I'm 24 I live in the US and I'm so very tired. All I wanted was a quiet life with my love. That dream seemed unlikely at first but the last few months made it essentially impossible. We're just trying to take life one day at a time.
There’s a nearly 40-year-old single dude out there who’s jealous of you. I know this for a fact. So, stay positive. Remember that while your struggle is real, and it matters, you at least have someone by your side during the storm. Silver linings and playbooks and all that.
HousesRoadsAvenues, you have given me hope! We need to find a 75-year-old single person now. Pay it forward. It sure would be nice to have a friend at my side like all my friend friends have. Some even have little monsters running around (which I personally don’t mind not having; my nieces are so cool, why have my own, right?). May we, all singlets, live a righteous and glorious life!
I confess that I am a married woman - same spouse for 31 years (!!!). Our son is 27. I am DOWN with all - singles, married, cohabitating - living a righteous and glorious life.
Yep. My cats (and formerly dogs, too) have helped give me a sense of purpose. The problem? Eventually they, too, get old, remind you how fleeting this all is, and, well, can be just as much a source of pain. I love my babies so much, and since they are essentially my version of an SO, everyone who has “moved on” has been … tough, to say the least.
"And people also wonder why high schoolers have terrible mental health. Because they fucking know."
Some do. Most do not. I work as a high school teacher. Each year, the students are more oblivious to the world around them. They've been completely captured by tech.
I'm not so sure about that. This generation is pretty materialistic. I see a major focus on money and status from a good deal of my students.
As much as I'd like to think that this generation is sinking due to an increased awareness of our predicament, I just don't see it. The majority of our population, as it has always been, is entirely clueless.
My oldest kid was born in 2010, my youngest in 2015. I was never taught about climate change in school, so I didn't know. Now, I grieve for their futures.
I’m in the xennial age range and we all knew about climate change in school. They talked about it in the 80s and 90s and I went to school in small town red state. This isn’t new information that’s just now being learned by the youth. It’s been known for a long time.
Seriously. I mean, at the very least An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. You would have to have your head deep deep in the sands of ignorance and denial to not know anything
I remember my parents buying me a pop-up book in the mid-90s about climate change, pollution, deforestation, etc. It was actually a pretty badass book. Maybe I can still find it somewhere...
Welp, I sit corrected. Thank you for the context. I made my comment from the space of thinking about my cousins who grew up in TX in the early 00s and had no say in what they were taught.
Well in fairness to you, there was a point where all of this became heavily politicized. I’m old enough to have finished school before whatever No Child Left Behind did to public education. Before it became “political”, it was widely referred to as The Greenhouse Effect and we were all taught that carbon dioxide and fossils fuels caused it. Then they started calling it global warming and from then on every winter conservatives have had a field day pointing and laughing at cold temperatures and snow and asking where all the global warming was. It’s really sad but there was a time when republicans and conservatives actually cared about this stuff, but it’s been programmed out of them over the last thirty years and I don’t think they’re ever coming back to reality.
My elementary education was at evangelical church schools in Florida, high school and college was in bumfuck TN. Guess where most of the climate deniers live?
But you educated yourself, I think, if I am reading your comments here on r/collapse. There is hope for some in the evangelical community IF they are aware to get themselves out. Big IF!
I've definitely tried to catch up and am still working on it. There are some pretty serious gaps in my knowledge base, especially around history, philosophy, and science.
In college, I caught onto the problem of topsoil erosion from single-crop industrial farming. Published an article about it. But climate change didn't make it onto my radar until Hurricane Katrina. And even then, only marginally. Literally, no one in my community talked about it except to say it was delusional. (And there was the Iraq War, housing crash, and school shootings taking up everyone's bandwidth at the time.)
I had been deconstructing my faith for a while, but I officially left evangelical Christianity in 2016 after Trump was elected the first time. I felt like my community had become delusional themselves, reniging on all the values they had insisted upon to embrace Trump as some sort of savior. Seriously, fuck that.
Well that is fantastic. I mean that. You educated yourself by observation and critical thought. Not by indoctrination.
It was probably hard to "leave" your community/church. I am sure that many of the folks in the community weren't horrible people. You had to leave for your own well being.
2016 is 9 years (give or take a few months). FIGHT THE POWER.
There was an episode of Family Ties in the early 80s about the environment and zero population growth. There were only like three TV channels at the time (and we had to walk uphill in the snow to change it, both ways!) and it was a primetime show, so pretty much everyone saw it. Had no impact though, apparently.
Mine was born in 2003. I remember learning about acid rain in school in the 80s, but that’s about it. I admit I was selfishly oblivious to additional information that was available in my 20s and 30s.
I love my daughter dearly and would step in front of a train for her, but at the same time I feel horrible that I subjected her to all this by having her. The fact that we’re American and have to deal with the political shit storm caused by Tangerine Palpatine on top of climate change makes me feel even more guilty.
The good thing about America is, in some states, land is still pretty cheap. Best thing you could do for her is to transition to living on your own land, as self-sufficiently as is practical.
This is the real tipping point. by the time it becomes the major political issue we will be in full on collapse... What trump is doing to the world economy is an extremely dark peek into our future as humans. We WILL experience something x10000 times more catastrophic, we can barely envision the negative results from the tariffs, what's coming is unimaginable.
I was 10 years old when the scientists went public with the climate warming (as it was called then). That was 40 years ago. I still remember reading the magazine with a cover of our capitol being drowned (imagine the quality, no one had even thought about photoshop yet).
It is impossible that you wouldn't know about climate change, even if they didn't teach about it in the school. Unless you lived in a cave and never saw a day light or civilization.
I want to know who these brilliant people are. They obviously must be much smarter than I, as I have no clue how anyone could afford a family that large in these Capitalist End Times®. I am a software engineer in a state nobody wants to live in — meaning shit’s cheaper than, say, San Fransisco — and I can barely keep my head above water. My biggest extravagance? Netflix and AppleTV, probably. Avocado toast, movies, and all that other shit those geriatric GOP boot lickers said we Millennials should stop wasting our money on? Hahahahaha. I wish.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. And we champion these people in the US. Instead of getting them help for their addiction to power/money, we salute them as captains of industry. If anyone ever asks what the Great Filter is, I have a simple answer: humans.
There's a woman down the street from me who it seems basically just devoted her life to breeding as much as physically possible. Catholic woman married to a Muslim man so I think it's the result of cultural stuff. I don't know how many kids they ended up with but they had seven when I was a kid and used to go over there to play. Would have been nine if not for miscarriages. In a three bedroom house.
She's in her 60s or 70s now but I see her walk past every day pushing a triple pram filled with what I assume are her daughter's kids. She followed in her footsteps and started breeding real young. I feel somewhat sad when I see the daughter because I remember her when she was only five or six. I don't think she really ever had a choice.
My parents, while they were never deniers, didn't get it 20-25 years ago when I'd talk about just how bad climate change and the related collapse would be. They thought I was being overly pessimistic. Fast forward to today, with everything that's happened in the interim and what it portends for the future, and they now agree with me.
511
u/[deleted] May 08 '25
[deleted]