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Comment by Regardsyjc | Hacker News Reader

I used to feel this way and I found that it wasn't productive. What can you do? If you can do something, do it. If you think you can't change the future possible destruction of our ecosystem or millions of people, then you also need to make peace with it.

I think you can either do or not do things without the negativity. I found that the negativity made me think emotionally and not rationally or productively, and also sometimes came off in my conversations with people which was also not helpful-because I was clearly very emotional about the issue.

My thought process is whatever happens, happens. I can't do much to prevent whatever systemic collapse that might happen or not happen. But whatever I can do, I will. When I first learned about this, I thought it meant the future that I took for granted could be nonexistent - the dying happily carefree of systemic collapse part after having a family and growing old. It made me bitter and resentful. What's the point of doing anything if the world's going to go to shit by 2030? I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life. Sorry if this is a trash comment.

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> I decided to be more optimistic or maybe stoic. Make sure I can do what I can or all I can and not let some potential apocalyptic future darken my life.

I am somewhere along this path, trying to find a mindset to cope. Yet I have the feeling that even so, widespread, happiness all but ensures the collapse, as the emergent effect of everyone being happy and living their best life, no matter what they think as they do it, is just as bad. I am sorry about this, sorry to be a bearer of bad news, sorry to bring this darkness out in the world, but honestly there is no way out of this box for humanity.

I am too optimistic about humanity. I think there are billions of humans on Earth and not all are as stupid as some people might presume. In fact I would say if there's any humans that survive, it will probably be the 1% that many people hate. I think even then being in the USA easily increases your survival chances.

At the same time, I have absolutely no doubts what is to come. If this is the end of humanity then so be it. It would be irrational to feel bad because I can't do much to stop a disaster like that. I accepted last year that I will die, everyone I love will die, and even potentially all of humanity will die perhaps in my lifetime, and I have made my peace with it.

I have spent a significant amount of time reading all the ways the dominoes will fall and how people will die. People are dying right now.

Happiness comes from within, not from outside. What happens outside should not affect what you feel inside. That's the mindset I learned from stoicism and reading Victor Frankl. "The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance."

If you are too emotional and depressed, you will be unproductive/not be able to do much to help, and do you also want to spend the little time you have like that? I choose to enjoy the little life I have with the people I love but not in ignorance. I will do everything I can but I will not let it darken my life and my disposition. I hope that makes sense.

I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today.

Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet.

It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's "saving the planet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

I think you vastly over-estimate our power.

If the oceans die through acidification and pollution, and all of the insects die we will die as well.

I expect us to die.

I think you may have misread the intent of my comment.

We're going away.

Yes, we'll die, but only 99.99% dead. The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of humanity, and will continue on and rebuild. It sucks, but so did the millions of years of animals murdering each other just so that I could type this and you could read it.

> The remaining surviving will have learned the most costly lesson yet of humanity

I wish I could believe this, but I don't. The cycle will repeat as the collapse passes out of living memory. We will have lost civilization by then, the only records that remain will be the trash heaps that we leave behind.

Thank you. St.Carlin always keeps me grounded.

This isn't a trash comment- this is exactly what I needed to read after reading this article. Thank you!

I'm still on the "affected by negativity" phase. May I ask what concrete actions are you taking (besides being optimistic).

I spent one morning with a group which plants and looks after trees in a reserve near my place. We were putting protections around young saplings so cows wouldn't eat them. It took my team of three the whole morning to put protections around a single sapling.

The whole thing made me sad. There is no way we are going to counteract our consumption with single individual actions like that. So I am looking for ways to be more effective.

It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children. There are too many people on the planet.

I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly. Another way to look at it would be that we have a responsibility to raise more responsible people.

I suppose the question is whether the future is a gift or a curse.

Though I agree. It's odd - I've known people who seemed offended by Idiocracy, but couldn't really come up with any flaws in its basic premise (in short, well-educated highly-productive people (for traditional values of productive which is its own debate) tend to have fewer kids, and people are usually like their parents, so over time we'll have fewer people like that).

