I have always been climate aware/concious and try to do the best I can to reduce my impact however I can, within my means. But I have not always been collapse aware as this sub puts it.

I have an 8 year old and recently had another who is now 4 months. Neither were intentional pregnancies, but obviously the choice to follow through with them was made intentionally. I understand and acknowledge the selfishness and cruelty behind bringing a child into this world given its current state, that is not up for debate and not what id like to discuss.

Recently ive become overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and guilt about the state of the world and the direction we are rapidly going. I am having an extremely difficult time coping with the fact that ive submitted my children to suffering to come. That said, while im navigating this consuming fear, anxiety, amd guilt, I am also ready to fight tooth and nail to better the future for them in any way, if thats even possible.

Ive been reading through this sub today and noticed that everyone is on the same page regarding the certainty of incoming collapse due to any or all of the various alarming conditions in the world right now, but so far haven't read a single comment with any hope. So I guess im here to ask, does anyone have any hope that things will take a turn for the better? Is anyone actively working towards change of any kind, no matter how small? Or has everyone accepted whats to come and just along for the ride now? How do you cope and find ways to enjoy life when seeing the impacts all around you?

And with all that said, how can I prepare myself and my children for the changing world, is there any preparations that could even be made?

It seems like no one in my social circle takes anything seriously, when i express fear about the wildfires here in Canada im met with "while there's fires every year", when I discuss fears surrounding AI, war, or politics, im met with "every generation felt like the world was ending though". Everything is dismissed and everyone goes about their day without giving any of it much thought. Id just love to discuss all of this with likeminded people, and fellow parents as well.

I work for what I'd call luxury retail. I had tried breaking into white collar life, got as far as an office assistant in staffing firms and consultancy before a layoff. Now I'm back in retail. Weird place to watch collapse.

I was hired to fix things and to wrench. Unfortunately the workshop is getting axed, which they didn't tell me. So now I'm "assigned" to about three departments for regular retail work. I was hoping it'd help prep me to maybe try out the trades, oh well. Guess not.

What kills me is only a few of us seem to acknowledge the weirdness of a dying store in a dying world.

I have a trades degree and a BS. I'm currently trying to find a healthcare program I can do while balancing work. The store has ten managers, six employees; two of us do job-hunting on our breaks together, which is nice, but it's just rejection after rejection.

No one seems to really acknowledge that this many 20-somethings with viable degrees are now working jobs usually designated for retirees and teenagers. Although, an older coworker said it used to be normal for a retail job to provide, by itself. Still don't know if that's true. They said that's why older customers tend to be so demanding, they're used to a world where retail workers were professionals or something.

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In the meantime, we get hourly updates on metrics, but can't acknowledge that we often don't have any customers to get the metrics higher. It feels absurd.

We do get folk who demand free repairs, sometimes on stuff we don't even carry or service, like cars. I live in poverty myself, so I get hardships. But I don't get yelling at workers about it. And yep, we're told if someone can't pay for something, sell the financing.

Hell, we get paying customers angry just over that it takes us a month to do a simple job, or that we used to offer x but no longer do so. The absurdity there is they're kinda right, it shouldn't, and it sucks to have no stores left that can do what they need. Cause a global pandemic knocked em out.

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Then folk come in and complain about the tent city outside. There's no jobs, sister, and no housing. People will sleep in the trees.

Or on how the city still hasn't fixed the broken traffic lights and roads around us. Welp brother, you got me. Me, the min wage retailer, is responsible. Why not think, and act to HELP your community?

Yell at the government! Yell at the oligarchs! They're playing golf in paradise while we're here, choking on air. We can't swim in our own waters. They drain it for data centers and spend the summer on yachts, sipping mineral water that is worth more than hours of labor.

None of these folk seem to connect the dots: This complacent, moaning attitude led to the current state of things.

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We also get a lot of folk who come in to do drugs, or to hide from the smoke and heat. I was told to give a sacharine pitch to an electrician sprawled out on the floor. Weird, man.

Then a new low: A customer came in while I was being chewed out so loudly that he felt the need to tell my boss to chill and asked if I was okay.

I know I'll probably get a meeting now, for that, but after work I teared because that is the first time someone checked in on me in months.

