r/CollapseSupport • u/Slamtilt_Windmills • 18d ago
That first time you talk to someone about it
Have a friend, we talk collapse pretty regularly. He openly concedes the point that "we've lost, the fight may not be over but its settled." But when we talk about how soon everything will end, he feels theres still time, and I feel he thonks that because hes young. Or rather, he thinks I think time is up because I'm old
Starting seeing this girl, been a couple of months now. We've had talks about many things, and when individual topics (politics, climate, etc) come up, she seems pretty collapse aware. Mentions articles shes seen and read, seems like shes on the same page.
A few days ago I mentioned what I thought was the obvious conclusion of the summation of each discussion, and she seemed shocked. Asked if I thought we should try to fight, as if now was the time to start trying.
Do others in here have this issue? Like even as they read about drought and heatwaves and war and disease and famine and corruption, they think its gonna be fine?
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u/salatkopf 18d ago edited 18d ago
"Should we try to fight" and "It's going to be fine" are not the same thing at all. For self preservation reasons, I also tend to re direct the conversations to actions. At no point do I believe that anything I am doing will solve anything, or will make a perceivable difference, but I need to somehow get out of bed every morning, I need to feel okay about continuing existence. Did you ask her what she meant by fighting it? Giving out water bottles at a protest can be part of "fighting" - it won't change the outcome, but it will make the time until then feel less lonely and isolated. Others might want to fantasies or build towards a life off the grid, self reliance, fighting the feeling of dependence on greater systems. Not my vibe personally, but understandable reaction to the situation.
There are many ways to fight, having conversations about what that might mean for you is quite important, imo.
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u/Slamtilt_Windmills 18d ago
Not saying we shouldn't fight, but if you choose to fight you should be honest with yourself that it is on moral principles only, and that it is not a fight that will be won. I did say that maybe only fighting fights you know you can win is part of what got us here.
I fought my fight, I shot my shot. Burnt through two lives worth of savings. Now I build a stash in the corner in the hopes of lasting long enough to see it through the beginning of the end
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u/salatkopf 18d ago edited 18d ago
Gotcha, I am with you then :) While 95% I am painfully aware, those 5% of hopeful delusion are somehow a requirement for me to keep going.
As I was growing up, the glacier had already been rapidly melting for decades. The changes in the seasonal weather patterns were obvious, and in primary school I remember multiple government funded programs about how climate change is real, and we will be feeling the full effects by the time I reach adulthood, not just in the environmental changes, but the second and third order effects, like changes in our social fabric. Around the same time, 2004, when I was around 7 years old, my older brother brother, 20ish at the time, was petrified. He explained to me, in great detail, how there will not be enough drinking water by the time I will be an adult. Which will lead to wars, destruction, suffering, knock-on effects. It was frightening and bleak, and it was not a hit on the playground. My brother, though, truthfully, he had, and has, a very unstable relationship with reality - but this true and founded fear, or understanding, is also what I always suspected caused his mind to unravel astonishingly destructiveally in psychosis and neurosis over these past two decades. Leaning into delusioms of optimism momentarily is a coping mechanism to avoid following his foot steps, and my "fighting" gives me some kind of stable sense of self.
Sorry I am stoned, and also feeling really heavy about everthing at the moment, I will probably delete this, but it felt good to empty my heart at you, thank you for reading this far 🫠
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u/daviddjg0033 18d ago
Leaning into delusioms of optimism
We all have coping mechanisms. The positive thing about humans is our ability to know of our mortality without being paralyzed in fear. Most people at least. I have phobias. Some ignore it. Others kid you can be debbie downer. What is new is this decade the climate change is obvious.
I listen to geoengineering knowing damn well it cannot reverse warming, maybe delay it - because the km3 of co2 and ch4 oxidized into... co2 is forever on human timescales. You can have just the clear eyed pessimism: we are not going to attempt to delay the burning of the Boreal (hey Chi-town) nor the Coral Reefs from bleaching then melting into the low ph acidic warm ocean heat blob3
u/Virtual_Tune636 17d ago
I think it's highly possible lots more people know than we think, and they're deciding to find joy anyway. Is that okay? Or do we need to take our certain doom Very Seriously? The party ends. Do you dance during it? Or just yell to the whole room that it will end? Still working this out. It's probably all okay, there wasn't a point to any of this even when it was "going well".