> I've thought this too but then you are leaving the future to those who breed more irresponsibly.

The movie "Idiocracy" addresses this very issue. It's a comedy, and I really enjoyed it.

>It's a comedy

I think you meant prophecy.

Yes, this is true. For me the way that I deal with the reality of a planet becoming a shitty place to live is to not have children. It is the best way for me to cope with the situation. People can choose to do otherwise.

Have you considered letting your children decide whether they want to be alive on whatever the future has in store for this planet? Life is optional; they can opt out at any time. But my hunch is that they'll appreciate being alive and decide to make a go of it, however tough it is. After all, there is no alternative; the only life they can have is the one you give them.

I have not considered letting things that don't yet exist decide if they want to exist.

Hrm, I'm thinking that all the time one spends raising a single child could be spent educating a lot more children to be responsible. Raising != educating of course, but raising individual responsible children doesn't scale the same way that education can.

do both and gain extra insights into humans overall.

You could also eat a mostly vegan diet, get the world to move towards sustainable farming practices (and away from monoculture crops), and support scaling up nuclear, renewables, and a massive infrastructure overhaul.

While I'm very happy having chosen the path you suggest, I never suggest it to anyone because I think it is not realistic. What do you think the odds are, that the average person can win against one of the strongest primal drives with which every living being is born. Also, people (on average) do need to procreate if society has to continue its existence.

I would agree that having sex is one of the strongest primal drives. However, a drive to have sex =/= a drive to have children. Can you provide a source that shows having children is a natural, inborn drive of humans?

You are looking at it the other way around. The drive is ultimately to spread one's genes. We just invented a way to get enjoyment out of the process without creating offspring. I leave it to you to reach for your favourite search engine or to visit library if you wish to verify that propagating one's genes is one of the primal drives of living beings.

You might have a fundamental misunderstanding of how genetics and evolution work. The spreading of genes is a consequence of having sex, not its goal. There is no higher power that determined "spreading one's genes" as some sort of ultimate drive, then set about finding ways to make it happen.

You can think of it this way:

- Presumably, some mammals would have been born that did not enjoy sex. Those would not procreate and their gene would die out.

- Other mammals would enjoy sex. They would procreate, and their genes would spread.

It's the sex and enjoyment thereof that is the driving force behind procreation. When you hear people saying "the ultimate drive is to spread one's genes," that's just a hand-wavy explanation used for simplification (which, unfortunately, many people have come to interpret too literally - as is often the case when simplification is involved).

It's the same type of simplification as when a nature documentary says "Nature found a way to do X". As if nature is some conscious entity with a will that is working towards achieving some goal.

For the sake of a charitable interpretation and productive dialogue, I'll ignore your first sentence. From the rest, it appears that we are (mostly) in agreement. Genes which are more likely to spread and survive are the genes that remain. Also, it is not evident that many species enjoy sex.

Sorry if my post came off as rude - it was not my intention.

I do have a question, actually, if you will humor me.

Suppose we take two human children - a boy and a girl. We separate them from their parents at age 1 and we isolate them from society. A professional caretaker visits them a few times a day, giving them food and helping them with their necessities. They are taught to communicate in one manner or another, perhaps given access to some form of entertainment.

Now, I'm going to be brutal - for science: the hypothetical boy has been sterilized. He doesn't know it, of course.

At no point do the children learn how humans are born. Nothing in their surroundings is an indication, and the caretaker never tells them.

Also, they never learn that it is "normal" for regular people to have children of their own.

As far as the kids are concerned, no other humans except them and the caretaker exist.

Do you think that:

1) Those children will experience an innate need to have children of their own?

2) What activities will the children undertake to satisfy that need?

Thanks

- Adapting to artificial changes to environment/constraints requires a long time to evolve and that will be through countless generations. So, the example above needs to be thought of through large numbers instead of such a small sample.

- Additionally, consider that you could perhaps fool a duckling to imprint upon someone/something else as his/her mother. This one example is not useful if one were to attempt to disprove that this imprinting behaviour evolved to help the ducklings stay with their mother in a vulnerable period.