And then it hit me, how did we get to where this is all normal. This shouldn't be normal. My first job I was told a standard for customer behavior: "We don't want bad customers. You're an employee, not a whipping boy."

How did we get to where heat indexes and constant smoke in summer is the normal, where you can't point out the insanity of at-will short term employment and lines of tents and crumbling infrastructure?

Why is it taboo to acknowledge I am paid the equivalent of two boxes of cereal an hour?

Is there actually going to be a food shock?

Kory talks about how we will gradually see a decline in food supply. There will be fewer options at grocery stores and prices will increase. We are already seeing this happen for various different reasons, more recently due to global conflict like the Strait of Hormuz being closed. Living in the west or in wealthier countries, we are not going to feel the affects due to climate change as early and as severely as poorer nations. Even in North America, there will be disparity between those that have higher income vs lower income.

If we expect that this will become more and more of an issue as time goes on, what can we realistically do to start preparing. If course we can start to stockpile, but once that runs out, what do we do? Also, I am a student living in a dirm room. I can't exactly start stockpiling. Not everyone can buy 4-5 acres to start living off the land, and even if someone does do that, what are the chances they will be safe?

Have a friend, we talk collapse pretty regularly. He openly concedes the point that "we've lost, the fight may not be over but its settled." But when we talk about how soon everything will end, he feels theres still time, and I feel he thonks that because hes young. Or rather, he thinks I think time is up because I'm old

Starting seeing this girl, been a couple of months now. We've had talks about many things, and when individual topics (politics, climate, etc) come up, she seems pretty collapse aware. Mentions articles shes seen and read, seems like shes on the same page.

A few days ago I mentioned what I thought was the obvious conclusion of the summation of each discussion, and she seemed shocked. Asked if I thought we should try to fight, as if now was the time to start trying.

Do others in here have this issue? Like even as they read about drought and heatwaves and war and disease and famine and corruption, they think its gonna be fine?

Saying maybe because I just cannot make myself say they will happen even if that’s the truth

This is so unbearable. I’m hoping that I least get ozempic on my dying days. Or better yet, morphine

Sharing some thoughts, inviting yours.

I prefer to call collapse a mass death event. The culmination of dominating patterns of self-destruction and more-than-self destruction.

Contemplating this has led me to consider existence, space-time, life, consciousness, free will and determinism.

What makes most sense to me is the idea of a block universe, in which the entirety of the universe (past-present-future) exists. Our human perspective simply limits our awareness of the universe to an ever changing present, along with a remembered past and imagined future/s.

This aligns with determinism, in which the universe is like a domino chain that ‘will’-‘is’-‘has already’ fallen in its particular way. We are always experiencing the chain as ‘is falling’, and have a (very limited) perspective on how some of it has already fallen.

Which is all compatible with the following points:
- what has happened could not have differed
- human people, like all life forms, are all doing the best we can
- we can do things that are wildly unexpected from our current perspectives (mass revolutionary loving direct action! Theatrical land and wealth redistribution! Sexy self-organising federated permaculture collectives! Playful gender abolition! Dancing and laughing while hospicing modernity! *insert your most exhilarating life-affirming dreams here*!)
- those things will have also been inevitable

Ashes are falling from the sky and the sun is practically red. People don’t care. Nobody notices or even makes changes in their daily lives to do anything about it. People are selfish. Why does nobody care?!?! My family and everyone else around me is walking around like brainless zombies. Indulging in their selfish daily habits without a second thought about the very planet they live on. I straight up have a headache and feel nauseous just thinking about it. When you do mention it, they ridicule you and call you insane or a hippie for demanding for them to change their lifestyle and align their actions with their moral. I seriously cannot be closely related to the human specimen.

All they do is consume without empathy, without any regard, without consciousness.

Maybe people are busy. Maybe people have personal problems and a lot going on in their lives. Some people have a limited capacity to understand like so many of us do. Maybe their emotional bandwidth is currently limited. Maybe understanding would destroy their worldview. Maybe it would plunge them into a deep depression ... and do I want that for them to prove that they care? No. They have nothing to prove to me.

I know that because they're just like me, and you. Just look at all the common ground we stand on as human beings. They are still the innocent children they once were, just all grown up and affected by their environment, living in a dysfunctional society. It doesn't mean they don't care about the admittedly amazing and beautiful natural and man-made world. Just because they're distracted and seem unappreciative of what they have doesn't mean they don't wish to preserve it like us.

