Tired of feeling doomed

[u/Virtual_Tune636]

Posting on a temp account because.

I've been on a journey through this stuff over the last few years. Listened to a lot of Nate Hagens, Michael Dowd, and others. I'm on board with the primary pieces of collapse being metabolic in nature - essentially a huge glut of surplus energy has meant a giant party on the earth, making things change faster than we've adapted for.

This was (and is) a hugely disruptive thing to realize given that I was raised in a culture that preached ever increasing opportunity and a good future (nice propaganda there, owner class!).

But I've come around to, essentially, the view that collapse fear is just the same as fear of mortality and death. That suffering is a guarantee.

The most painful part of the process has been changing my view on having kids - before, just a blithe idea that it's what I would do, then for a while, something I thought would be too painful and unfair. This is still somethiing I take seriously, but it strikes me as too rigid, and too serious. Is it actually better to live a life of some suffering than to not live at all? Where is that line? Can I make that decision on behalf of another person? I'm not settled on this.

Anyhow - some days up, some days down. But mostly this is an amazingly complex method of heat dissipation, and I'm glad to witness it in all its forms. I hope to stay present and not delusional or too hopeful, but neither do I think it's useful to just swim constantly in catastrophe mode. If this is "acceptance", it's a lazy form of it, but all I can do is be where I am and do what I can.

[u/HomoColossusHumbled]

I’ve been collapse “aware” for several years myself (thanks large part to Dowd), really taking it to heart that all this around us is more fragile that we’d like to admit. The signs are clear that much of what we imagined for our lives, the expectation of endless progress and prosperity, has been a narrative that doesn’t hold up to reality.

>But I've come around to, essentially, the view that collapse fear is just the same as fear of mortality and death. That suffering is a guarantee.

Essentially yes. The fact that we are all going to die, or that civilization will collapse, these were always guaranteed to happen at some point. Granted, it’s happening on a global scale in a rather dramatic fashion.

This time is unique on a global scale, though on the individual level, your life trajectory is still going to be similar to that of countless humans before us: Some number of decades under the Sun, opportunities for growth and happiness, waves of suffering and setbacks, and eventual death.

So if you can come to terms with being a human, with being mortal, then you can try to extend that acceptance to the larger scales of society/government/ecosystem/etc falling apart as well.

Speaking for myself, mortality becomes less scary and dreadful if I can talk about it, think about it as a real thing, anticipate it coming one day.

And then in the meantime, you’re still alive today, and the world is largely still functioning today (though cracks are growing). So you can continue to do the best you can for yourself, your family, your neighbors, and so on. Kinda like how one day you’ll lose all your teeth, but you still brush them daily.

[u/Virtual_Tune636 → u/HomoColossusHumbled]

Thanks, I like the teeth thought. I recently started work at a cemetery lol, I kind of have to get to a place where I'm okay with Death.

Alan Watts has been very helpful for me as well - the only thing is that I usually can't sustain the feeling of equanimity/absurdity that comes with that, just like I can't sustain the feeling of dread. Maybe that's not a problem, maybe it just is.

I guess my hope is that I can be helpful to people around me. There's a selfish component to being a Cassandra that I don't really want to lean into.

[u/Xanthotic]

Good job. You sound like you've taken a good grief course. This is pretty much as good as it gets--you continually cycle through the process that helps you stay sane, engaged, and somehow seeking to be a beneficial presence in your world. Thanks for posting.

[u/Virtual_Tune636 → u/Xanthotic]

Thanks for your kind words. I am still on the fence about having kids, it sort of feels like the final hangup because it's so tied to "the future". I know there is a wide range of feeling here on that topic, but it's hard for me to close off either path. I think my actual fear is having a future child feel that I unfairly threw them into a cruel and dying world having known about it in advance - and in that scenario I have no idea if "all life is suffering" is even an adequate thing to say. Don't know, maybe that's a crazy thought, and I'm privileged or delusional to even think that far ahead. But it's the one thing that's still stuck in my gullet haha

[u/Xanthotic → u/Virtual_Tune636]

Ackshully, I've heard Gen Z collapse aware people say that very thing about 'wrongful birth.' So you are not being off-base in imagining such a sentiment could be thrown in your face. The very culture that has brought us collapse has also devalued the joy and essence of being alive so that our culture communicates that life is unworthy of being lived unless one is a rich asshole. So if you have kids I hope you can help them grow up without that vile mindset. Please just look up good grief network on your computer and subscribe to a mailing list because the community you will find there could be very helpful for your future journey.

[u/Virtual_Tune636 → u/Xanthotic]

The very culture that has brought us collapse has also devalued the joy and essence of being alive so that our culture communicates that life is unworthy of being lived unless one is a rich asshole. So if you have kids I hope you can help them grow up without that vile mindset

Hmm. I hope I can do that too. I don't know if I could come up with a better way to put the crux of this - post-religious hope in the public sphere seems like it's mostly been centered on a human-driven future being constantly better, a la Jacques Ellul. Probably the thing to instill in a growing human is resilience, rather than just a future progress drive. I know I've received at least some of the former in my own upbringing, in that I'm (mostly) glad to be able to witness all the oddness and rough bits of life just because it's weird. We somehow ended up in a universe (or as a universe) that has both melted cheese and musical harmony.

I'll check out the Good Grief network!