Although the linked study examined attitudes of those 16 to 25 years of age, there are many outside that range (myself included) who experience extreme pessimism about the future of human existence.
What experiences led you to your own conclusions about the fate of humanity? Do those conclusions affect your everyday decisions? How does your acceptance of imminent calamity shape your long term goals?
I’ll start. I was but a child in the 1960’s (Boomer II), born into a family deeply involved in charismatic Christianity. Fear surrounding the predicted events of a highly anticipated second coming of Christ (The Rapture, Tribulation, etc.) combined with the exaggerated cultural threat of communist aggression and the certainty of thermonuclear destruction created a perfect storm of personal despair and dread by the time I was 9 years old. As the fundamentalist Christian culture edged toward prosperity gospel and Seven Mountains, my mind turned towards nihilistic and scientific literature.
By my teenage years, I was solidly convinced that nothing short of a miracle could save humanity prior to my 30th birthday. Yet, here we are. The angst of my childhood absolutely shaped the trajectory of my life. Secondary education seemed a senseless enough endeavor to ignore. I considered reproduction to be a cruel endeavor. I embraced agnosticism, punk culture and anarchism.
The privileged existence of being white, privileged and cis male has served me well, and I can’t say that I’m unhappy. I find succor in the growing probability that a natural death will spare me the majority of horrors to come. And I am sad and angry for what subsequent generations are about to experience.
What’s your story?
I’m convinced that there is no way to avoid a climate induced environmental collapse, and there never was. The entirety of our evolution has been a competition for resources where the winner reproduces their genes better than the loser. Fossilized carbon is the most valuable resource the planet has to offer. It powered the industrial revolution and provided the energy to create the society we live in today. And it fueled the largest growth in human population in history. We compete bitterly with each other (on a national level) to have access to fossil fuels. And any group of us who decides to reduce their usage for the benefit of the earth will simply be allowing another group to use ‘their’ share of fossil fuels. And the altruistic group will suffer while watching the other group prosper. We don’t have the ability as a species to think ahead for the good of the planet. It’s never been a useful survival strategy. It’s our nature to compete, each of us wanting more for ourselves or our group, regardless of the consequence for others. So we will continue to extract and burn until it’s no longer possible. I see no alternative.
As far as how I come to this conclusion, it’s hard to say. I think there is a logical thread here that leads me to a reasonable, if pessimistic, conclusion. Maybe something in my history killed my faith in the collective good of humankind. Maybe game theory points this way. Not sure. I want to say my opinions and observations are self-evident, but probably everyone thinks that about their own ideas.
We aren’t necessarily doomed, but we’re at serious risk of biosphere collapse and our way of life is already changed. And if it’s true that we can’t alter our own fate, the moral imperative is that we lessen the blow for whatever is left. Scientists have had a consistent warning for decades, but it is growing worse. We are not changing our societies fast enough, but I am pleasantly surprised that we have changed at all.
It does affect my life and plans for the future.
With respect to the study’s findings, I was also surprised at how the USA was less worried/impacted than other countries, and that it’s particularly bad in India.
Figure 1 Worry about climate change and impact on functioning The graph shows the proportion of the sample reporting a negative impact on functioning from their feelings about climate change and various levels of worry about climate change. Data are shown for the whole sample (n=10 000) and by country (n=1000 per country)
Yes, India’s functioning bar is at the top, yet their worry seems inappropriately low. Filipinos seem to be appropriately worried.
All the studies that show how the environment will collapse within my lifetime. I wish I wasn’t even born at all so I wouldn’t have to live to see something like this. It’s hard to not be a doomer when the world is literally dying around us because the super rich, the boomers and gen x don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves.
I’m a closet doomer. As with my atheism, I keep this part of me secret from all but a select few and certain corners and byways on the the internet.
In the mid-90s I had an awakening of awareness that I was a doomer, although that term did not yet exist.
How did I get there? Easy peasy.
Beginning in about 1970, I learned about something called the greenhouse effect. I found it intriguing and wondered about the implications, so I chased my curiosity down a rabbit hole and concluded that it was a disaster in the making and has been since at least as far back as mid-1800s. There were a few people warning of potential problems, but they were basically ignored or dismissed as nutty.
I started talking to friends and relatives and teachers about this stuff and was quickly consigned to the ranks of the nutjobs.
I sought out what environmental groups were in the area and was quickly consigned to the ranks of the nutjobs.
I sought out what social and political justice groups were in the area and was quickly consigned to the ranks of the nutjobs.
I sought out political parties and their support groups and was quickly consigned to the ranks of the nutjobs.
I’m a slow learner, so it wasn’t until the early 1990s that I realized that there was a deeper problem that needed to be solved first. People and the institutions and organizations they create are very good at ignoring big problems while working very hard to solve small ones. Likewise in identifying problems: it’s easy to get agreement that a pothole needs fixing and hard to get agreement on snow clearing and impossible to get agreement and how to raise the money to pay for either. And climate change makes almost everything else look small by comparison.
By the mid-1990s I’d concluded that this problem of getting people to both pay attention and act could probably be solved, but not in time to mean much for me or the next few generations. So, doomer.
But, I guess, more like “doomer lite,” because a decade later it looked like the problem of dealing with human psychology was actually further than ever from anything like a solution, so I came to a more modern version of doomerism.
Now, the last decade, but especially our collective response to COVID, has pushed me over to “doomer supreme.” I no longer think anything short of civilization-scale evolution can take us to the point at which we can ever tackle any problem that plays out over a century or more. We will never collectively agree on anything with those kinds of timelines in time to actually address the problem with any kind of effectiveness.