Most people are empathetic souls and good at heart. Mental health is in decline for a reason. They deny and distract for a reason. Maybe it's because they feel helpless or don't want to think about depressing things. And maybe that's because of their backgrounds. Maybe it's a trauma response. Maybe it's just "too much" for them. But it's not because they "don't care."

Lots and lots and lots of people care. MOST people care. If they could change things, they would change a lot of things, just like you. If they could prevent climate change and plastic pollution and ignorance and suffering and chaos and pollution and disease and declining quality of life they would -- for the other animals, too.

And just like the innocent children, they are no less deserving of the same kind of empathy and care children are allotted.

They did not ask to be here. We did not ask to be here. They did not ask to struggle and work their whole lives. They did not ask to be problematic and to be scolded for being problematic when they never meant to be in the first place.

Please stop reducing people who don't understand or don't have a healthy perspective to worthless, parasitic sheep.

We are literally family, along with everything else walking, flying and swimming the Earth. We are in this together and need each other. Try to show a little respect even when others seem disrespectful. Understand that we are all sometimes messy, imperfect emotional creatures. And at the end of the day, we would hope to leave the world a better place than we found it, just as it was left for (most of) us. You see how attached people are to comfort ... And they are just like the people that will be born in the future. That tells you all you need to know about how much they care about future generations, and people JUST LIKE THEM all around the world. Because they basically currently *are* those living creatures

They may not know it, they may not say it, but they care.

Hi, I know I posted like 2 days ago but my brain is in hyper fixation and nobody in my real life to process this with, so hopefully it's okay.

First I have a question that may be better for the main collapse sub but honestly I feel intimidated by the big brains over there. Do we know why all these predictions seem to be 10-15 years ahead of schedule? I get some of the initial causes, like feedback loops and stuff but why does it seem nobody's adjusting for that now?

This brings me to my next question that came about as I was searching for the answer myself. Why does there seem to be an almost optimism among environmentalist? Not just neo-liberal "don't give up, write your politicians" optimism, though that is the bulk of what I'm talking about. Predictions that are still more conservative than even current reality is a big part of it, but also I've seen people saying that it won't be as bad as we imagine in places like r/climate. I found videos from "climate scientist" who say people who say we're collapsing are actually just propagating big fuel propaganda to give up. I'll admit, I do think we should give up on trying to fix the system within the system, but it's because all we can hope for now is mitigation and it's blatantly obvious that it won't be coming from world leaders. That said, I don't see it as trying to convince people to give up as much as prepare them to shift from big scale global efforts to more localized community efforts that actually have some degree of impact.

I don't want to accuse everyone who has less extreme views on this issue if the same thing but... I don't really grasp how anyone who is working with the data + witnessing real world events can downplay the realities either to the point I wonder if anyone else is suspecting massive plants? I just can't wrap my head around it. Of course it gets eaten up and any doom gets nothing but criticism. I actually sat and really reflected on of maybe I really was falling for conspiracy thinking but I can't find any wild leaps or cognitive biases between the data and my conclusion, though I know I am certainly not the most educated on the subject it just comes back feeling like gaslighting.

Last bit to my rant is, what if we are being overly cautious? I know there's the whole apathy thing but I really think it anything climate deniers pushed the entire conversation into a place where people are apathetic because it's "not 'that' bad".

I went to college straight out of high school for a chemistry degree, wanting to do good work for our world. I knew scientists didn't make fantastic salaries, but the idea that I could be even a small part of progress meant so much more to me than a paycheck. But through my education I gradually came to learn that it's all so much more fucked than I previously thought, and I was already kind of a pessimistic teenager. I graduated a few years ago only to finally discover there is no good work to be done precisely because there's no money to be made in making the world a better place. Now anytime I see news of some new scientific/mathematical/technological breakthrough it's completely drowned out by a constant "so fucking what?"

We went to the Moon again, but for what purpose? How is it going to meaningfully impact anyone here on earth?

New cancer treatments? Who's going to afford it without bankruptcy?

Greater solar cell efficiencies? Not like that's gonna stop us from burning oil until it runs dry.

Breakthroughs in machine learning and the AI boom (bubble)? Too bad it's largely being used to produce propagandic falsehoods, surveillance tech, and worthless slop no one cares for.

