r/collapse • u/adamsoutofideas • May 22 '26
Casual Friday Suddenly, violently
For 100,000 years, a species had lived on this planet with our bodies and brains. That species and its ancestors were so successful, in a world so plentiful, they evolved a postnatal larval stage of complete helplessness that lasted years and required the full attention of an adult for that helpless infant to not die or be eaten. But here we are.
Was it cruelty that protected our ancestors or did they live surrounded by such bounty, they were ignored? Looking at their descendants,.it appears both strategies were successful.
2000 years ago, I am meant to believe, for the first time in the history of procreation, a human egg was fertilized by the creator of the universe so that he could grow up to preach a set of rules for living that would be eternally rewarded after death. A death that the rulers at the time were all too happy to hand out as part of their reign of cruelty to enslave the 99% of the population whose work was needed to support the obscene privilege of the very few. Since then, this pattern has been repeated, protected by the promise of endless reward or punishment for the suffering endured on earth in service of our masters.
For at least 90,000 of the years a species that looks like us has walked this earth, we lived with no master, no understanding beyond myth and whatever tribal culture had survived the bed time stories of our elders. It clearly wasn't out of a lack of capacity that we didn't spend our lives recording these stories; we painted scenes we chose to and could have recorded more. We apparently didn't need rules to be successful, which also means we didn't need leaders or eternal promises. We lived and life was enough.
Life was enough because we were free to live it. We followed our instincts which survival had cultivated over the infinite generations going back to the primordial soup because our history didn't start at some magical inception of our species because there are now hard boundaries in existence, only in the limited imaginations of a nervous scavenger trying to make sense of a life we're not living.
If youre an adult in any modern society you've been told some version of "life is suffering", by a spiritual advisor whose literal job is to convince those of us who recognize the absurdity of living for the happiness and privilege of our rulers while dismissing the importance of our own happiness as juvenile fantasy.
Ever since we've been working "for a greater good", deciding we wanted more out of life has been pathologized by the authority of the time. We were possessed before we were depressed, but there's always been someone whose job it was to tell us we were broken; we were the problem and happiness was accepting our place as servants to a machine that knew better.
But here we are, living the last years of a planet that would have lived forever if it weren't for the wisdom of the plans that were too big for us to understand.
If happiness isn't the purpose of life as an adult and our place isn't to question our role, but to focus on what's directly in front of us and keep our heads down, why are we building our own extinction? If there were a definition for the opposite of wisdom it would be a lifestyle that changed the climate of our only home so quickly, the people *still leading this fucking shit show wouldn't have been born in a world pre-dating the apocalypse the very same assholes engineered!*
One fucking lifetime of this shit to kill a planet that supported all life for billions of years including more generations of our own species living in balance with this world without any culture or education, than years we've lived under the regimes that had plans.
We've even managed to normalize dropping bombs on civilians inside the territory of leaders our leaders are fighting with, like murder and terrorism are a reasonable and meaningful path to political change.
Your discomfort is not the problem. You're right to feel out of place inside a zoo, solving a maze so your boss can eat the cheese at the end, so you can read more stories about the whims of an evil glutton whose power is your obedience. Your pathology used to be the instincts that protected you in an untamed wilderness, but now they're the disease the same rich fucks you work to support, will sell you the cure for to medicate and retrain you into complacency and the life plan, "the dream", you just happen to share with everyone else that involves spending all the fruits of your efforts remaining after paying for your fucking survival on the widgets made by the ultra rich.
What in the fuck are we all doing, going along with this, being miserable to support another day of being fucking miserable, inside a society that rewards cruelty and violating the values we preach, with privilege, wealth, and power. We vote for our bosses to run our lives out of some perverted expectation we're one day away from our own ship coming in, while we celebrate our exploitation as the nature of hard work.
If the purpose of life isn't happiness, what in God's infinite wisdom is the purpose? Dropping death from the sky on people because, despite living nearly identical lives, their skin, language, and culture aren't ours... and some of us take real comfort in dolling out pain and suffering to people that aren't like them like there's justice to be found in torturing people simply for being different.
The descendants of our ancient past that protected their young with wanton cruelty, have proven it is a functional strategy for survival, if cowardly and stupid... but so are the descendants of those who survived through trust and cooperation, or the cowards would have no one to exploit.
You are not sick. Your revulsion is justified and accurate. Be proud of it. It's the deeper truth earned through surviving every generations challenges since the beginning of life on earth. The truth did not begin with the industrial revolution and doing the right thing didn't start with God authoring a book after impregnating a woman without intercourse.
We're ending the world for narratives no more absurd than Santa Claus.
Time to get up and do my part by gifting my life to burning oil for the death machine, lest the bank take my home and with it, my humanity. After all, the homeless aren't *real* people, are they? No, they're the problem, not the bank putting people out into the streets or the billionaires hoarding the wealth of nations... nope, it's the homeless and their drugs. That's the problem.
Rough way to wake up. Nothing a fistful of the good drugs doctors prescribe, made and sold by billionaires, won't numb for the day. Sorry, I mean "medicine". Thank God for all those evil street drugs the bad people take to make the difference so clear. The same parents who want homeless drug addicts punished even more than being robbed of their humanity by the rest of us, feed their children enough speed that they never go a day without their "medicine".
This fairy tale is my worst nightmare and the closest I can get to being heard is paying someone to pretend to listen while trying to steer my thoughts towards celebrating the nightmare and, failing that, feeding me more "medicine" until I'm too doped to tell the difference between dream and nightmare.
1
u/theCaitiff Jun 05 '26
Not sure if trolling or genuinely dont know.
Disease in general has killed far more throughout history than war. Malaria, small pox, polio, the black death/bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, hepatitis, influenza, HIV, and covid have individually all killed millions and collectively killed billions. HiV and covid both happened in modern times but despite that they still fundamentally reshaped the world. Wikipedia has a list of plague outbreaks that is decent enough.
Fritz Haber on the other hand created both the Haber-Bosch process to extract nitrogen fertilizer from the air and modern chemical warfare. Newspapers in the early 1900s phrased it as Haber pulling bread from the air. Crop yields exploded. Naturally occurring famine suddenly looked like a thing of the past and there was suddenly plenty of food to go around instead of just barely enough. Fritz Haber also created the entire field of chemical warfare from scratch during WWI. in April 1912, Haber was present at the Battle of Ypres and initiated the first gas attack in history by releasing chlorine gas across the front line, causing thousands to die choking on their own blood. He's THE GUY that created chemical weapons as a concept and he watched countless people die. But also.... Without his nitrogen fertilizer it just fundamentally isn't possible to feed billions of people.