Everything just seems so out of control. The US seems to be tearing itself apart. The world is on fire. We seem to be going backwards when it comes to freedom and human rights. We’ve turned our backs on each other. How do you cope with all this without just giving up?
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Don’t spend all your time reading news, they are purposely negative because it generates more interest and money, don’t take everything you read as truth.
99% of these problems won’t turn into anything other than a faded memory.
End of the day, nothing you can do will change what’s happening half way across the world, so why let it change you?
Giving up isn’t so bad, but for myself I limit how much social media and news I consume and do my best to plan life ahead for any upcoming tragedies when I do get my periodic doses.
Not much we can do about the truly terrible things happening, but we can make existence a little less shitty around ourselves.
You and I are not the center of the universe, it’s okay to just exist.
Log off. It’s that simple. Your stress will reduce linearly with reduced screen time
I just accept that life is absurd. Once you accept that morality, your own desires, logic, all of them are like waves through time, coming and going, changing form, never staying still…you recognize how ridiculous it is to desperately cling to any semblence of a ground beneath you. Just let yourself fall into the unknown, and at least the insignificance of your own struggle against the tides of change is acknowledged.
Or you can, y’know, just scream, cry, and rage about it. I think of emotions like a buffet. You gotta try them all at least once, and often in a wide variety of combinations. But hey, you do you.
Copius amounts of alcohol.
Newspaper scene from Roxanne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW5EiGwi_a8
Live in Australia, its great
That’s the neat part, I don’t.
Accepting this is what my species is like and that this is the world we’ve made for ourselves, is the hard bit.
The good bit is that it will be over soon.The rest is depression.
How do I cope? Poorly
Exactly what I was about to post
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Do what you can. Reduce your carbon footprint by eating less meat, using cars less, flying less. OK, by yourself it’s not going to make a huge difference, but at least you will know that personally, you aren’t making it worse. Join a group that is trying to make a positive difference.
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Concentrate on the little things that make you happy. You can’t stop climate change on your own but you can make something nice for dinner.
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Value your friends and keep in touch with them. They probably feel pretty much the same as you do. Cheer each other up and support each other.
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Get a hobby to keep yourself occupied.
That’s all I can think of.
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Focus on your bright spots.
Also, keep in mind that all the negativity you see is mostly due to 24hour news cycles and other methods of getting instant updates from around the world. And misery-porn sells better.
On average the world is better than it’s ever been. Higher life expectancies, less war, better quality of life; it’s all generally on the up. Would you rather go back to the last financial crisis? When the ozone layer was being depleted? The interment threat of nuclear annihilation? Race riots? Women not being able to vote? High infant mortality? etc, etc
Some people argue that humanity was never freer, happier and healthier than before the agricultural revolution. Everything has gone to shit since we decided to settle down on a small plot of land.
It was much simpler when you were born, miraculously survived childhood, hunted, gathered, then died before your back even had time to get sore
Honestly it probably was a far more meaningful and fun life. Terrifying too, but super meaningful. The environment your brain evolved for. No old age horseshit, just a painful moment of death followed by your family mourning you. But no pictures or nothing, and everyone’s tripping on shrooms so you’re still there in spirit form. I’m joking as a reflex but I’m serious here. It was probably a better life overall. Seeing a worm and thinking of it as food, having no problem eating that little bastard because your stomach’s gnawing at ya. That’s life boy. Just raw dogging for all the jungle to see why the hell not. It’s prehistory baby. Anything goes.
Sorry I am trying to make a point. I think it would be better probably. Except for all the misery. The good parts would be super good. The non-awful parts would be super good.
How’s the argument go?
Less war?
There’s a genocide going on in the middle east right now by settler colonialist fully backed by the western powers to destabilize the region and I’m sure you know that, it’s just irrelevant to you.
There’re too many neoliberals on lemmy, I can’t even deal fam
There were at least 2 other genocides in progress the last October when this mess started. You only care about this one because you have been told to.
Neoliberalism is really an economic philosophy. It doesn’t really have a lot to say about how a nation ought to position itself toward foreign wars. It’s not an all purpose slur for people who disagree with you.
Which ones are those? What?
There is less war, but that’s not always a great indicator. Depending on how you define “war” you could even define Ukraine/Russian war not as a war.
Life expectancy is going up because of 3rd world countries finally catching up. It’s going down in America.
The “world” is also getting richer. But the average person is getting poorer.
Also ozone layer isn’t doing great, there are race riots still, there is threat of nuclear war with Russia existing in its current state, a lot of rights are threatened and a lot of people want to return to a time before women’s suffrage. I haven’t looked up anything on infant mortality, but I imagine with abortion band happening that will also change for the worse.
The only peace I’ve found is action.
This is such a short-sighted and USA-centric response. Your life expectancy seems fine, and even if there were a blip I’m sure it will continue to increase on average. Wealth is not an objective measure of quality of life. The ozone layer repaired itself. Even in America you’ve got a lot less lynching than you used to have. Speak to anyone who lived through the cold war and tell them you think nuclear war is just as much of a threat now as it was then.