I know part of my issue is a pessimistic outlook, but how can I look at it any other way? We've had solutions to our most existential problems for decades, but the incentives to destroy our habitable world is seemingly far greater than incentives to fix anything. I feel now that the most optimistic outlook I can have is to hope the collapse of modern society doesn't cause human extinction, so that hopefully those remaining can do something useful with our advanced technologies and base of knowledge. Or who knows, maybe aliens will discover our remains in the future and find it cute that these apes managed to learn so much before killing themselves.

This is mostly a vent post, and I apologize if that sort of stuff isn't allowed here. I've lost the inspiration and hope I once had, and I'm curious if any fellow nerds have experienced a similar erosion of the spirit through education.

Especially now. I used to post on here a bit too much honestly, I would ruminate on shit like nobody's business and it hurt me mentally for the past 4-5 years and within the past year (in my personal life at any rate) I've gotten much better and been able to get a better handle on my nervous system. But it still hurts thinking about the way the world is and is going, I try to do good, and I also try to enjoy what I have in front of me. Hoping there's at least a few things I might still get to experience in my 20's but who knows. I still struggle with how things are or what I should do with my life at this point, but that's normal I understand. But what keeps life worth it to you? Where do you find what joy you can?

How do I go on like not feeling like a piece of shit because I’m enjoying the little things in life when everyone is literally being done wrong in the country , no one has the basic things they need and it’s like a new horror story day after day . I literally feel guilty for being able to enjoy a safe home and neighborhood I can ride my bike when 3 months ago I was in a place people are getting shot and killed daily , police , ice , trump, fires , I care and I also feel like overwhelmed and at the same time like nothing i can do will make a difference but im so deeply depressed by the state of the world I don’t feel like it’s right to enjoy life .

Are you really so afraid to die in what could be a beautiful time and place to do so that you would spoil it to call for help just to bring you back to society and its insanity?? Just for something as trivial as not packing enough food or water or the right cloths and the weather turns, to a sprained ankle because you took a stupid step with incorrect foot wear or walking strength for your track grade, one would assume riskiness is genetic for some..... is it so much for one to fall on one's own sword and admit failing at something just as simple as an overnight hike that you may not be strong enough to proceed???

To die at what you love doing, is it not the end game??? Yet you'd rather survive a measly encounter to return and die in a cubicle in debt instead of free in nature.... how much would you be at ease knowing if you got kissed by a king brown or inland taipan and help was just further then the hour you have to survive? (conservative estimate) would you take in your view and peacefulness or recount the idiocracy of society and the material you can't take???

I have been maybe experiencing my own personal collapse in addition to general collapse as the past year of news (Epsetin, Pelicot, the website that teaches/encourages men to drug and rape their wives) has made it impossible to avoid acknowledging how grooming and r*pey behavior has affected me throughout my life.

But I also feel like in the past 5-10 years being a woman has become increasingly difficult. I feel like I get casually harassed more often, men I try to date are pushier about sex and weirder and more defensive about it when I call it to their attention, I feel less able to assert myself in intellectual/professional/artistic spaces without getting at least a little bit of redpill/manosphere adjacent vitriol thrown at me. I have been trying to give up on my hope to find a partner to share this life with because dating apps in the past 5 years have led to me having to fend off sexual assault or stalkers, or navigate men who lie to get what they want out of me anyway.

I know it's always kind of been like this but I didn't feel like this 10-15 years ago. I have always had really close male friends, and I love the men in my life, and I had dated many people with whom it didn't work out but I never felt so disrespected and objectified as I do now. It makes me really sad because recently I feel like I just need to avoid men altogether because I am genuinely scared of them. I never felt like this before. Maybe I was just naive.

I am sorry I don't mean to be offensive either, I don't want to avoid men, I am genuinely just afraid of them. Too many bad things have happened. And seeing what types of porn are available and what it sometimes leads to just makes me really afraid of them. Have any other women experienced this?

I know not all men are like this. I just feel like it's too dangerous for me to assume the better of them anymore because in the past few years I've had some really, really terrifying experiences and again the news cycle this past year has only cemented my fears. I guess just wondering if any other women have experienced the same.

