World News

We love to commiserate. Shared pain = half pain in my mother tongue. Shared laughter = double laughter.

I don't disagree, but also I can find hope in this too. Humans likely aren't going anywhere, nor is the Earth. Us getting largely wiped out us a chance for a fresh start. We'd lose a lot, and there'd be a lot of suffering, but I personally can also find hope in a soft reset. Most of our information probably wouldn't be lost, but we could come back and hopefully have an understanding of how we can impact the planet.

This volcano isn't it though. It's just going to hurt a lot of people, but it's not big enough for any kind of reset of societal norms.

Comments like this just released into this kind of depressing echo chamber just spread negativity and hopelessness that is not needed in the world today.

look bro the only thing that brings me happiness and solace in life is nature, which is being fucked over, so i pretend that isn't happening, and doing shit. So i just do a lot of things.

Sometimes it's good to recognize the shitty in the world, just to see through to the good. Especially in something that you have no control over ultimately at the end of the day.

Thanks for saying this.

I think these posts have a way of propagating doomer-think in a way that almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all collectively assume good will never win so we don't do anything, so good doesn't win, but then we collectively at least feel smug and perceptive.

For all of us, but I think especially for younger generations, it's hard to see any "wins" from the side of good, so it's tempting and almost comfortable to just make sardonic memes and embrace depressive nihilism. We've been conditioned to helplessness.

We laud cynical storytelling about selfish horrible people because it's "realistic". We meme about mass-extinction. We see boring-cyberpunk dystopias as our inevitable near future. We doomscroll about each and every terrible rotten thing that happens on every square inch of the planet that we can't do anything about and believe it's our fault.

But we gotta combat this with hope if there's any possibility for a brighter future.

I'm just gonna leave this here. It's profound and I think of it every day to keep going:

FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.

SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?

SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

--Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers (film version)

I wish I could only selectively see the seemingly fewer and fewer good things in life, but I've lived long enough to see how far downhill we've gone over the past handful of decades. It's made even more depressing by the fact of having seen the root cause (mostly aggressive manipulation by the right wing eaten up by selfish masses) of what was an upward trajectory turned to shit needlessly in order to serve as a scoreboard to a pissing match for the ultra-domineering control freaks.

Even if climate change doesn't make human life completely unbearable for humans on what's left of the planet, it's going to take too long to rebalance our living circumstances to see much hope for a good future for the masses. Especially as those at the top work so vociferously against the common interest.

Is there hope? You are saying it but I'm not seeing any

Look around. The world has been ending for a long time. Just because it hasn't been for you doesn't mean the apocalypse isn't already here for many people or even most.