrakh aren't value judgements in most cases, they're just descriptive facts. But on the level of living one's life, they're not the only relevant facts. That means the Anaal Nathrakh mindset is all the more real, because it's grounded in descriptive facts. But it also means that living in that mindset the whole time would be all the more absurd, because they're not the only facts. We simply cannot cope psychologically with that level of obsessive awareness and attention to some things, and disregard for other things, at all times. It would be ridiculous and I've no doubt deeply harmful to try - so why would you try? But that doesn't mean that Anaal Nathrakh is ‘made up' or insincere or anything like that. Reality is just complicated! If you want the whole encyclopaedic range of human emotion in music, maybe try listening to the chaconne from Bach's partita no. 2 for solo violin. That's famously got such emotional range it's almost ridiculous. But there's nothing wrong with music or any form of art that's centred around a certain more concentrated set of emotional coordinates - it can still be hugely compelling.

Blocking roads, highways, blowing pipelines will create more of the same. Division. \ Not because it is not useful, it very much is as it creates conversations among individuals and groups, but that the society that lacks self awareness will not see the message behind such acts therefore the end result will be “them vs. us”.
The media will paint a picture of any extreme protests against modern social construct as how these extremists are here to make social life miserable to all of us because of “strange reasons of these lunatics”, and these “strange reasons” have to be addressed with regulations, laws and peoples money and not by blocking streets or highways if we want any meaningful change. The reasoning is at large fallacious and brings no fruits for further debates.
This entirety of such proportion that the mainstream media depicts however, is misleading since big majority of individuals, like that mom who failed to drive her imbecile kid to school, do not even comprehend that the vastness of government sector, which is responsible for regulating businesses and practices, is sold to the corporate sector that benefits from not only not being regulated to the teeth but also for lying to the public that regulations do work.
Slowly but surely, more and more individuals start to see behind the opaque veil, and as they understand that regulations, laws and frankly the entirety of the government sector is both sold and powerless a void is being created.\ And just like with any social void those in desperation will fill the void as they seem fit. Extreme actions, blocking roads, highways, blowing pipelines and so forth.
The cycle of such reality is closed, infinite and impossible to break out from as long as global consensus practices business as usual. I suspect as we move forward, more and more individuals will start preaching anarchistic values and ideologies. It won't be peaceful by no means, but what else do people have left to at least try to stop the madness in absence of democratic options.

Anything and everything that can milked for $$$ will be milked.
As innovation slows down and conventional avenues of investment lose attractiveness, we can expect more of this as more "startups" are created whose sole business model is to gig-ify and privatize formerly public services in the name of "efficiency" and profit. "Gig librarians as a service" will be likely followed by "gig nurses" or gig firefighters. All kinds of "public" works will be actually performed by digitized sharing economy companies who will take task X, make some shitty app, then hire contractors slaves who will perform task X at a very mediocre quality for a fraction of the previous price. Of course local governments are going to jump at this deal - less tax dollars are wasted and we support an innovative emerging industry, right? right?

The government and media are not flip-flopping and contradicting themselves. They are just bound to be irrationally optimistic by the economic and political systems in place, until it doesn't work anymore with the current topic. But it starts over again with the next topic. Our civilization is incapable of addressing collective issues because we set everything up in terms of competition, and this has also created a subculture of radically egotistical individuals that are validated by this system. This undermines any rational, scientific approach at coordinating behaviors to prevent disaster like pandemics or ecological collapse.

"I'm dead and I still can't afford to retire" - Americans soon.

We are already too late. At this point, there are only two options: radical adaptation and radical geoengineering.
Radical adaptation could take the form of arctic, underground, and undersea cities. Inevitably when the rest of the planet is no longer livable, the rich and powerful will be granted a place in these final refuges, while the global poor will be left to die by the billions.
Radical geoengineering presents both the best- and worst-case scenarios. If we get it right, we save the planet. If we get it wrong.... at least the fossil fuel execs die with the rest of us.