To me, this appears clear. However, I am not sure if I've articulated it in a way where you are able to also see where I am going with this.

Cheers

This line of reasoning is spurious. The people who consume the most resources also have the lowest fertility rates.

What we can do other than despair and contemplate genocide is transition to a carbon neutral economy. It really only requires political will.

Sorry but your comment doesn't help me. I can not "transition my society to a carbon neutral economy". I don't know how I can "create political will". Can you be more concrete?

You posited an individual act that could only have a result if realized collectively. I posit the same. Make carbon neutral choices as much as possible, in your personal and professional life; conservation works.

As for political will, it is the same: composed of individual wills. Bill McKibben points out that a major impediment to a carbon-neutral future is that fossil fuel reserves are capital; the powerful people that own them need us to remain dependent on fossil fuels so their capital continues to have value. These people mobilize huge resources to support their goals; in the last generation trillions of dollars, representing engineering, resources and manufacturing, that should have gone to developing a carbon neutral economy was squandered in useless wars to secure access to fossil fuel resources in the Middle East.

At the same time these forces are extremely vulnerable to collective action in the form of an organized populace. Creating political will means: educate yourself and your neighbors and discover ways (protest, lecture, lobby) to stymie their agenda and advance your own.

We could always transcend from carbon based life forms to a hybrid silicon-carbon based lifeform by becoming part AI.

>Creating political will means: educate yourself and your neighbors and discover ways (protest, lecture, lobby) to stymie their agenda and advance your own.

Tons of people have been trying this for decades now, and all we have to show for it is Trump and climate denialism. Educating people doesn't seem to actually work in practice.

Blog, tweet, participate in tv, radio shows “, join a political party, join an activist group. Really pick any assembly of people and contribute to the agenda in with any means available. Be a leader.

It's not genocide to not have children. At an individual level the best thing we can do is to not have children if you are in a rich country. Those of us who live in rich countries massively over consume (including myself in this). Going to a carbon neutral economy is not helpful if it isn't done on a world wide scale. Right now rich countries have a nice system whereby they can realistically become carbon neutral in terms of their energy usage but their appetite for consumer goods is one of the main reasons for all of those polluting factories in other countries. Rich countries are outsourcing their pollution.

The resource consumption per capita of a person in the U.S. far exceeds the resource consumption of a person in Afghanistan. One American is more damaging to the world wide environment than a family in Afghanistan. Thus your second statement is not relevant. It is true that Americans have fewer children than people in poor countries. But our overconsumption more than makes up for this deficit.

It really only requires political will.

Are you an American? Because this statement sounds like someone who is not aware of the political reality in the United States.

Not having children is also not helpful if not done on a worldwide scale, so I dont see how your strategy is better.

I am an American, and I remain optimistic that we can fix our politics. In fact I'd say that fixing our politics is exactly the same as manifesting political will. For a generation since the labor movement dwindled there have not been any significant vehicles of popular will at work in American politics. It's past time to change that. To suggest we can't is simply despair - it will be true as long as we believe it, and no further.

The person I originally responded to asked for suggestions to deal with the reality of living on a planet increasingly becoming a shitty place to live. He/she appeared to be having a problem coming to terms with this reality. I suggested not having kids. The suggestion isn't feasible in terms of large scale change. It is feasible in terms of coming to grips with being an over consumer of resources and assuaging the accompanying guilt. At least it has worked for me.

Political reality in america is that there were multiple changes of ruling party in the last decade and MPs being voted out on specific issues. Of course a representative multi-party system would be preferable, but it's not that it's impossible to achieve anything at all.

...multiple changes of ruling party...

I think you don't understand the American political system. At present there are only two parties in terms of realistically getting elected. There is no such thing as a ruling party in the sense of European parliaments. Members of a party are free to vote as they please. Hence Lieberman famously derailing aspects of Obamacare. There is also the fact that both parties in the U.S. have shifted very much to the right the last 40 years. The reality in the U.S. is that even with our so called left leaning party in power in the legislative branch and executive branch no serious environmental accords were negotiated and passed.