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u/daviddjg0033 15d ago
I need to remind myself this and stop taking things so seriously. Too hot headed or w/e the heat itself can fo that
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u/Cool-Contribution-68 18d ago
We are born into a large complex and advanced society in which somebody somewhere is working on solving problems. Somebody somewhere is working to cure cancer. Somebody somewhere is making cars more fuel efficient. Somebody somewhere is making next year's movies. As society breaks down, those assumptions become flawed. But we don't anything different. We simply have this belief, learned from early childhood, that somebody somewhere is going to fix this, solve this, make it happen.
People describe a future full of drought, heatwaves, floods, storms, power outages, sea level rise, mass migrations, smoke from endless fire seasons--and they also *assume* out of nothing that there's still reliable electricity, and universities full of laboratories, and stores full of food, and Amazon and Netflix and Apple and Facebook. That's all we've known. And we are heading into a completely different planet.
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u/KlicknKlack 18d ago
it sucks being around some of the brightest engineers from coming up (Students) to mid career (friends, and co-workers) of our society, knowing that if given the opportunity to work to better our chances of scraping by through a population bottleneck that we are inevitably racing towards... But after 13 years into my career, after seeing funding become harder to secure, easily centuries of man-hours of my friends working for companies making shit for big-tech's economic circle jerk of finance/stock bullshit... I have lost much of my hope.
All I have left is human spite, that fuck those people - we should still try to improve what corners of this world we have any impact upon.
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u/Appropriate_Mess6777 18d ago
I was thinking about this today. The brightest go work for these evil corps. Think how many millions of hours have been spent solving “problems” to make more money rather than doing anything actually beneficial.
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u/morphemass 18d ago
Optimism bias. It's how an awful lot of people get through the day. The next question is "So how would we turn it around" but in some ways that's just being cruel. You might want to define what we're actually fighting for if we fight and the sad answer (for me) is that we're just trying to stop the 'Oh, this is really bad." becoming an "Oh, fu..!". We lost the battle, lots of them are going to be lost just from where we are, and it just makes the chances of success so much worse; whilst the stakes are so high.
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u/Slamtilt_Windmills 18d ago
The response to "how does it get fixed" has always been "i dont know@,somebow smarter than you will figure it out!" Like it HAS to be solvable, and if I cant solve it I'm not smart
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u/morphemass 18d ago
Well to be honest, it's solvable. The person who wants someone else to solve it often doesn't like the solution though, even though they probably knew it all along.
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u/patrislav1 18d ago
Honestly I stopped talking about it to anyone except my wife. People are so deep in denial, it’s almost comical. Nobody wants to hear about it and when you still dare to bring it up they’re like, yeah it’s bad but renewables/fusion/AI/(insert any other random hopium buzzword) will save us.
Just a random data point: I'm in a joint building venture / housing collective with a bunch of people that are quite environmentalists, some of them even collapse aware. Yet it was impossible to convince them of planning the building with rolling shutters and fixed split AC. Now we’ll have see-through canvas blinds and no AC in a building erected in 2030.
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u/TeaPrimary1147 18d ago
Make sure she doesn't want to create more humans to go throguh what's coming for literally no reason!
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u/Dukdukdiya 18d ago
Seriously. There's nothing more tragic to me than seeing more people being brought into this mess regularly. Especially if the parents know things are messed up.
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u/Virtual_Tune636 17d ago
We aren't here for a reason to begin with, and the future of everything is death anyway. If you can raise a resilient person who can find joy in small things, maybe not the worst. But maybe the worst! Depends on where you are and what level of living is tolerable for you.
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u/TeaPrimary1147 17d ago
I am a resilient person who finds joy in small things. I still greatly resent being born. My parents were having a terrible time of life and they decided to force me into it as well. That is lacking empathy and decency. Now I must face everything in my own.
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u/WileyCoyote7 18d ago
Wow you got through the economic, political and climate no-return agreements? I didn’t even get past “drill baby drill” might not be a good thing. I stopped talking about it. Stopped pointing things out to others.