I do have arguments against all of what you said. But the funniest one is definitely the ozone layer.
You sure you want to say the ozone layer is fine? When was the last time you looked at anything talking about it?
As a result of the scientific findings and the possible severe impacts of ozone depletion, governments around the world began passing laws reducing or banning the production of CFCs and other ODSs. This culminated in the Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987, which has now been signed by every member state of the United Nations. Signatories to the Montreal Protocol have agreed to phase out ODSs and replace them with less-damaging substances.
Since the passing of the Montreal Protocol, the emissions of ODSs have fallen to a fraction of their levels in the early 1980s and the ozone layer has begun to recover. The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica still exists, but it has been slowly shrinking over the past two decades thanks to concerted international action.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate/climate-explained/ozone-layer
So not completely back to how it was before we fucked it, but the problem has been fixed
"By taking a holistic look at the yearly progression of the Antarctic ozone hole over the last two decades, we find that:
The addition of recent years to the Antarctic (60°S–90°S) total column ozone time series results in insignificant long-term change since the early 2000’s, even where significant recovery has previously been reported. During this time, we find a delay in both the deep ozone hole onset date as well as the breakup date."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42637-0
Tl:dr if all you’re doing is looking at the peak/minimum times of year it can seem better. The hole “breathes” and they’re getting delayed.
I work on diesel trucks, they create a lot of N0x. This article talks about how N0x being bad. It’s a niche thing but I at least understand why I tend to see these things first.
The “world” is also getting richer. But the average person is getting poorer.
I’m sorry I don’t understand this statement. How could this be true in a way that doesn’t violate logic?
Pretend an x,y graph
Put a bell curve in it. This will be money
Put one behind it. This will be population.Now increase money curve and shift it to the right. Push it so far it stops being a bell curve and becomes an exponential curve.
What’s the phrase? 1% owns 99% of the wealth? So there is more money in the system, but fewer people have “middle class” money.
On average the world is better than it’s ever been
Of course, certain groups of people have been trying to reverse these trends in the name of…money? Tradition?
The newer generations are no longer becoming smarter (I believe it was the Flynn effect). Education is being defunded at all levels.
The cost of living in many parts of the world has been outpacing wages… especially now, but for decades. Yet we have more wealth hoarded into fewer hands.
Anti-vax and anti-science movements have been reintroducing measles and have been making it hard to fight other diseases.
We are seeing the effects of these things in action, and they will only get worse over time.
They’re trying to reverse those trends because acknowledging those trends means giving up on their theory that our dominant economic system is defunct.
It’s cancer and it’s killing us all.
Exactly. That kind of thinking doesn’t work when you realize the “cancer” is producing situations like:
Higher life expectancies, less war, better quality of life
Do you disagree with those statements? Do you need to see evidence before you’ll believe them?
Or do you acknowledge the statements, but disagree that they justify the “cancer” of our current economic system?
Do you disagree with those statements? Do you need to see evidence before you’ll believe them?\
I disagree with them.
Higher life expectancy - I wouldn’t attribute that to capitalism. Further more life expectancy in the US is declining afaik.
Less war - What do you mean? There’s a war in Ukraine, one in Palestine, and there’s been perpetual war since …forever. The US war machine always bombs some country, assassinates a democratically elected leader, etc.
Better quality of life - For the 1% at the expense of all the others maybe.Capitalism is all about profits, not about better products, better quality of life, etc. In fact it’s easily against those things if they get in the way of profit. You can see enshittification everywhere.
For example it would be against their interest for a pharmaceutical company to sell the permanent cure for a disease instead of life-long medical treatment. The latter would be subscription-based therefore create more profit. The cancer comparison is quite fitting imo.
I learn why and how it has happened before
If you prefer audio
You are nearly powerless as an individual yes, but you still have some influence on the world around you. Using it alone at your own whims maybe you can affect the people closest to you and make their lives better but as a collective you can expand that sphere of influence to a vast extent, even globally.
Western society is designed to isolate you, it’s a sprawling expanse of concrete with no where for you to go that doesn’t cost money. We primarily live in single family homes and that is often legally required due to our districting. we wake up, we go to work surrounded by people we often don’t actually connect with because deep down we still know they are our competition, maybe we go out and spend time with what friends we might have retained this far if it’s a weekend and we aren’t too exhausted, maybe we stay inside and busy ourselves with some hobby or mindlessly consume some media, then we do it again. Over and over and over and over.
How are you meant to organize if you barely even know anyone outside a small friend group? If you don’t have a car? If you’re exhausted from rediculous work hours and broke from shitty pay? You certainly won’t organize if you’re pumped full of the most dopamine rich meaningless slop corporate can come up with. Not if there is no sense of community where you live because existing outside cost money and everyone is so far away you don’t even know who your neighbors are.
But you do it anyway. Because the struggle is not meaningless, because you wouldn’t want them to look the other way when you’re left to rot, because you want change.
It’s normal to feel overwhelmed by the horrors of the world when you have no one to lean on and you don’t have any idea of how you might help. You are meant to feel that way because the more powerless you feel the easier you are to exploit
Going solarpunk
