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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Existential dread is like the background radiation of stress for this era - the constant worry that the climate will change more rapidly than anticipated, that reified systems will collapse, that unrest and chaos will spread.

Add to that the expectation of constant availability and instantaneous response, the expectation of unmitigated success, the expectation of having a soaring career and being a good parent and impressing your (global) peers and presenting a flawless life in every aspect.

Add to that the faceless systemisation of processes and functions that once had a human face (getting a loan, buying a home, screening for employment, the passing of judgment), and the dehumanisation of human affairs.

It honestly amazes me that humans are so far, en masse, proving relatively resilient under this relentless cudgelling, but I wonder how long it can last. Not much longer, I fear.

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In the last century, people were all worried about nuclear armageddon. This was not an idle fear, see the Cuban Missile Crisis. And, of course, there were all the global wars.

I find it strange that people think this century is uniquely stressful.

My theory, unencumbered by evidence, is parents have successfully removed all chance of failure, injury, risk and need for effort from children, and so children never learn to deal with adversity. Eventually, the kids are old enough to face problems their parents can't insulate them from, and they have no coping skills.

"I find it strange that people think this century is uniquely stressful."

Probably because people talk about it far more than they used to - which is a good thing. However, I also suspect social media also layers on a whole news ways for people to get stressed.

people talk about their present day more than the past at every point in the past. It's a human condition to think that right now is the most important time ever. Take every point in history and at that point the people would think that the point they are living in is the most important time.

History gives perspective.

I find the sort of 18-25 internet culture that exists on other platforms is full of "look at how depressed I am lol just kidding" kinds of posts. It's like an amplifier for dragging people down, and this year social media in general has effectively given every rabid doomer a megaphone to spout (mostly unsourced) doom and gloom like a million funeral bells ringing constantly in your face. No wonder rates of depression are up!

I grew up under the threat of nuclear armageddon, which was a super-scary binary willtheydropthebombornot one day end of the world. The difference for me is that catastrophic system collapse due to carbon-emission-driven global heating is in progress, unstoppable, and something that will happen over a much longer period of time.

(Apparently the threat of nuclear armageddon is as high as it has ever been, too: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/ )

The doomsday clock doesn't mean anything anymore, at least for atomic war. They started including global warming as a metric in where they set the clock so it's much closer than where it would be by nuclear risk alone.

For example we're at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than the 2 minutes during the Cuban missile crises, which is total nonsense

I'm a bit surprised by the down votes, it would be nice to have some comments for discussion...

To clarify I'm not saying that climate change isn't a critical thing to address, I'm just saying that the doomsday clock is no longer a measure of how imminent nuclear war as the parent thread mentioned.

Yes I do think it's ridiculous that the doomsday clock is closer to zero now than during the Cuban missile crises. I don't think this is a very controversial statement. Would be very nice to get some comments rather than just downvotes.

Well, when it was instituted, Nuclear Armageddon was the existential threat to humanity, and therefore that was the metric they chose. Everything else paled in comparison. They weren’t hugely aware of the threat that things like climate change, or trophic cascades, could present. They were pure hypotheticals.

They didn’t, however, call it the “Nuclear Armageddon” clock, rather the doomsday clock, because the point was tracking that overarching threat to the continuation of the human species.

As we have now recognised that there are other categories of threat which are potentially civilisation-ending, we, in my opinion rightly, include those in the metrics of the probability of doom.

Climate change is like having a slow growing but untreatable cancer. It’s going to get you, unless something unexpected and drastic happens. It may even get you sooner than you expect - right now we are tracking the upper bounds of every model, and the worst case scenarios are consistently getting worse.

So, nay, it no longer tracks the sole threat of nuclear Armageddon, but I think the estimation of how close we are to midnight is pretty accurate.

> Existential dread is like the background radiation of stress for this era - the constant worry that the climate will change more rapidly than anticipated, that reified systems will collapse, that unrest and chaos will spread.

That's not existential dread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Angst_and_dread

Existential dread is not used in the sense of Existentialism but in the sense of existence.

So rather than:

Existentialism -> dread it is instead

existence -> dread

While all of the things that you listed are real and actual reasons to be stressed out, it's not like life was less stressful in the past. Just thinking about the history of my own country, your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry

1) whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allowed under harsh punishment, you could only learn Polish history and language in hiding

2) The restoration of independence after WW1 came with reshuffling of land ownership, so you might have had to abandon all your posessions to move somewhere else

3) general shitty conditions all the way until WW2

4) WW2, 2.4 million Poles killed because they were "the wrong race" and just happened to be in an attractive geopolitical location

5) WW2 ends, but we get 40 years of communism instead. Now your daily worries include whether you get a government-assigned job on the other side of the country so you don't get to see your family, and secret police coming to disappear you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. General shitty conditions unless you follow the party line.

In comparison to that, life in the 21st century is "honey and mead" as they say. Yeah sure young people struggle with climate change and buying a house like everyone else, but it's not like the lives of their ancestors were any less stressful(and most likely more so).

> your average Pole in the 20th century had to worry whether they can even speak their own language as under Prussian-Russian-Austrian occupation it wasn't allowed under harsh punishment, you could only learn Polish history and language in hiding

This is an incredible overexaggeration. Polish was the language spoken on an everyday basis by the vast majority of Poles during the 19th century. It was the language that would ordinarily be used in the marketplace or shop or when talking with one’s Roman Catholic priest and fellow parishioners. It was the language that laborers spoke to each other all day every day at work. Yes, Polish was not a prestige language; official usage and the intelligentsia functioned in Russian or German. And there was definitely heavy censorship of publications during the Tsarist era which required an underground Polish-language education system to teach Polish nationalist history and Polish as a literary language, but the masses weren’t banned from speaking their native tongue.

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