The first symptom was citizens united. It was suddenly decided that a corporation's personhood was the equivalent of a citizen's personhood, and the money contributed by that corporation was, in essence, a form of free speech. The first seal, broken.
The second symptom of this that began the end-stage was the '08 financial crisis. When people began hearing the words "too big to fail," that was the second seal breaking. Average, everyday people had to shoulder the burden while faceless corporations and billionaires were handed tax money to continue their schemes. Nothing was changed, nothing was altered. It simply continued in perpetuity, and all of the reforms that were put in place to ensure that another collapse never happened were weak, toothless, and easily sidestepped by even the most rookie financial investor. Second seal, broken.
The third symptom of this was Trump. Regardless of your political affiliation or how you feel about him in general, the man operated outside of the bounds of what we consider normal law and order. He ran over ever precedent, committed documented criminal acts while in office, and instead of facing justice for those actions, ran roughshod over the institutions that were supposed to provide some form of checks and balances. The third seal, broken.
The fourth symptom was Q. An entire swath of the population so caught up in the idea that we were going to have a long-dead politician suddenly reappear and that there was a secret "deep-state" running sex dungeons out of pizza shops. All of this was propagated by a wakaba messageboard formerly famous for allowing some of the most heinous shit to trickle through the internet. That idea was fed to the most gullible in our population by the media and disinformation took off. They quickly turned into a mob that couldn't be controlled. Fourth seal, broken.
The fifth symptom was COVID. A world too caught up in the politics and shit-slinging to understand that we must all act as one in order to defeat something like a global pandemic. It was like a game of Tug of War. We had one group of people pulling us closer to the pit, another pulling the other side closer to the pit, and no one failed to see that we were all chained to the rope. We all fall, no matter who loses. Meanwhile, financial institutions seeded the ideas to corporate media that we had to keep the economy running, no matter what, or else. "Essential workers" became heroes, and instead of us all buckling down for a month in isolation, opposition was astroturfed, and because our government institutions were weakened to the point of being unable to effectively direct people or overcome the oppositional astroturfing, they half-assed the pandemic and turned it into a political football, tossed around by the corporatists and the bought-off politicians. fifth seal, broken.
The sixth symptom was January 6th. We've never had anything quite like it, and it's a very clear sign that something is very wrong in our population. We had people who refused to believe that an election was fair despite audit upon audit upon audit. We had conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory spread by one of the most popular news networks in the country, and even sitting senators that refused to state that the election was fair for fear of being cast out of their own party, although willing to admit as much behind closed doors. The ones that did stand up and state the obvious were blackballed. Many of the people that participated in the insurrection were never prosecuted, with just a few who could be identified being treated as "examples." To the misled, they are "patriots." To others, they're traitors. To realists, they're symbolic signifiers that the center is no longer holding. The sixth seal has been broken.
I fear for the seventh seal. I'm not a religious person, but if you are, it's revelations time. Except, instead of the Rapture, it's the end of the financial systems and government institutions that held together our society. What that means, I'm not sure; I don't know what it means in the face of unstoppable climate change and resource depletion. Especially when you've got things like the most fresh water in the US concentrated in the great lakes region, or most international shipping ports located in blue states.

Solar Radiation Management is coming soon, to a planet near you, the only pertinent questions remaining are, what will be the reflective particle used, and will it break down the ozone layer? It was thought until recently that calcium carbonate would not damage the ozone, but the latest peer reviewed lit is indicating that it will, albeit at a slower rate than the other reflective particle of choice, sulfur. This, I would suggest, is extinction level news. I find interesting at this late hour that on a subreddit that is theoretically devoted to collapse issues that perhaps even a majority of its members are not sure what an SRM regime is. Get a grip people. The collapse of this particular civilization is about the boiling of the biosphere of this planet. If that is not dealt with, then all other collapse related issues become irrelevant. And unless you haven't been paying attention the last 40 years, nothing is ever going to be done to address the boiling of our world in any sane or sensible way, because business as usual will prevail. That's just the way it is. Which leaves one last throw of the dice for humans, and for all life. Spray and Pray.

I'm waiting for death. Like, this is as good as it's going to get. The rest of my life will become gradually worse, and not at a constant rate. If anything, that's what we don't know, how turbulent the downfall is going to be.
I'm not depressed. I'm not suicidal. I just..... lost hope of the future. What's motivating me these days? Eh..... maybe the fact that I can still eat well and I'm not out on the streets yet (what's happening in the US will happen in Europe). But it's still "waiting for death". I just hope it's painless.

At this point: To the surprise of absolutely everyone.
It's crystal clear they won't really act on climate change until everything is falling apart, and even then they won't act to fix the underlying problems but instead to try to salvage their power in a crumbling world.

"Violence is like duct tape, it can solve most problems if you're willing to use enough of it."

- My kindergarten teacher

Positioning myself as a regional warlord means a lot of sacrifice on the front end. Tending the animals, reloading mortars, and stretching razor wire while the others my age are out raising families and roller skating takes its toll. Still, I long for the days when the State has fallen and crops have failed, when I can take in children my neighbors can no longer care for and raise them to rule the barrio with an iron fist. Boomer mom and dad only get sadder when this is my response to “when are we going to get some grand babies?”

420 parts per marijuana
Or 420 parts per million at marijuana observatory. Observed through the telescope at 69 degrees.

If you were being chased by a bear, no one would tell you you have a bear anxiety problem.
What you have is a fucking bear problem.

