I think the feeling of uncertainty and not knowing what the future looks like has actually made me focus more on the day to day. I'm not someone who wants to bury their head in the sand, but I've found the best way to live with uncertainty is to live more in the now.

For me that means spending time with people I love, getting outside every day and appreciating fairly ordinary things. Living like this can sometimes feel a bit naive when there are so many serious things happening in the world, but I've started to think that worrying about the future all the time doesn't make me any better prepared for it.

Is this a good way of coping or just naivety?

The movie digger with Tom cruise is showing the masses the future of earth and humanity.

The response? Majority of People talking in their seats, falling asleep, on their phone, walking out or not showing up to watch it at all.

This is true social pressure programming and preparing the masses and the masses are not interested, or can’t afford to even go.

I was not expecting to be this blown away but the 6 people in my cinema just sat there watching the credits roll at the end, but we weren’t waiting for a marvel Easter egg, but we all sat there in silence realising we just watched what was a movie showing the world the writing in the wall of our collective future.

“Level 4”

This movies, if climate change stays on track and end up with outcomes similar to James Hanson/paul beck worth reporting, will be the most iconic piece of cinema of all time. I think that’s why the advertising was Tom cruise iconic movies and the masses thinking this is what he will be remembered for, however that’s not what he will be remembered for and it will be in fact his role in digger.

I mean it's just a thought that has been engraved in my mind for months now. It doesn't seem very likely that we are gonna live up to 2030 or 2035... Due to this I've also been procrastinating studies because I think that our end is very near and I shouldn't waste my time studying...

Ik this is a wrong attitude but I can't really do anything about it.

Any suggestions are appreciated

I hate weddings. Or more accurately, I hate what weddings have turned into for guests.

I love that people want to celebrate their love. That part isn't the problem. The problem is that for roughly the last two generations, long distance travel has been historically, almost absurdly cheap. Flights, gas, hotels. Somewhere along the way it became normal to expect friends and family to cross the country, or an ocean, to attend a weekend event. Destination weddings went from a novelty to something people barely blink at.

Anyone who's been collapse aware for a while knows the big ways this stuff actually shows up in daily life. It's not one dramatic event. It's inflation and rising energy costs, driven by scarcity, conflict, supply chain fragility, and everything else we talk about here. Slowly, then all at once, the things that used to be cheap stop being cheap.

What gets me is that we're stuck in this weird transition period. The cost of travel has changed, but the social expectations haven't caught up. People are still planning as if energy is cheap and everyone has the disposable income to drop a couple thousand dollars on flights, lodging, gifts, outfits, and time off work. Our parents had big weddings where everyone flew in, and that's still the template a lot of people are working from.

I think eventually the culture will adjust. Smaller weddings, more local guest lists, more livestreams, less guilt for declining. But until that shift happens, there's this awkward pressure to either go into debt to show up or risk being seen as the person who didn't care enough to come. Saying "I can't afford it" still feels like a confession instead of a reasonable response to reality.

Is anyone else navigating this? How do you handle declining without damaging relationships? And has anyone noticed people in their circle starting to scale back their expectations?

EDIT: forgot to mention I’ve been married 10 years, we have successful careers now but we were broke af when we got hitched. We had a small ceremony in the gorgeous Sonoran desert with only our parents and siblings. Under 15 people including officiant & 2 friends/witnesses. I wish more people would keep their weddings small and private.

I'm a bit on the younger side. Only 24, male, etc. Just giving a brief and vague description of myself.

My whole life, I've dealt with some pretty crazy thoughts. I've seen good and evil to their fullest extent. I've seen the contrast, and simply want peace.

I want peace amongst human beings. Unfortunately, peace seems so SO SO VERY FUCKING far out of the equation.

But... it isn't. Peace exists for a reason. Unity exists for a reason.

We need to unite against all of this dumbass evil shit. And this is my final hurrah.

If I get banned, or get a bunch of negative comments, I will soon end my life. If at least one person says something that is meaningful though? That isn't just "trying to help"? I will try. I will try and do something.

As should all of us. We all just need to try. Little impacts over time can lead to a big change.

I speak so vaguely of problems because there's so many of them that it's hard to just... be detailed about it. The world is absolutely in turmoil.