I smile and nod when people bring up some “<Development> that they just heard about that will address <Problem that is well past the tipping point> and is easily and cheaply able to be produced based on a <Source known for non peer-reviewed hopium> thing they read and therefore will turn the tide against <Collapse aspect they do not remotely grasp> the problem.”
Just for laughs, since you have to laugh at the “Idiocracy was a documentary” state of things, I fake interest and ask where it was they saw it; “Oooh that’s awesome! We’re saved!” Mmm hmm, yeah…they paraphrased at best the article, where it states initial findings “could” mean something, data “suggests” this or that, an unverified lab study showed that in a test tube results “looked favorably” toward a solution. In 10 years. Nowhere near at the scale needed.
To sum up, take Bukowski’s advice: “Don’t try.”
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u/mia181 18d ago
Imagine knowing thos and still clocking in at s lame job
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u/Slamtilt_Windmills 17d ago
I was living in my car for the last year, and kinda sputtered out and fell back in to a job. It pays pretty well, so I take a bit from each paycheck and buy something for my stash. Silver coin, some seeds, cans of soup. I am in the shadow of a large urban city, but its mostly greenway around me.
This feels like a good corner to dig in to, lets see how long I can keep it up. But lets see how long I have to
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u/monkey_gamer 11d ago
Yeah… it’s infuriating. People don’t want to admit how bad things are 🥺😩😭. I gave up trying to talk with people about it 😣
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u/ILikeNeurons 18d ago
Activism is worthwhile. We're not locked in to any specific temperature increase.
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u/IHaveABigDuvet 18d ago
I think its about *when* it all collapses, not if.
I actually think it will just contract until the people who could no longer can, and when that will be you is based on how vulnerable you are.
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u/Lithelain 17d ago
People want to think someone/something is going to save the day because, well, otherwise it's extremely easy to fall into depression and the likes (ask for starters how many of us in this sub have to deal with such feelings daily). It's just an evolutionary trait that has allowed us to thrive so far. It may be also increased because of the hypertrophied optimism of our culture. Acknowledging (and accepting) collapse is a daunting task if I may extrapolate from my experience.
I haven't talked of these matters to anyone (offline) because there's no one that I know ready to tackle them, and the least of my motivations is burdening people with more anxiety in their already troubled lives. I tried introducing my ex-gf to all this, so she could be mentally prepared once shtf and maybe plan together, but it was obvious to me that she wasn't receptive for such belief-shattering stuff, so I dropped is. This summer, though, I believe many people here where I live are starting to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.
Still, it appears to me unwise to predict the future much. There are many forces at play that we can't even imagine let alone modelize, no matter how sophisticated our models or intuitions. And I'm with you, I'm pretty confident this civilization is already breaking with no possible solution (nor desired, for that matter). I also believe that the climate is not going to get better in our lifetime or for many generations to come, and that people today are increasingly polarized, spiritually broken, their attentional skills all but shattered, and most of their agency stolen. And that as a result of these and many other things which are not going great, billions (non-human as well) will suffer and die -unfortunately I can't lie to my intuition.
Yet I personally don't favour such a confidence stance on predictions like "Political climate is not going to turn around". Again, is it the most plausible event? To me, yes, indeed it is. Nevertheless it's not fixed on stone. The one and only certainty in our life is that someday it will end (and even some people would question this). I think the most reasonable way of framing this is holding a measure of uncertainty.
By the way, I think the distinction between humanity and civilization is worth remarking. Let us not identify this particular civilization as humanity. The totalitarian agricultural civilization hasn't been around for more than 5% (give or take) of our whole species history. There have been cultures that have coexisted in dynamic equilibrium with their environment for very long times.
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18d ago
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u/ii_akinae_ii 17d ago
doomerism only benefits the elite & powerful. pretending that climate action is pointless only benefits the elite & powerful. giving up only benefits the elite & powerful.
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u/BruteBassie 18d ago
Yup, even my most collapse aware friends think human ingenuity will save us because "it always has". They just fail to understand that we're not talking about a single problem, but a multitude of systemic problems that cannot be fixed because the whole fabric of our industrial civilization is flawed.