Your comment arrives a bit too late. I already have one child. What else?

That's basically it. Assuming you live in a rich country the facts are that we way over consume. The people who say they are vegan and recycle and whatnot are still way over consuming for the most part. All of those cars, clothes, devices, etc. that they possess are very harmful to the planet. Limit yourself to one child since that is below the replacement rate for population growth. That's my suggestion and my way of dealing with the reality of the world we live in.

There's more one can do than just that. I do not own or use cars. I try limit my meat consumption (not entirely successful on that front). I changed energy providers to buy from renewables sources. I do not travel by air. I don't have air conditioning.

I also sit on a pile of money, not sure what to do with it. Index stocks contain fossil companies which I don't want to support. Maybe I'll throw some at those silicate weathering pilot projects.

What you write is true but I don't think will be duplicable on a large scale without regulations and pricing negative externalities into products. The free rider problem is a negative aspect of human psychology.

The question is what someone who is aware of the issues and willing to act can do. Just because there are those who act irresponsibly does not prevent you from adjusting your behavior.

It does actually prevent me for adjusting my behavior. I'm a victim of free rider thinking. I'm not going to fall on my sword so to speak and sacrifice whilst almost no one else does.

Please reflect on what you are saying. You stylize yourself as victim when you are actually benefiting from making harmful decisions and then rationalizing that harmful behavior with "but everyone else is doing it too".

I haven't stylized myself as anything other than a person who advocates not having children. I over consume. I've come to grips with this fact. I deal with it by not having children as a means of assuaging my guilt. I've got just one life and I'm going to enjoy it as much as I can. I'm not going to sacrifice for the greater good when it's just me and a handful of other people doing it.

> I try limit my meat consumption (not entirely successful on that front).

You can drastically reduce related emissions by just giving up beef and replacing it witch chicken. IIRC it's something like 1/5 or 1/6th the amount of greenhouse gas emissions pound for pound of meat.

Why not invest in space-faring companies? There are 40 billion earth-like planets out there. Plenty of room for lots of different eco-systems to flourish.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you care about the environment, you should have children. I wrote a whole blog post on this, but the gist is that people are going to have children whatever you decide to do. If people like you, who are thoughtful and conscientious about the future of our species, decide not to have children, then the world will just be filled with the offspring of people who don't really care about the future of our species. And those children will share both the nature and nurture of their parents.

My blog post: http://www.richardjones.org/kids-are-good-for-the-environmen...

What you write makes sense but I don't feel right about having children. The world sucks and it will suck much more in the coming decades. I have no desire to put my progeny through that mess.

This only makes sense if you assume "caring about the environment" is highly heritable and that individuals "caring about the environment" in the abstract somehow translates into large-scale public policy that's better for the environment (I would suggest available evidence shows that it does not).

As I pointed out, children get their nature and their nurture from their parents. And I don't know how you can reconcile the success of the environmental movement in the developed world in the past 5 decades with your position that somehow people caring about the environment doesn't have any real world effects.

CO2 emissions are not just rising but rising faster. We haven't even gotten the second derivative pointed in the necessary direction.

But you and your significant other are not the only players in the game. There are other people who will have children, regardless of what you do. So your choice is between a future that contains your children, who share your disposition and are indoctrinated by you into a specific worldview, or a world that does not contain them.

How does your side win if it promotes a strategy of not even showing up to the game?

My "side" "wins" in that my [non-existent] children and grandchildren will not suffer and starve on a famine-stricken planet burning itself to death.

I don’t get your position. You’re evidently not concerned with the greater good, only with what your own descendants will experience. But then you’re completely willing to ensure that you will leave no descendants.