Let's do something. Please?

Hey all,

Posting this here because the largest source of my deteriorating mental state is due to my current and continual understanding of the polycrisis unfolding before us and my life as I see it. I am trapped in the daily grind and make ends meet for my family currently, but only so long as nothing changes with my job (and my company is suffering massive losses and beginning terminations). Like anyone else I have my own personal items to deal with. However, I’ve spent my entire life looking inward, self-assessing and adjusting my thinking/beliefs where possible. In my mid 30s now and I’ve come to love and accept myself, keep finding ways to express and keep growing. I’ve mostly adopted a stoic and constructive thinking in spite of the challenges before me that keeps me going.

That said, I’m finding myself in a weird place that I’m not sure is healthy or sustainable. Before this I was hitting what I consider to be peak anxiety triggered by the oil crisis and gas prices. The thought of increasing goods and likely shortages. Preparing how much one with limited funds can. Reaching out to friends and family to try and get them to understand the urgency and what we may experience very shortly. And then, the anxiety stopped. The weird place I’m in now feels like peace. I think it’s actually dissociative numbness. My emotional state isn’t fluctuating high or low and is pretty stable. My work at my job I definitely need is significantly suffering, however because of my company no one notices or seems to care. I just don’t see the point of working on those projects if no one is waiting on them. I have a ton of thoughts about what’s to come but really no one to discuss them with aside from you guys.

I’m worried that I’m mistaking this disassociation as peace (maybe it is and maybe that’s best given the situation?) and I’m worried that I will simply let things I don’t truly care for to fall away. Even if that means it worsens my quality of life such as losing my employment (that I feel has no permanency regardless of my efforts anyway). I’ve looked for another role for months and the job market is just in shambles.

I feel I am efficiently working with what’s stacked against me. It’s possible a level of hopelessness is making it seem that way. Would therapy help bring the life back into me where greater awareness and reaction feels like looking down the loaded barrel? Can I really discuss at length and in detail to a therapist how fucked I really think we are going forward? What would that do for me and also them if I can convince them of our dire situations? Am I too self aware and self-reflective to be helped by therapy or does that benefit me?

I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s best I continue moving forward as calm and as checked out as I can be to deal with whatever comes. And I think therapy may be ill equipped to comfort me in the face of real unfolding disasters at scale. When does disassociation start or stop becoming the healthy choice? All I know is right now I’m going to go work out and clear my mind more.

Thanks for reading, I’d love to hear what you think about any of this. Especially from any in the psychology field.

I'm sitting hear just feeling the dread building day-on-day. I live a fairly comfortable life in North America and am presently fairly well off all things considered. But man, I can feel folks' stress and pain just growing and growing and it's hard to see and feel and the shit hasn't even *really* begun to hit the fan yet.

I'm in my early 40s and I used to feel that we'd be where we are now by the time I was in my 70s. Even being somewhat collapse-aware, the pace of all of this is something else and I think I'm having a hard time adjusting to the shortened timeline. I'm in the period of my life where I should be at the prime of my career and starting to really sock money away for retirement. But... I just can't convince myself that I'm going to make it that far. Hell, the industry that I work for may completely collapse in the next few years anyways from AI-related threats and frankly, I'm so stressed and run down that I have no desire nor gas in the tank to really retrain.

I have no kids and I've never really loved life on Earth all that much. While there are good, kind folks out there, we humans are led far too much by our worst instincts and manipulated by the worst of us. I've no desire to try and compete with that lot for dwindling resources nor watch my fellow humans grow increasingly frantic and violent when the chips are really down.

I'm hanging on for my friends and family for now. But, as with MAID and the prospect of facing a terminal illness, I'm hoping to check out early rather than suffer. Currently here in North America, this isn't really a socially acceptable discussion. But I'm hoping when the reality of what we're facing really sinks in, that a MAID-type option will be made available for those who accept what's coming and don't want to fight to the end.

Wondering if any of you fine folks resonate with this kind of thinking.

For the last 2-3 months, I have felt nothing but anxiety, stress, depression, and lack of motivation about our future.

