The profound loneliness of being collapse aware

He definitely "spends too much time on those subreddits."

Being concerned is one thing. Making this concern a part of your identity is another, especially for somehing as nebulous as societal collapse. There is nothing wrong with turning away from a topic so you can keep it together and handle information related to it in a healthy way, especially when it is something you can't fix alone. This person should have done that years ago.

what if there is nowhere else [to grow food]?

what if I they can’t [build enough renewable infrastructure]?

What if we start running out of fossil fuels?

What if they do solve all those problems, and you spend your entire life being miserable for no reason?

Please add me to the list of folks that figure the author has gone a wee bit too far down the rabbit hole. It’s definitely worth discussing since this is the future of Earth’s biosphere, but that topic is best addressed separately and dispassionately from how it affects one’s mental health and outlook.

Personal philosophy: if the future/collapse is inevitable anyways, then there’s no point in worrying about it. Do the best with what you have now so you can leave the world with a clean conscience. It’s all we’ve ever been able to do as a species anyways, it’s just that the stakes are more dire for us than ever before.

(except maybe when the global human population hit 3000-10000 during the theorized Toba mass extinction several tens of thousand years ago. Things were pretty dire then ngl)

Ever since we have had people, we have had an imminent collapse looming before us. I wrote a comment about having kids in the face of calamity not that long ago, and I think it is almost directly an answer to this same article, and in the time since I wrote that comment very recently, there have been potentially world changing technologies developed: see the superconductors tag for more information.

The world is not going to end. Society is not going to end. We are not going to be living in a post apocalyptic wasteland. We will live in a society that is different from the one we live in now - hopefully a better one - but that's always the case. Things are different now from when I was young. Things were different when I was young from when my parents were young.

There's a specific point in the article that I would like to call out as incorrect as well:

If we can’t even come together to fight COVID-19, how will we ever come together to fight climate change?

For the most part, across the world, the vast majority of people came together (by staying apart) to fight COVID-19. It was an almost uniquely american response to flout pandemic protocols to own the libs, which is why the death rate in america was so much worse than everywhere else, and it was red states that were the ones that were doing the bulk of that heavy lifting. Many other places did not have the same issues that people experienced in the USA, but it is a spirit breaking experience to be stuck in the US if you are a person with socialist responsibility tendencies. It's understandable to think that the whole world can't come together to do stuff, but lots of other countries weathered things much better because we did collectively work together.

If you find yourself feeling this way, bear in mind that this is a mindset that has persisted throughout history. That everything is doomed and bound to get worse, and the halcyon days of the world are past.

The Greeks and Romans had it baked into their religion that the golden age of the world happened long before then, and had already ended. Hinduism says that the world eventually ends when Kalki comes to herald that the world has degraded too much. Malthusians were convinced population growth of the poors would lead to mass starvation.

Point being, it's natural to feel despair that the world will never be as good as it seemed when you were 5.

That doesn't mean you're wrong to be upset or concerned, it's just a bit of perspective that this is a feeling people are prone to happen even when historically it turned out that things were pretty well set.

Vlogbrothers has a term for the psychological place this person is in: the Sad Gap. [4-minute video]

You enter the Sad Gap when you become aware of the numerous, terrifying, extremely difficult problems our future will face. These problems are fairly easy to describe, and it's not difficult to make money/influence doing so, so people do it a lot. It's more difficult to gain followers describing solutions that are still in the design phase and have not yet been proven to work.

The best way to get out of the Sad Gap is to actually engage with these problems. Pick one and dive deep on it. Become an expert. On a deeper-than-surface level, where did this problem come from and what specifically is going to happen? How do the various pieces of the problem affect each other? How confident are we in the various possibilities that have been forecasted? Who is working on this, and what potential remedies have been put forth? What projects are underway to address this issue? How can you use or develop skills that will contribute?

And don't just learn, participate. Go to meetings. Volunteer. Meet people who're as passionate about this as you are. Once you're working to solve the problem you've chosen, it gets a lot easier to trust that other people are working on the other problems.

I respect Vlogbrothers because they follow their own advice on this. They picked maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, and they're helping to build a hospital there. This is not a one-off project; it's an open-ended commitment. They also built a bunch of YouTube channels to help people understand the world at a more-than-superficial level. They know what they're talking about here because they speak from experience.

The problems we face are enormous. Maybe we'll make it; maybe not. But working to fix these problems isn't just better for everyone else; it's better for you.

A couple of years ago, someone very close to me joined an apocalypse cult. I can tell you from personal observation that being in an apocalypse cult makes you highly susceptible to manipulation from people who like power, because nothing matters as much as The Cause. My friend eventually left the cult after the cult leader psychologically broke her. She's still recovering.

So don't ignore the problem, but maintain perspective. Learn whatever you can from trustworthy sources, help however you can, and maintain your mental health. It's better for you and better for everyone else.

I feel great empathy for so many in this thread. There's much discounting, many feelings, and so many assumptions about what people are sure they know. And yet so little actual understanding about where things stand globally and environmentally.

I would ask those here right now to make a note to look back on this thread in, say, 3-5 years time and see if you feel similarly to how you do currently. We are on the downhill slope at the moment but so many can't recognize it (and also won't recognize it) and I only hope they truly understand what a terrible spot we're in during the coming years so it isn't so much of shock when their quality of life declines considerably in the future.

