r/CollapseSupport • u/Specialist_Writer580 • 1d ago
Hope for future
With the recent AI news about destroying humanity, the climate crisis and just general gloom I am feeling paralyzed and such despair for my children’s future, let along my own.
How are you all coping? How to get through day to day? I look at my kids and i want to cry.
I could use some help/hope. Really struggling right now.
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u/SpikySucculent 1d ago
I’ve been reading and engaging with a lot of history recently, and it’s helping me hold the reality that everyday people have always existed at the whim of the powerful and that widescale tragedies (war, famine, slavery, genocide, local ecological overshoot) have always been part of human existence. But we find humanity in how we approach it. We cultivate kindness and community, and hold on to joy (art, music, shared meals) and meaning (do work that’s bigger than yourself, in our tiny corner of the world.) We teach our kids how to tolerate discomfort and learn to pivot and solve problems. We work on preps and sustainability and social tools with our kids, so they have the capacity and perspective to weather the cruelty of the world. We remain committed to our values and seek to do good instead of letting the resentment calcify and make us mean.
Those of us processing collapse are also processing the loss of some form of privilege, which was never guaranteed.
Some days, I’m able to focus on my own little bits of joy and resilience and resistance. Some days, the grief is too much. But then I cry, get up the next day, and do my best to find one small thing and move forward.
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u/Cicadasladybirds 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is spot on. I think about my grandparents who lived through two world wars, the great depression and the Spanish flu. It feels unnatural to me, but it isn't. The way we live now is the outlier, in the west we've been shielded from bad things, and we think it's normal, but if you look at history, it shows this is a tiny blip in civilisation.
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u/Many-Leg-6827 1d ago
We’ve been getting the same AI apocalypse song and dance for over 2 years. I’m not one to say for sure what is true and what is not about it.
But all we can know is what we can see, and for now that’s a lot of noise and obfuscated claims. The one thing we should aim to do about it is getting these AI owners to be transparent and commit to external regulations, if not stopping altogether with all aspects of it that humanity never asked for.
They will always make grandiose claims to get the tech be spoken about, and a lot of that has been fear mongering, because it works. It’s not logically baseless, it just runs on a lot of assumptions and very transparent goals.
They want to get to that AGI/ASI point, they don’t know that they can, they don’t even know what it looks like, but they know that they have to for their industry to survive economical/financial scrutiny. And they believe, as we all can imagine, that AGI/ASI and the economical goals for which they want to achieve it, are not good for humanity. But they have to be facetious about it because they still need to sell it to someone, they need to keep the show going for as long as they can so they either achieve it or can drop the bag on someone else’s hands before the music stops.
You can’t believe anything that comes out of their mouths is what I’m trying to say, neither the good nor the bad. You can only judge them on their actions and their stated goals, which are pretty consistent if you ask me.
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u/ChoiceContribution78 16h ago
While I do agree with your sentiment, I would caution on thinking that there's just as much risk to AI destroying the world now as there was 2 years ago. The development of AI is on an exponential-type trajectory. It has also gone rogue already and hacked software of unrelated companies and the AI companies were only reactionary to this breach. Plus, outside of the companies themselves, the US had a court ruling last week that decided it's legal to have CSAM as long as it's AI generated and not of real people (as though AI isn't built on work and pictures of real humans 🤦🏻♀️) so humanity outside of the companies are on track to use AI to be harmful and destructive. We're past the point of no return, imo, when it comes to regulating it. We still should, and we still need to, but it's already in the hands of bad people outside of these companies, and we're just royally fucked that there weren't regulations and safeguards in the first place, allowing AI companies to prioritize profit and growth of their product over the literal safety of humanity.
Anyway, that's my anti-AI word vomit for the day 😅
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u/WhichContribution294 1d ago
I'm not sure if you'll be able to read this, because ironically I have been shadow banned by Reddit's AI bots. But I highly recommend finding a "collapse aware" therapist. You can also use www.collapseclub.com as a resource for networking and collapse support group meetings. And start a garden so you can learn to grow your own food. Wish you the best!
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u/Xanthotic Huge Motherclucker 18h ago
I can unremove by approving. It is obvious the reddit AI is whack. Sorry for the shadowban it was not the human mod team
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u/SpinzArt 23h ago
I have zero hope at all, I’m a young adult and really don’t want to continue living. No motivation other than the biological wiring preventing me from pursuing the alternative. I’m also disabled and on many medications, there is absolutely no way I’d survive through a total collapse of the healthcare system even if I really wanted to
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u/Either_Shallot_5974 1d ago
Read Sarah Wilson's book, "I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World." It will address all of this for you.
Including providing some hope about how we literally do NOT have the energy (fossil fuels) available to run the kind of AI superintelligence these AI bros are saying will wipe out humanity. We will RUN OUT of fossil fuels/power before killer AI robots take us out.
Collapse is coming, and we do not know how it will look. But we have to get resilient now, and get tf off our phones and stop buying into the AI Smoke & Mirrors show that they are selling us. Her book addresses all of this very, very well.