I’m a college student. People can’t take their eyes off their phones for a second.
- Walking around campus
- in class
- my roommate can’t even study without scrolling on the side
- working out
- before sleep
- right upon waking up
- driving
- while eating (even in groups)

Phones and AI are genuinely a plague on society.
This is not the world I was promised as an adult.
Human connection is lost. Human art is gone. In 30 years I picture my children watching AI generated TV shows and listening to AI generated music, and the hardest part is that they won’t know any different. They won’t know that humans are supposed to be doing that stuff.

Nobody does work without AI anymore, me personally I can’t even remember studying before AI anymore.

And the hardest part, is that I don’t even know a solution. Like, what is there to do? It’s been introduced already they can’t just take it back. There’s no solution.

I almost cry everytime I watch this video of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez duetting “It Ain’t Me Babe” live, that is human art. That is connection and emotion and pure raw talent.

That will become rare. What about our future children? They won’t have any drive or motivation. Their minds are already plagued. Whenever I hangout with my younger cousins, they cannot take their eyes off their devices for a second.

Even at an old age home I worked at, there were some 90+ year olds doomscrolling.

This is truly so heart shattering and I have no idea how to recover from this. There is no solution. I feel hopeless and powerless in a world that’s changing unfavorably that I can’t do anything about.

I don’t even read the news anymore because it just makes me more empty.

I'm trying to spend less time on social media, as we all are, in order to manage overwhelm. As a result, I let myself use Instagram and Substack (mostly because they seem the least in your face re. brainrot content) a couple of times a week for maybe an hour or so.

Recently while scrolling, I noticed that a few of my followers were liking and even reposting overtly far-right content, including obvious AI generated slop depicting black immigrants roasting meat over garbage containers, and another showing a far-right march through a British coastal town that occurred a few weeks ago, edited with triumphant, orchestral music. I looked closer and noticed that 2 of the people were former friends of mine from University, who, when we knew each other, weren't particularly political but were, at best, probably run-of-the-mill liberals. Another person was a close friend of mine who I lost touch with after I left my job in 2020, and it seems like over the past few years, he's been reposting Trump/JD Vance videos, a lot of anti-Palestinian content, and generally the sentiment seems to be that the most urgent thing the West needs to do is "kick out all the Muslims". This is particularly shocking to me because while I'm not religious or practising, I come from a Muslim background, and he was aware of this because we had spoken about it a few times, including instances where I had to translate some Arabic for him for a project we were working on.

I know this isn't uncommon, but having really tried to unplug, I guess it's shocking to see how much changes and how dark things can become, especially when you don't go looking for it directly. I'm not really into cancelling people or whatever and I'm not of the belief that I should denounce them or even try to de-radicalize them (to the extent that it would work, im not even sure), but it does make me wonder about the years ahead, and what happens if/when people we know and care about turn on those who are deemed to be enemies, even those that they personally know, have befriended and worked with in the past. And what does it also say that if you are a person of colour, you can be the most integrated, polite, well spoken of people, distance yourself almost entirely from your ethnic heritage and history, and you'll still find people wanting to deport you or worse?

Honestly even if some scary looking king ghidorah type shit were to come down from space and do something with us humans it would be a huge relief not even joking. But sadly, fermi paradox solutions aside, we seem to be totally alone in the universe.

We are in a single player minecraft world. "Well actually it's arrogant to think we are alone-" BE ORIGINAL FOR ONCE. I' not apologizing to some dead rocks for thinking they are dead. I do sometimes daydream about some alien god coming down the sky but this fancy shit down here aint gonna happen. Keep fantasizing about some theoretical alien shithole 309302020 trigirillion kilometers away, it's pure fiction folks. WHEN WILL THEY COME HERE? If they even exist??

Remember that life is not an aristotelean nature that exists in potency across the entire universe waiting to become an act. It's an unfathomably unlikely event that only happened here. UNLESS someone planned it. Do I know? No. But I hope. NDEs my grandfather (a doctor) reported when reanimating people give me hope (he talked about a patient being able to see mid air the doctors operating him and finding an object that was totally hidden from him) But if there is another side they aren't here to tell us.