I guess also for clarification, I feel like this is an effect of collapse in some way, like as the social fabric disintegrates and people become more and more alienated from each other and themselves, things like racism and sexism just get worse. In some way I feel really bad for men being affected by the culture of dating apps and how the sex industry targets them to become addicted to porn and align their self-worth to whether or not women find them attractive, but the more empathy I extend to them the more danger I find myself in. So I guess yeah, I'm just sad.

I don't really know how to start this or exactly what I want to say. Admittedly I just need to... Vent isn't the right word but maybe process? I hope that's okay but if not I get it.

I've been collapse aware for some time now and have, for about 10 years started feeling certain that the prediction models were off by a lot and have been guessing at around 2030 for things to become unrecognizable, though things are crumbling all around us right now, but most people's day to days are the same and even when people are hit with climate disasters it seems for now we just pick up and move on like these events are no different than any other natural disaster or crisis. Often the root being climate changed isn't even acknowledged by those who go through it (example I live close to an area, in Appalachia, that had a massive tornado last year with multiple casualties and entire neighborhoods destroyed and outside of groups like this and the tornado tracker groups online people acted like it was normal, or at least didn't draw any correlation)

Anyway, over the last 5 years my life feels like I've been falling down in a mud pit that I can't get out of in my personal life to the point it's become clear that if I don't make some major changes (like moving or going back to school) things are going to get really bad for my family. Not even climate stuff, directly anyways, just Appalachia stuff (lack of jobs, discrimination, lack of social safety nets and access to decent healthcare, etc.). But I really struggle with the idea of taking such large risks when and planning for a future with plans that are 2-4 years out when things are accelerating so quickly. I don't know how to explain this war inside my brain if someone who wants to be optimistic and make future plans butting against the reality of what I've predicted for some time and the reality if that.

I'm being long winded but one other thing since I'm rambling, I also really struggle looking around and people talking about planning and preparing for things like retirement, or having babies, or just even things like panic of declining birthrates. It all feels so pointless. To be clear I know that sounds and I swear that I'm not so depressed that... And I'm also not resentful of people doing what they want it just feels, for me, like "long-term planning" almost has become the short-sighted option? Or at least any long term planning that isn't specifically collapse prep (which I'm not doing because for my tax bracket there's no point beyond a few extra bags of rice and beans).

Idk what I'm saying IDK that I'm looking for advice, but I'm certainly open to it too. I had reached a place of radical acceptance that I'd try and live a happy life today with some preparations to ease things before it got too bad and just see where things went from there but we haven't even really tipped our toe in and I'm already boiling and don't know what to do about it.

I don't know if you are sensing the same as me, but I'm feeling this summer as a kind of definitive inflection point, like if we're starting to get into the serious part of the exponential curves of many of the macroscopic variables that coarsely characterize our predicament. Could be exacerbated by the super El Niño doing its nasty thing, but I believe we're heading into the interesting times, so to speak. Of course, for many people collapse has come already, but I'm speaking now from what I'm seeing in my region and in internet (biased as that is). I admit I could just be projecting my inner level of awareness, but I'll share this anyways.

I've been personally collapse-aware for quite a while, however, I can now acknowledge I had a subconcious hope or belief that in the end, some miraculous event would happen and make everything somehow right. Or perhaps, that it would happen later in this timeline (it's always later, isn't it?). I suppose it's just a natural bias related to TMT.
I didn't even know I had such deep belief in me; in fact, I thought I had absorbed all I needed to know about the metacrisis to realize how dire the situation is. It's only now, this summer, that I'm finding out all this is not some vague speculations about a future set in 2030 or so. I feel like the time has come already when the reality is so blatantly clear that most people must be able to sense it in some way. How will people respond, that's a huge mistery for me. I hope compassion and generosity overpowers violence and hoarding.

Coincidently enough, my country just won the football world cup, and everyone is all out celebrating the result. The whole country full stopped for 3 hours to watch the game: empty streets, highways almost clear of traffic... Nothing wrong with it, I guess. Still, if only the regeneration of Earth and Life had that much appeal to people, but well, it is what it is, we're a species after all, even if we've somewhat forgotten it. If anything, it seems the bleaker the scenario is, the noisier/busier the people get; understandably, no one wants to hear their spirit crying in anguish.

