I mean being depressed is one thing, living in a world that's literally cooking at the same time just takes it up a whole other level.
I guess in the past, no matter how bad things got for you on a personal level, you could kind of count on the world being there if you got through it, now it's sort of 50/50.
3 degrees of warming will be something like the rapture for modern civilization.
I mean I enjoyed having neither but then most people weren’t lucky enough to grow up in the 90’s.
During the cold war it was quite literally minute by minute, alive or dead. Every day was news of airspace incursions, naval confrontations, proxy conflicts etc. "Slim chance" it was not.
But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?
More like not necessary anymore, since birthrates tend do decline by themself in more afluent countries, once sex is decoupled from reproduction and children are not the primary retirement plan anymore. "Helping poor countries" is just easier to sell than "We must make them stop having babies".
China is in far worse shape, they restricted number of children for decades, and now they are presented with a demographics crisis that could halve their population in 60 years.