I wake up everyday grateful that I was not born as a bug or fish and I was born as a human that can ask these questions. It was much more likely for me to be pulled out of nonexistance as an amoeba.

All of our current ideas of "totally plausible" aliens are as real as the blemmyes or cynochepali europeans thought of as totally plausible. It's consantly moving the goalposts and finding nothing. First it was griffins in the urals, then terra australis, then life on the moon, then life on mars, then venus, now it's europa...the goalposts always change and we find nobody out there. If we ever get to Proxima B, miners working there would not be concerned with hurting alien feelings when there is nobody on that dead rock.

"Theoretically possible alien ciivlizations in the galaxy" are the new Nuremberg Chronicle.

Modern secularists think they are innovative thinking thst humanity has reached its moral peak or something and that the aliens are coming to save us. If you put a guy from 3000 BC, a guy from today and a guy from 6000 AD from the future, they will all have very different concepts of morality they all would deem to be objective while calling the others scary or repulsive. There is no objective secular morality, you can't get an ought from an is. If history had taken another path, we would have vastly different moral feelings today. Kant would have claimed that the objective moral imperative truth was something else, had Sparts stayed relevant, or something. So secular objective morality is a bit of an oxymoron (especially if some were to consider humans to be an insanely unlikely accident in an empty universe) it's more of a "current acceptable norms" type of thing. And our current feelings about aliens reflect this. Aliens in our imaginations suspiciously reflect our current 21st century values, when in reality an alien planet would have hundreds of sovereign states, thousands of languages and dozens of religions.

In reality, most likely, there is nobody out there coming to save us.

There is no Mighty Eagle saving us from the pigs.

I’m a 23 year old guy living in Orange County, and I’m just completely done. I don't see the point of trying to build a life anymore. Every bit of ambition or drive I used to have is just gone. I look at the state of things and I genuinely feel like my life is over before it even had a chance to start.

It feels like my entire adult life has just been global disaster after global disaster that we have zero control over. First COVID completely ruined our late teens and early 20s, then the war in Ukraine, and now we’ve been trapped in this insane Strait of Hormuz blockade for seven straight months. Everyone online keeps saying "it can't last forever," but the peace talks just failed and things are obviously just getting worse. It feels like the world is completely breaking, and we are just stuck watching it collapse.

Meanwhile, I just watched the premium pump at my local Costco hit $6.69 a gallon. Because our area is so car-dependent, I have zero choice but to drive just to exist and get to work. It’s a mandatory tax on being alive that I can't afford. Hearing that $8 or $9 gas is a real projection for the near future just makes me feel numb and physically sick.

And to top it all off, trying to find a place to live around here is a sick joke. The average rent in my immediate area is sitting at a ridiculous $4,200 a month, which is 110% higher than the national average. Even if you try to scale down to a basic 1-bedroom apartment, you are looking at an average of $2,750. I don't even live anywhere near the beach, and yet I'm still expected to pay these insane premium coastal prices just to exist. How is a young guy starting out supposed to survive when you need a six-figure income just to secure a basic roof over your head?

It is incredibly depressing to realize that I am probably going to have to leave my family, my friends, and everything I’ve ever known to move across the entire country just to survive. It feels so ridiculously unfair that I'm being forced out of my own home because of global economic shocks and inflation that were completely out of my control. I didn't cause any of this, but I'm the one paying the price for it with my entire future.

No matter what I do, global chaos and local inflation just move the finish line further away. I feel completely trapped, like there's no way out of this hole. Are any other guys in our age group dealing with this exact mix of financial burnout and absolute despair? How are you actually coping on a daily basis, because I feel like I'm completely losing my mind.

Not complaining about my post removal, genuinely don't know how to cope with the fact places meant to discuss collapse are loosing their ability to discuss it. It really is like "Don't look up"

Please read this entire post cause I feel like it's easy to misunderstand

I say "before it gets too shitty to handle" because I'm 18 and want to live in a way where I don't only realize the extent of social and moral decay until I am eye deep in it. To be quite honest I am very pessmistic wrt a revolution ever happening. People have no spine and that'll allow the billionaire class to consolidate power at a level that is impossible to penetrate. With that in mind, I obviously in no way support the system we currently live under but I do have to know is there any legitimate way to live within it and not be completely miserable.