Well, how the fuck would you feel as a young person seeing things get progressively worse? When I was 5 - 9/11 happened, when I was 12 the Great Recession happened; when I went to college - Donald Trump was elected and Brexit happened, I've seen the rise and fall of ISIS, the rise of the far-right. Now as a working adult trying to make living, and we got COVID-19 which knocked our house of cards economy down. Then there's the Climate Crisis looming over us threatening to end most life on the planet. Where one can't even check out of society in the woods. That there is no escape from human ignorance. People are so selfish and self-righteous that they can't put a cloth mask on their face for two weeks, which gives me no hope that people are willing to make the sacrifices necessary for climate change such as reducing meat consumption or drive less. There's no agreement on which reality is canon. My generation is under surveillance 24/7, a 3-digit number determines where you can live, people's brain rot from social media being bombarded with propaganda from all sides, go to college to get a degree for a job that requires it but drown you debt. A studio apartment cost $1200 min while wages are $7.50 min. We see that hard work does not pay off, that the veneer of meritocracy is peeling away. Those who were supposed to lead us failed and lied to us instead. Greater divides between rich and poor bordering on Corporate Feudalism with decreasing social mobility. That our only means of retaliation is rioting and breaking a Walmart window. It's no surprise we feel this way, that there is no future. Even the media shows it with movies like Joker and Parasite or This is America. I'll own nothing and I won't be happy.

We spent the last century building a just in time global system that is hyper efficient. It made the world safe and nations rich. The efficiency made it brittle and unable to adapt to novel situations.
Mother Nature exploited that system into a vector for disease. Fighting nature impedes the system beyond its stress tolerances. Since this system is now unworkable it's collapsing. Since the virus is global, the entire system is poisoned.
The people who made this system and could fix it are mostly dead and retired. That skill set is functionally extinct. The managers they have now can only make the situation worse. They're trained to cut and refine, not build or repair. The destruction will overtake any attempts to fix it.
The world has to devolve, and slow down. Lots of people will die when the crunch hits. The only bright side is that after it all burns down, hopefully something sustainable will have room to replace it.

Money corrupts your sense of value. When you've got everything nothing really gets your blood boiling anymore... What to do? Increase the stakes. But when everything costs pennies to you, these stakes can only be found in huge bets on financial markets, where a billion more, or 10 billions more, might get a rush out of you. When you can buy everything nothing has value, and so your money loses value but what else do you have if what you have is no longer of value to you? When you got so much of it you cant spend it even if you tried. You gotta make it valuable somehow, high-high-high-stakes gambling and figuring out ways to increase the value of money again - like finding someone selling what money usually cannot buy. Or merely just taking part in a game of thrones, a game of power, where the whole world and the people in it are merely pawns to be manipulated to your liking. Then you meet once a year and say "Good Game" to your fellow players while you laugh and reminisce different battles lost and won over the year - Ah Patrick old chap, that was a wonderful play you made, riling up a civil war to sell guns to both sides and use the chaos to strenghten your child-trafficking business!

Climate grief. Ecological mourning.
We are watching death in slow motion. Ours and everything around us.
Either you come to terms with death and learn to witness it or you spin off into destructive behaviours.
Gried and mourning processes slowly. You might think you healed from grandpa's passing 10 years ago but today you are reminded and are feeling grief and sadness again today as fresh of a feeling as the day he passed.
Now imagine grandpa dying every day, every week. But you do not get the closure of the doctor saying he passed. Or the funeral. He is just gone and you are pretty sure gone for good but... No proof. (Do those beetles live on elsewhere? Is that species of frog surviving further north?)
This is the harder death to process.
Mortality is one of the hardest concepts to process emotionally. And we are emotional beings.
The psychological reaction has always, imo, been the wildcard in collapse caused by climate change.

I am the lorax and I speak for the trees.


The trees are telling me to commit domestic terrorism.

The greatest form of protest:
Don't have kids.
Exploitative society needs them as labor.
Break the cycle of birth and death.
Live out your life without dooming another.

Max Wilbert on civilizational collapse

Every civilization that has ever existed has destroyed its own ecological foundations and then collapsed. Collapse is not an event, it's a process. We're already in the early stages of collapse. Aquifers are shrinking, increasing disease and civil conflict, droughts and extreme weather. It's here.

Where the fuck is the ANGER???
Humanity is pathetic, if we fail at fighting back against the real villains here i.e. the bankers then we deserve this end. Why the bankers? They control and own everything. They even control the creation of money!! IMF, BIS, world bank, WEF, goldman sucks, jp whoregan, hsbc, citi, etc. Their board members, past and present, chose to do nothing. Where is the fucking anger?? We need to make sure they're all out of a job! Take all of their wealth and put all of them in prison.