I think discussions around doomsday scenarios suffer from a type of unjustified inductive inference: we're so accustomed to regularity that we're unable to imagine unfamiliar catastrophes.

Try to remember late 2019 and early 2020, when whispers of a novel respiratory virus circulating in China began to spread. Although intellectually we all realized that the possibility of a pandemic existed back in late 2019, few people actually took measures against it. I remember being on a plane to San Diego, visiting friends, when I received an email from my school that classes would be canceled for "a few weeks". I texted a friend that things were probably going to get real weird soon. But I continued my vacation as planned, if perhaps a bit more diligent with my hand washing than usual. A week later, I attended a musical; the next day, the theater shuttered for the subsequent year and a half. The reality of the situation finally set in, and so I quarantined until I was able to get vaccinated nearly a year later.

This is how I imagine climate catastrophe will occur. Everything will seem fine until it clearly isn't. Assuming civilization will rebuild based on past history is a fallacy: of course civilization has survived until now. How could we be having this discussion otherwise? That doesn't guarantee civilization's future.

California grows a lot of food. What happens when there’s not enough water for the crops?

FWIW, California’s two biggest reservoirs are all but full after reaching perilously low levels late last year. Not sure how long it will last, but it is a bit of good news. Sometimes we get lucky.

If there's anything that /r/collapse (and similar subreddits like /r/unitedkingdom (they're very pessimistic there), /r/antiwork and /r/workreform) made me realize, it's that we are fucked as a human species. We will do nothing to curb our inevitable downfall until we are so far up shit creek without a paddle that we may as well dig our own graves.

Spain and Italy suffer blistering heatwaves. Texas goes through a freak blizzard that knocks out their whole grid infrastructure. The Caribbean suffers through numerous category 4 and 5 hurricanes that have the potential to devastate entire cities, like we saw with Katrina, Irma and Ida. Deaths from extreme heat in America's and Europe's hottest places are going up exponentially. Yet we would rather stick our fingers in our ears and sing "LALALALALALA" to the news that our carbon emissions are literally killing our future on the planet. Oh, and did I mention that the methane we are potentially going to release into the atmosphere from thawing Arctic and Siberian permafrost may accelerate climate change to the point where the worst predictions of sea levels rising whole metres and displacing billions may happen decades sooner?

Our world is ltierally controlled by petrostates that would rather keep big oil running for shorter term profits than save our species. For the Saudis it's going to doom them but the Russians want our glaciers to melt because it means for once that Siberia will be inhabitable and St Petersberg will be usable as a port year-round.

We are also in our worst economic state where nobody in the Western world can afford to even rent a house, let alone buy one. Yet people will still simp for corporations and billionaires that insist that giving workers anything other than a pittance would collapse the economy - whilst corporate fat-cats reap record-breaking profits.

More people aren't having kids because they don't want to raise children in a world as crap as this.

While I think it's good to be aware of the state of the world -- each person needs to balance that with their mental health capacity for such information and focus. As someone with depression and anxiety, doom scrolling would not be good for my mental health and it would paralyze me with inaction rather than motivate me to action. Similar to how counselors must prioritize their own mental health and their ability to help others without burning out, I will not be useful if I sit all day in a room rocking back and forth about how bad the world is.

I am more useful focusing on what is in my sphere of influence. In my case I work for an organization that provides funding to local community projects across my country where the projects focus on one or more of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Each project is community led by the people it impacts and empowers communities to make a difference.

(EDIT to add: I shared this specific example as I think it's good for people to know about the 17 SDGs, but also perhaps, for those of you who can, to consider if switching jobs/organizations could lead to you spending your working hours each week supporting solutions in one capacity or another. Working in a personally-meaningful job with people who are engaged and hopeful about making a better world has been a boon to my mental health as well.)

While it's important to not put one's head in the sand it goes both ways -- we should also research about the good that is being done in the world too and the myriad of ways people are working on solutions. Rather than focus on fear-based media, how about focusing on content that that motivates you with hope for the future instead? (Once again, I'm not advocating not learning about the issues -- but rather for every 1 doom and gloom article, maybe read 5 ones about people working on solutions to that problem.)

Wow, that's quite the doom and gloom article on par with the crazy guy on the corner yelling about the end of the world.

I doubt it will be that quick, which is bad. It would be a good thing if it came on that quickly. If it were quick, we have a history of pulling crazy solutions out of nowhere when backed into a corner. Mainly because people are far more willing to make sacrifices when stressed. However, if it's too slow it won't register enough to spur people to do more than write articles and believe politicians that claim they want to change things and yet don't use their connections to do more than make wild claims, point fingers and tax poor people for not being able to afford electric cars.

I'm not saying a quick collapse is impossible, it's actually rather depressing how people don't realize our safe little bubble could pop, falsely believing we're too great to fall so far. It would just take a lot to do it at this time, but over time it could easily wear thin and we are on that path.

Say I'm not afraid to look like a crazy doomsday preper and I think things will be really bad in the next 10-15 years. What do I actually start doing?

I'm not rich, but not exactly poor either. I have the resources to begin making preparations but where do I even start? Learn to farm my own food? Stockpile food and medicine? Buy a gun? Move my family somewhere more isolated and begin fortifying my home against the eventual looters and raiders?

I live in northern Alberta which already swings wildly between mid 30s in the summer and -50 in the winter, but it's probably one of the better locations in the world in terms of temperature and access to fresh water. At least till the states stats running dry and come after it.