The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

Even without the Effective Altruism take on this, I see this kind of thing expressed a lot. I've often seen arguments of the form "People say climate change will kill everybody, but that's an exaggeration, so there's nothing to worry about". Or "COVID only kills 1% of people, so what's the big deal".

It feels almost as if it's influenced by superhero movies: anything shy of apocalypse just isn't important. It's not just that there's some far-flung future where today's population seems irrelevant, but that the actual suffering isn't worth a yawn unless it's going to kill every single person on the planet.

This even seems to cross the usual ideological borders. People who might otherwise be interested seem underwhelmed when they hear it's not the apocalypse. It's just not interesting enough to care about.