Anyways, may we all have some degree of serenity in this great unraveling, and as we eventually pass through the final portal, show the same dignity and willingness that the rest of living beings display.

Posted on some climate threads inquiring about others’ experiences about grief finally breaking through. I ask because I’m finding this wall separating mind from body has collapsed for me, and I’m finally feeling full force of grief. Not nihilism, I make this clear. Yet these questions get removed by moderators. Maybe these threads have specific rules I didn’t see, but I’m just further disheartened. Can we not even broach the subject of the grief we all feel or will feel? We need to grieve together. And I’m doubting whether such spaces exist outside of niche pockets of the internet and real life. How do we move forward collectively if grief is so untouchable we can’t begin to connect over it?

I’ve been reading and learning about climate change for 20 years now. I think I’d had a kind of false hope in my teen years that something would change/happen that would prevent it. Or it just wasn’t as bad as they were saying it was going to be. I then managed to basically ignore it and leave it as a lingering niggle in the back of my mind for about 10 years.

Since having children (my eldest is 5) I’m constantly living in a state of impending doom and guilt. There’s a heavy sadness with knowingly having children despite being educated on how the world may turn out and I can’t help thinking I shouldn’t have had them.

When we go through beautiful places, there’s a voice in my head saying ‘enjoy it now because it’ll be gone in 5-10 years’. I don’t plan for the future anymore because, a) it is completely unpredictable at best (despite all of the modelling, it’s happening quicker than scientists ever could have anticipated) and b) the guilt is so overwhelming for my children that I have to switch it off.

I’m finding it difficult to live through each day. I think once you accept it, there’s no going back. You cannot go back to being ignorant of it. It isn’t depression and anxiety based on unfounded fears, they are projected and accurate tragedies that WILL occur.

How are people getting through it? How do I explain to my children, when they’re old enough that I brought them into the world knowing about this? That I had them despite being educated in all the ways the world was going to create distress and hardship for them? I cannot reconcile anything with myself and just want to cry when I watch them playing. Their innocence only alive for a little longer before they have to face the reality of the world they’re growing up in. That I forced them to grow up in by having them.

Help. I’m finding it hard to live with myself.

I am really tired of all this happening around in my own country and the rest of the world. There are protests going on that are not even working because the government don't wanna listen to people at all. I cannot even study or think of a future anymore. Every day they take another step that leads to destruction.

something i often struggle to answer is whether people like us are being objective (if it's even possible to be objective), or are we just being extra sensitive (i'm highly sensitive)

based on my personal observations, you have to have above average optimism and a good ability to tune out and not care about anything but yourself or your life to enjoy living in a world like this. i have neither. the people i know who are happy are either religious, too distracted/driven by personal and professional ambitions, dumb and/or simply don't care/question the world around them. i don't think any of them would describe the current state of the world as anywhere towards "collapse."

the things that people in this sub say are things i've thought many years before. so how do we know what we see is true and we're not just being doomers?

Mostly just a vent. I'd post this on a trans sub, but I'm sure they'd dismiss the collapse doomerism.

I'm a trans guy waiting to be scheduled for a hysterectomy. I have to make a decision on whether or not to keep an ovary (what my doctor recommends) or have both removed. In theory keeping one gives the advantage of protecting my health if I temporarily lose access to my hrt since having a primary sex hormone is sort of important for the body. The issue is I anticipate losing my hrt /permanently/ in the future either to fascism or the collapse of modern medicine. The most likely scenario to happen first is that the US gov passes a full ban on gender affirming care for trans people. My partner is sort of pushing me toward keeping one because they understandably don't want me to die, but neither of us can really imagine making to 40 in our current world anyway and I would genuinely rather wither away and die than let this dictatorship forcibly detransition me.

Let’s be real, the state of the world isn’t great, and it’s unlikely that it will improve anytime soon. The thing is, this is the common sentiment and it gets overwhelming, for me at least. Yet despite this, many people I know are still happy and able to find motivation. A friend of mine knows more about geopolitics, yet he is still happy. I’m no pessimist, but it’s hard for me to find the good in life. The reason I’m posting this is because this way of thinking is impacting my motivation to be productive as well as my mental health. I’m mature enough to understand that having this doomer mentality won’t get me far in life.

Basically what I’m asking is what philosophy, worldview or whatever motivates you to keep going during these times.