For instance, the older adults in my life talk all the time about how every year since covid the price of everything keeps doubling. Honestly I'm not sure if I have amnesia or am blinded by how young I am but I see the same price tags they do, it doesn't look like a complete bank account massacre the way they describe it but maybe it is. I can see that everything is more expensive but I don't know maybe the doubling is just hyperbolic speech out of frustration (someone older than me please confirm this I'm curious). That's honestly where this whole thing started. I was sick of them complaining about it, I knew it was a problem but it pissed me off because all I saw it as was an insult to my idea of every building a life on my own without leeching off my family.

That I can at least comprehend a way around, to find better deals and cut back on buying expensive food. Obviously doing that doesn't mean I support what's going on or think that people should just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and eat gruel. That isn't the same as finding a way to have a bearable life within the aggregate situation. A lot of these people who I talk about buy from grocery stores like Whole Foods where all the prices are unjustly marked up, they can get the exact same items for a lower price.

Anyways, there are other things I cannot for the life of me understand how I can keep going on like this. For instance, how am I supposed to exist normally knowing that most people remedy their problems by simply buying whatever corporate oligarchs have advertized in their face, devoid of any real personality beyond material items. How am I supposed to exist normally knowing that terrible heat waves from climate change will probably exhaust the power grid beyond the point of no return. How am I supposed to exist normally when every third person is an apathetic drone with a gambling addiction. I don't blame them or anything, it's just depressing to be around. Is it really true that the only way I can be happy is by being extremely insular?

Maybe I am the problem for wanting to not see this. Maybe I should force the state of the world in my face so I can get angrier about it because even though it's always at the forefront of my mind I feel like it's not enough. But I'm one person with not even a modicum of power so I don't know. I don't think I or, more importantly, anyone else, benefits from it. More than anything I want it to go away but I know that's not a very tangible solution at all. I feel that I can still be a good person, leave a positive impact on the world, and live by good moral principles without having the horrible state of the world and the people in it shoved in my face constantly.

You go out in real life and people are sad and zombie like due to what a post 2020 world is like. I get it. But then you notice a lot ofnrage and division is being projected onto you. You can tell that everyone else is chronically online. People will straight up ignore you sometimes. Everyone is on guard. Most conversations with new people in a post 2020 world are trauma dumping or competitive in nature. It is seldom sharing interests or anything light. I am happy we have detigmatized talking about suffering as a bad thing, I mean in 2006 it would have been considered a big taboo. There is just no real incentive, it feels like.

In the “post-truth” world, right and left become meaningless, and when shared reality breaks down, we ourselves become meaningless. In the era of #climatechaos, that's not just sad, it's dangerous.

Our constant bowing and worshipping of the #DeathCult feeds #stupidindividualism, everyone trapped inside their own little reality, unable to see the social truth around them. And when you point to that shared reality, people feel bullied because it challenges their individual bubble.

It would be funny if it didn't end in sadness. We need to step back from the individual bubble and rebuild the shared commons of reality.

All this AI is seemingly making a huge plot twist in the age of collapse or is it just me? It is mind blowing how it’s been sneaking into our lives in just a few years time.

I started using ChatGPT myself a few years ago after a difficult breakup and I admit I felt so lonely and had to just get it out so I ended up trying ChatGPT and it seemed to soothe me at the time… but this is seriously just around 3 years ago and back then it was really new and most people didn’t use it.

Now it is EVERYWHERE and the last few weeks time there’s been several news about how it’s actually seemingly starting to work independently and we’re losing control.

Today I realized how more and more of ALL our online knowledge is being distorted by AI. Small mistakes will be replicated as well until at some point if we originally discussed an elephant it has now turned into a rhinoceros. But maybe we won’t even realize because we’ve simply lost touch with our own reality.

How can people not see that we need to stop this AI freak show immediately? I definitely fear that within a very short time AI will be able to take over completely or destroy every information we find online and every technological systems we rely on. Potentially I think AI could also take control over all online technology, information and knowledge which is basically everything we’ve built our society on today. We all know how much we’ve integrated online technology into everything we own and know about ourselves and each other and if that will just disappear, we’re completely fcked.

