Nobody's Driving

There isn't a mention, anywhere in the tags, title, of the gun pointed at her own head. She's just a smiling, cheerful, attractive young woman on vacation sitting in a car, a finger movement away from firing the gun at her own head?

Are these keywords completely autogenerated with no human in the loop? And how does this picture happen in the middle of a photoshoot ("more from this series") that doesn't seem to involve guns other than in this one photo?

I also thought that suicide and lack of gun safety were somewhat taboo in the US, references to these things are very often accompanied with content warnings and such, so how does this photo happen?

I'm not outraged or shocked, just... very confused by this, I think.

We have, for better or for worse, no one-world government. We don't have a great way to overcome free riders, etc. A nation or group of nations can choose to reduce their emissions, but this means it's easier to undercut them on the global market. The same thing happens with human rights - it's cheap to buy stuff made by enslaved people, so we do.

There's no body that's really able to price negative externalities correctly. Emissions kill people - lots of people - yet there's no real price for using other people's lungs as a dump. For a brief window that body might have been the US and its hegemony, but the US doesn't have the power it used to. Perhaps China will take up the mantle - not much benefit to conquering the world if there isn't a civilisation left.

We should still do what we can, of course. Perhaps enough students on the bus can shift their weight or grab the wheel enough to stop it careening down the ravine. Technological advances have certainly helped in terms of making renewables more competitive against fossil power.

I also think teens are largely sad because they are lonely - so are adults; we have fewer friends and see them less than we used to, and social life has been torn to shreds. My mom thinks the same; she grew up on streets where kids ran outside to play with friends and neighbours _all day long_. But there were far fewer cars (and they were smaller and slower), and there was a parent in almost every home to keep an eye on things out the kitchen window.

The only difference I can see is that not many people seemed to feel like that when I was a kid. It would make you some kind of hippy tree hugger.

At least kids these days seem to be more aware of these things.

Teens are sad, oh my god! Bad adults are taking their tiktok away.

Would love to see this interview.

However, I am not really convinced about the list of effects and reasons that the author proposes.

From the article, it seems that climate change is the number 1 reason why teens are sad... Are we sure? I hope not... also because there is little that the West can do to fix that. Most of the emissions and most of the pollution come from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam. Even if we magically (without polluting and emitting even more) the West goes to zero net emissions, we'd still have 99% of the problem to be solved. Or do you get rid of concrete? Or do you declare war to half of the world "to defeat climate change"?

No, teens are not sad because of climate change. Teens are sad because when they look at adults, it seems that there is nothing more important than climate change. Nothing more important than affirming their gender. Nothing more important than paying their loans. Nothing more important than owning a gun.

If life is not worth living, people become sad. This is why teens are sad. This is why adults stopped driving the bus. Nobody knows why life is worth anymore. Nobody knows where we are driving to.

Perhaps it's time to figure out again a reason for which it is worth to fight. And then we'll fight climate change (if we can), we'll fight the issue with guns, we'll fight for a more equitable education, we'll fight for everything that is worth fighting for. And if we fail... it's okay, we'll start again. Why? BECAUSE IT IS WORTH IT.

If you don't answer the question: why is it worth it? Teens will remain sad. Adults will keep not driving.

Global warming can be solved. We're already transitioning to green energy at an amazing pace. Geo engineering is a solution in the meantime (which she dismisses completely without reason "which could either cool the planet or kill us all even faster."). Once we've built out an over capacity of solar and wind we can think about carbon capture and storage.

The real crisis is that people are not having kids, and unless you hate humanity you probably want there to be one in the future. We're all trending to be South Korea which now has a birthrate of 0.7. Zero point seven! Every thirty years a school class would go from 30 students to 10! South Korea is dying, and so is the rest of the developed world, albeit at a slower pace, so far.

The solution: AGI, robotics and longevity are all things that the doomers are actively opposed to.

I do think there's a polycrisis of issues. To me, most of these stem not from a top down directing. They stem from a system which restraints & holds humanity back in an individual level. The basic common good counts for so much, but when folks are struggling for food shelter and housing, when jobs eat away at self respect, when corporations have become such vast government-devouring titans, when we have such a powerful capable world but are DRM & legally locked out of interaction & mastery with the worl: when these factors all align against the individual there's no space left for the good to be evinced out.

This young author is wearing "doomer" like a fashion accessory and it shows. It's dripping with ignorance and stupidity. Although, I suppose if the education system has failed her that badly, perhaps she has at least one valid complaint.

yep,nobody's driving, and thanks for that.

Yes we are all going down and there is little we can do about it. So find meaning where you can and be kind to your neighbor.

But the older I get the more I come to realize that human culture hasn't changed all that much, what has changed is the democratization of cultural displays. Now that the "elite" are forced to compete with the "rest" in media (social or otherwise), that retro perfection spell is broken and the idealists are butting up against the reality that humans basically want to be carefree and revel in the enjoyment of life.

So what achieved such rapid technological improvements the past couple hundred years? Well, it's pretty clear by now that good ideas happen all over the place, and money flows relatively freely to make these ideas available for public scrutiny and adoption. What changed seems to be the working conditions of the rest -- child labor and 12 hour days in grueling conditions made the Industrial Revolution successful (largely for the elite), and forced/exploitative labor made the computing revolution possible in the 60s up until now in the mining and manufacturing sectors. Now that people are fighting en masse for a global solidarity centered around respect in the workplace, you are seeing elite complaints about how it will destroy civilization as we know it, presumably based on a convenient and self-serving nostalgic view of progress as something that "requires" "sacrifice" from others (never themselves, somehow).

If culture has changed to any serious degree, what's changed in the rest is that we realized this life is about more than toil and scraping by.

Yet many of the rest believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed elite and so have looked upon those around them with contempt and disdain, citing arguments of moral degeneracy ("mind virus"), etc. to fuel their reactionary ideologies. The reaction has been swift and the elite have the money to fuel it as part of public discourse through influence of the media machines, but they cannot completely quash this rising tide because media companies are still beholden to the economic forces that the elite instituted in the first place -- popular stuff makes money, so these ideas continue to be visible in popular media.

No one was ever driving. Only the superorganism called society can be said to be "driving", and even then we would need to qualify that heavily to be clear despite the clumsy language. Treat your fellow humans as such so collaboration is possible and this may actually work out.

Also, please stay alert and in control when you drive. Collaboration works best when you keep your neighbors alive.

Instead of trying to synchronize humanity against a single enemy, we should try to encourage each of them individually to improve their life by being simple and make them want to switch and notice a clear immediate change.

Climate change has never been the battle to fight, nobody care. If you live anywhere close to a city you definitely don't, you may believe in it, but you do not care. And we should stop pretending that it can change.