I think you're poorly informed, or perhaps in denial about how far down the road we already are: [0] [1] [2]

It's essentially too late for your or my hypothetical descendants to have any effect on "the greater good". The IPCC says either we cut _worldwide_ CO2 emissions by 50% in the next 11 years, or it's game over for +1.5C scenarios: all coral reefs die, along with most of the fish, crop yields down 40% in some places, mass migration and resource wars are likely.

So basically I think it's too late for any "greater good" to come from my having kids, and I believe it's immoral to bring a life into a doomed world just to suffer.

[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/rcp-85-t...

[1] - https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-story-of-sustainability-in-2018-...

[2] - https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

I get the risks. I’m just not a quitter. Somebody has to show up and try and I’m willing to nominate my descendants for that. And I’m pretty sure they’ll be okay with my choice. Many people throughout history have been born into some pretty fucked up situations (slavery, etc.) and decided that life was worth living.

Agreed. Raising vegan/vegetarian children and trying to steer them toward effective-altruistic careers around environmental benefit probably has positive expected outcomes for the environmental and political future.

>>It seems to me the only thing we can really do is not have children.

And then who pays for your social security checks, pensions and other debt that was raised to fight wars?

I'm doing the basic concrete actions of the eco-friendly conscious like consuming less, avoiding plastic, etc.

I don't think that will do much so I have a bigger dream of eliminating menstrual poverty. I read a book that said if we could educate more women, it could have a significant impact on climate change, and I think menstrual poverty is an easy way to access and help educate the women that probably need it the most. So I am working on creating free resources to help eliminate menstrual poverty in the USA to start with reusable products- and also building a company that sells reusable products but whose mission is to eliminate menstrual poverty. It's not much but it makes me feel better.

Drawdown is the book I read that lists 100 potential solutions to climate change to reverse whatever is happening now, if it's possible. Maybe you can check out the website and see if any of the solutions look interesting to you, and see if there's any way you could help people with them. Volunteering should make you feel happy like you're making a difference. Maybe you will feel a lot better when you can donate your skills to a cause that could move the needle. I am sure you have more skills than planting trees that any organization needs and could appreciate.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/women-and-girls/educating...

Reaching out and talking to people will help.

1. If everyone has 1/2 surviving child then in 150 years, our population will become stable.

2. It’s not transferable because we still need species diversity

3. People will be incentivized with ubi and all their needs taken care of if they agree to #1.

4.stop animal based foods.

5. Return half planet back to nature to reforest and rewind.

6.reverse acidification of oceans.

7. Find ways to restore polar ice caps and bring down planet temperature

8. Reduce fossil fuel dependence. Go nuclear.

9. Protect water.

Nature will rewild. We just need to stop being so successful with procreation because our highest achievement will result in our extinction.

My 2c.

Human populations grow slower the more advanced they are. Most of the first world, including the US, is below replacement fertility rate of 2.1. Without immigration and the like, the US would start contracting. Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed. That and the other things you said.

[EDIT] Links help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

>>Bringing the third world up to first world is what is needed.

Again, the biggest hurdle to that is politics. There are deep geo political ramifications on any thing that causes change in economic equations at such massive levels.

Mostly its also the will of the people. The world is indeed a giant stack ranking system, and people do indeed believe in ruining anything it takes to score the most points. Most people do believe in things like their civilization, nationalism and racial supremacy.

If you think of it as a whole, space, asteroids and what humans could do if they work together. The very concept of economy feels like something that limits human progress.

Economy won’t go away, limited resources needs to be managed. A market economy, otoh, is just one approach.

I’m pretty sure the current configuration is just a temporary blind spot. Market economy as an optimization algorithm is pretty neat for a limited set of problems. As a means to handle social justice, collective planning, and a bunch of other problems perhaps not so much. While finding better models for that, we shouldn’t throw out the bayby with the bath water.

The timescale for sub-replacement fertility to work its magic is too long--on the order of centuries. We are already in an overshoot scenario, and bringing the third world up to first world living standards will only consume more energy and produce more greenhouse gasses. We're in serious trouble and small tweak to birthrates isn't going to fix this.

I appreciate this helpful comment

You can sabotage, initiate preemptive collapse

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