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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

I think even if we lived in a green paradise, there would be those who would measure themselves to others and still find themselves "short" to their more vocally successful peers

I think inequality and toxic competition from an early age demanded by our soceity is a much bigger factor

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People feeling increasingly crushed by the daily grind to keep one’s head above water is almost certainly a bigger factor. So many people are just one unfortunate event, or even worse, one paycheck away from financial ruin with little in the way of an institutional safety net (and in the case of many, even a friends/family support network) and that takes a massive toll on one’s psyche.

Speaking for myself, if all needs were guaranteed to be met I’d probably be happier living in a walkable metropolis than idyllic countryside. The part of the city that sucks isn’t the city as much as it is the rat race.

Depends on the checks and balances you have in the 'society'. Are vocally succesful peers lauded? Then perhaps you could run into this situation. Are they mocked for having a big mouth? Maybe the chances are slimmer.

> I think inequality and toxic competition from an early age demanded by our soceity is a much bigger factor

Yeah, I tend to agree with you in that these are important factors into how things are playing out. And the scale. My God. We used to have inequality and competition between a small subset of people, now we're competing with 7+ billion.

I think the “by the way our planet’s dying” just adds to the framing of despair. It’s not the root cause but certainly compounds to it. Independently of this phenomenon, it almost feels like we’re reliving the ‘70s (pollution, urban decay, political breakdown).

Just need to point out that the planet isn't dying, but our ecosystem is. We're like a zit or a mouth ulcer to the planet.

Agreed with regards to the scale, but without the ecosystem the planet is basically dead, like any other planet we know of.

I said our ecosystem, not the ecosystem. It's very unlikely that we are able to cause a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth like what happened on Venus and there's no evidence that this is happening anyway (as we'd be unlikely to be able to stop it; we have about 2 billion years to figure that out). So we'll wipe ourselves out and a good chunk of life on Earth today, but we won't kill the planet.

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