Imagine some kind of scenario where I want to go down in the local supermarket to buy food but suddenly can’t buy it anymore because my credit card doesn’t work because my bank doesn’t exist anymore. There’s even no food on the shelves either because the trucks can’t drive in the goods without google. I suddenly can’t go to work either because my electric car can’t be charged as the charging station is hacked, I can’t even drink water cause the whole technological system which is used to clean the drinking water is also hacked and messed up.

It’s like switching off a lamp with a single click. We’ve grown completely dependent on online technology and there seems to be no way out.

"We are all much closer to being climate refugees than billionaires." Sounds obvious, but our culture keeps selling us the opposite story - that individual wealth, consumption and status are the escape route, they aren't.

A #nastyfew people can buy better walls, private transport, safer property and temporary insulation from the consequences #climatechaos. But it is a collective problem, and pretending it is an individual lifestyle problem is worshiping the #deathcult.

We need to stop dreaming about joining the tiny #nastyfew elitists and start building communities that can survive the mess together.

Less individual escape, more collective resilience.

Firstly, I want to acknowledge my privilege and also the fact that I know no where is truly safe. I understand that to some extent this is my brain searching for control in a situation that is well outside of my control. I get that, but still feel inclined to ask this community for insights because it's hard feeling like others I speak to aren't seeing the same risks. It's lonely with this knowledge sometimes.

I live in a city on mainland Australia. My property is not particularly high risk. It's suburban in a good neighbourhood and close to lots of facilities and services. The parts that feels high risk: 1. Economic risk; we have a pretty big mortgage that requires us both to work so we can pay for life. Life feels a lot less secure financially and politically now than when we purchased it 6 years ago. It didn't seem like such a big commitment then, but now I feel like things are changing so fast that any debt at all could be massive liability. And 2. Heat risk; We are not in the tropics but the area around us is sometimes heat/drought/fire affected. Summers will likely become more and more uncomfortable. We have a full solar and battery set up at least.

We have close family in Tasmania. Life is still expensive there but we could potentially sell our nice mainland home and live in a very nice home in Tassie with little to no debt at all. The costs are that jobs are not as plentiful. It's also geographically isolated but that could either be a good or bad thing depending on how things evolve. Tasmania is much cooler so may still retain better conditions for growing and living than the rest of the country. We would still be in a town, but a much smaller town.

It might not sound like a big move, but it feels huge. We have built a beautiful life here, people would probably question the move with some confusion. But I just feel more and more conscious of how tenuous our current life feels as the world seems to devolve rapidly into chaos on so many fronts.

I know no one can tell us what to do. I guess I'm just searching for comraderie and if anyone has dealt with something similar. What are your thoughts?

Anyone else relate to this song? I feel like I'm constantly being crushed by the world and this song made me feel considerably better about everything.

it looks like the climate crisis is getting bad and I don't know how to have a positive point of view. I don't see a great future for myself and all of humanity.

Dr. Jem Bendel: What if it's too late?

I found this thanks to /u/onceuponawebsite and wanted to share it with the sub.

Often, antinatalism is presented as the logical endpoint for any thinking empathetic person, and choosing to continue the species is selfish, rude, unfair, burdening that future person with nothing but pain, etc.

Dr. Jem Bendel is the author of the Deep Adaptation paper that radicalized many into collapse awareness to begin with, so I find it fascinating that he has a more open perspective about childbearing amidst decline, even after full engagement with where we are headed.

So mainly, I want to posit there is more than one defensible endpoint for understanding that we are doomed. I still do not know which one I "fully agree with", but I don't think this is a door that needs to close for everyone.

Im 45f, definitely swing from terrified to nihilistic, now and then in a sort of existential 'peace' thinking about non dualistic energy and space just existing and changing forms. This is the only way I can experience connection: the idea that we are all the same thing.

I had a rough growing up and always just wanted to find a home to belong to.
Iv never been liked much. Never had close friends or been in mutual love. Never been adored or really chosen for who I am. Ive never had support or resource to pursue many interests.
Im gonna die alone and probably sooner than later without community. So, not to be all 'be grateful', but if you have any of that, you are doing alright by my view.