The "we" is the root of the problem.
Humanity has created, by degrees, a gordian knot of incentives that no one person or even country has the ability to cut through. It's no one individual or country. It is a system. No one governs this system. It is governed by webs of incentives acting across individuals, nations, and corporations which reward and have normalized the very actions that will accelerate the process of climate destruction.
Every single person's standard of living in developed nations is built on the status quo that is ruining the planet. Elected leaders don't want to upset the status quo for fear of being ousted by the people. The people are either brainwashed by corporations into believing there is no problem, or otherwise pissed at corporations but relatively helpless to do anything about it. No one leader or corporation is going to do the selfless thing. It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation. They all take advantage of the situation because everyone else is. Every country worries that if they reduce emissions, they have no guarantee that any other country will. No one country will make a difference alone, and there's no guarantee that another country won't simply increase their emissions and gain an economic or military advantage over their rival. Every world leader and corporate executive and billionaire knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that climate change is real, and that we are causing it. They know. But everyone is paralyzed by the tragedy of the commons. They major corporations and countries of the world are paralyzed by one another, and by their own populations who are addicted to a way of life that is not sustainable. Any individual who is 30 years old now, living in a developed nation, could conceivably live a relatively normal life from now until death. Climate change will continue to accelerate, and billions will suffer and die, but they will be able to live relatively comfortable lives. We won't start to see the really horrific shit until maybe 2050, so they'll be 60 before the truly apocalyptic stuff, like global inescapable heatwaves start. And maybe by that time, we'll have underground cities that people will have adjusted to, where they can live with family and friends in some sort of ordinary life. Not their ideal future. But a future. This is the calculation they're all running in their minds. Why should I forsake a normal live, they ask themselves, and live in a hut in the woods, when doing so won't make a difference, and will only deprive me of a chance at a normal life, especially when I wasn't even responsible for this mess in the first place? Why should I stop traveling and spending and forsake the pleasures of the earth as it is now, especially given the likelihood that each year that passes it will be less habitable, less paradisical as it is now? Across every developed nation, people are running this calculus through their minds, even those who accept climate change is real and truly want to do something, but have given in to a sense of helplessness and inability to affect change and surrendered to a sense of inevitability of the coming climate devastation. This attitude across peoples will make it much more difficult for any politicians who are calling for widespread sacrifice of commercial goods and progress and descaling emission-causing industries and potentially temporarily or permanently displacing the labor forces there.
Because if you've already accepted the inevitability of climate change, and if your mind is already accepting the levels of survival you're willing to accept in that inevitable future - why would you sacrifice your best years now, for the ambitions of politicians whose plans no one even has any confidence will affect change anyway?
That's the other irony - the more real climate change becomes gradually, the less willing people will be to sacrifice their last chances at a "normal", comfortable life. Not just for themselves, but for their family, for their understanding of the world and their place in it. That's the issue of our current situation. Consensus appears impossible.
Every individual is doing what is best for themselves, even knowing that it is a detriment to the world, because in isolation, their bad thing doesn't make a difference. So they do the bad thing, and everyone does the bad thing, and as the population keeps expanding, that calculation per individual doesn't change, but the damage of the aggregate continually increases. It will take widescale, planetary devastation on the magnitude of COVID but of longer duration to actually produce enough unified consensus to take action. But by the time we reach that point in earnest, it will be too late to do anything but endure the climate apocalypse for the next 50,000 years. The biggest problem with Climate Change is that it will not just suddenly become devastating immediately, like if we discovered a world-ending comet a week away from striking Earth. If Climate Change did present this sort of immediate, dramatic, cohesive threat, that would actually be beneficial for us. Because the human race is actually fairly good at organizing quickly and uniformly around an immediate, emergent, unified threat. But the reality is, things will get a little worse each year, little by little, in increments that will allow everyone to adjust to the "new normal" year after year, in isolation. The mass displacement of human bodies by the billions as third-world countries collapse under climate devastation will be met with increased hostility by developed nations, and will increase the clout and power of myopic, fascist regimes that will exploit the situation for power, which will undeniably hamstring any action on climate change in inverse correlation to the level of consequences from climate change. In other words, the worse climate change gets, the more the world will react in ways further preventing us from taking actions to mitigate climate change. So I hope I'm wrong. I'm going to continue to act as though I'm wrong, and promote awareness, and donate to climate groups, and boycott polluters - but this is a very bad situation with no clear or easy way out.

Conversation in The Newsroom SE03 E03

Will McAvoy (News Anchor): “You're saying the situation is dire?”
Toby (EPA Deputy Administrator): “Not exactly. Your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire. Your house has already burned to the ground, the situation is over.”

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000008672305/stay-with-me-the-world-is-a-devastating-place.html