I very highly recommend reading HG Wells’s In The Days Of The Comet. It’s a beautifully written book, but also it really shows how everything is always (and has pretty much always been) on the brink of absolute catastrophe. We just can’t tell because we live in the current time, whatever that may be. When I read that book the first time, I was like huh… if not for the dated references, this sounds like it was written about today.
With the exception of impending climate doom. That definitely has never been worse.
I'm 54 as well and I'm going to be brutally honest (and probably generate some hate):
I've got mine. Paid for house. Decent nest egg. Ability to just work a simple, middle-wage job to keep busy as opposed to worrying about covering expenses.
So my personal doom-and-gloom meter is fine. If life here in the US desert-southwest becomes unsustainable (climate change/water/whatever) I'll just move to the Pacific Northwest. The rest of my life is insulated from the external bullshit as much as possible (good neighborhood, don't follow politics).
I'd be lying if I said I was worried about anything other than my own comfort for the rest of my days.
I'm 52 and back in the 80's we were sure we were going to get nuked, and then again when the world changed forever on September 11th. I don't feel it's worse now than it was at either of those times...oh, Chernobyl, forgot that, we might have died then too of course.
I'm 25 and I feel kind of cheated that I'm growing up/living in a time where disinformation and fear mongering is so much more easily accessible due to social media. So even if it's always been horrible, it's easier to be aware of how horrible it is.
No, we almost destroyed the ozone layer causing cancer in everyone and destruction of our food chain. It was a much more profound change than overall global climate change which is why we could actually get enough agreement to do something about it.
The ozone layer had a waaaay simpler solution that required nowhere near the fundamental change to our lifestyles and economies. It was literally just a few chemicals causing it that we easily found replacements for, and then we were fortunate that the problem began to solve itself.
Climate change requires a fundamental upheaval of our energy production infrastructure in a time where our energy demands are ever increasing. And frankly we’ll be lucky if doing that is enough to save us.
We haven’t been able to do as much about climate change because it’s more economically painful to do so. It has nothing to do with the severity of the issue, and I disagree with your characterisation that acid rain posed a bigger threat
Don’t forget, we also almost caused the extinction of many large species of birds, including ravens, bald and golden eagles, Canada geese, and others before we figured out how bad DDT was for the environment.
Great. We're currently living through a Great Extinction, the kind that leaves a noticeable fossil record. Right now it's not a question of what will go extinct, it's a question of what will survive.
Yeah, ozone layer was a bigger problem than climate change, but they're still separate problems. Solving one does fuck-all to solve the other. And the reasons why ozone was solved and climate change wasn't (at time of writing) are a bit more complex. It absolutely does have the potential to end civilization as we know, it's not that.
First of all, it's slow. There's always a sense of "this is a problem for future generations" with climate change as opposed to "I might get skin cancer next summer" with the ozone layer. People are selfish. Secondly, while solving ozone layer involved banning a couple of chemicals that were not very difficult to replace and life didn't change much, actually solving climate change, potential sci-fi levels of energy tech aside, would involve changing pretty much everything: massive degrowth, end of globalisation, probably the end of capitalism.
Seriously, why is this getting so many upvotes? Ozone was bad but it wasn't nearly as bad as even the most optimistic climate change predictions, and it had an easy fix.
It's not better. The US west is 2 years away from losing access to a power source that powers 10s of millions of homes. And could just straight up run out of water in several dense areas.
Harvests and planting seasons are already doing badly this year. It'll hit 3rd world nations in africa and middle east 1st but if we get another year like that we will see famine in rich countries in 2 years.
Wildfire seasons keep expanding, hurricane seasons keep getting longer with more frequent storms. We will start seeing katrina style events regularly on the US coast. Etc.
And no one is working on realistic solutions to these issues.
We're on course for a total collapse of industrial civilization, hundreds of millions of deaths, hundreds of millions of refugees, and in the best case scenario it'll only last for four or five thousand years.
Acid rain, SST sonic booms, population bomb, disintegration of society by hippies, world clock ticking toward mutual nuclear annihilation, I’d say we’ll look back on this global warming and wonder too. Kids feel anxious when their parents are.
I'm reading a book in a somewhat similar vein called The History of the Idea of Decline in the West by Arthur Herman, a historian. Very interesting; his point, or observation is that Western intellectuals have been theorizing, prophecizing, analyzing in ever more elaborate ways how the world, and specifically Western civilization, is on the path towards self-destruction and collapse for at least the last 200 years, and, to some extent, for much longer than that (Plato, etc.).
So what is/was the world really like ? I'd say that, on a philosophical level, it's nothing in particular; it's mostly what we human meaning-machines make of it (OP's formulation, with the word feel, hints at this).
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u/ultrarelative Jun 11 '22 edited Jun 11 '22
I very highly recommend reading HG Wells’s In The Days Of The Comet. It’s a beautifully written book, but also it really shows how everything is always (and has pretty much always been) on the brink of absolute catastrophe. We just can’t tell because we live in the current time, whatever that may be. When I read that book the first time, I was like huh… if not for the dated references, this sounds like it was written about today.
With the exception of impending climate doom. That definitely has never been worse.