My grief is precisely located in the fact that I am here right now paying the price for hundredsbof years of short sighted actions of my ancestors. Our species is collectively committing suicide and I am along for the ride whether I like it or not. Unless you truly believe it's possible to convince all 8 billion of us to return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, their is no possible future in which the coming century will not be full of calamity unlike anything modern man has ever experienced. A few years ago I felt the same as you, but blind hope is not a solution. AI is not going to save us, fusion is a fantasy, and our species is too fucking selfish collectively to save ourselves from what is coming. Every serious climate scientist on the planet readily acknowledges we are fucked. Curiosity has nothing to do with it, these are objective facts no one wants to face because the weight of it is too much for our nervous systems to bare. I believe your heart is in the right place, but we are not going to vibe code ourselves out of this disaster and by the time people start dying by the millions and governments are forced to act it will already be too late. You are looking at all the same data as me and simply wishing this was not the case. I am tired of lying to myself. Best case scenario you have another 40-50 years to live the best life you can manage before the global crop failures and water wars begin in earnest, hope you make the most of it. I'll leave you in peace from now on, I am an interloper and am acutely aware my take is not a popular one and rarely talk much about climate change these days because even the people who know the science as well as I do are able to make themselves face the reality of what that data means. But to be honest this situation in Europe has me royally pissed off and I gotta dump these feelings somewhere or I will go even madder than I already am.
I don’t think you’re an interloper at all. If anything, I think you’re expressing a grief that many people either never allow themselves to feel or don’t yet know how to articulate. I appreciate you trusting me with it.
Where we differ isn’t in our assessment that humanity has placed itself in a deeply precarious position. I think we largely agree on that. We differ in what follows.
You seem to think I’m arguing for hope. I’m not. Hope is another prediction about the future. I try to avoid living inside predictions altogether—whether optimistic or catastrophic.
The moment I convince myself that history has already finished unfolding, curiosity ends. And once curiosity ends, so does my capacity to notice possibilities I couldn’t previously imagine.
None of that changes the seriousness of climate change. None of it guarantees that we’ll adapt in time. None of it denies that immense suffering may lie ahead.
It simply acknowledges something I don’t think either of us actually knows: how history ends.
What I do know is that every human being who ever lived eventually found themselves in circumstances they didn’t choose, carrying consequences they didn’t create. That has always been the human condition. We happen to have been born into this chapter of it.
So I ask myself a much smaller question:
What kind of human being do I want to be while reality continues unfolding?
For me, the answer has remained remarkably stable for many years now. I won’t distort reality to comfort myself, but I also won’t surrender my curiosity to fear. Whatever comes, those are the terms on which I intend to meet it.
If we’re heading into difficult decades, then I see even more reason to cultivate people who remain capable of thinking clearly, loving deeply, and adapting honestly under pressure. Those capacities don’t become less valuable because the future looks uncertain—they become more valuable.
I genuinely wish you and your garden well. To me, tending a garden, loving your family, and making art aren’t acts of resignation. They’re acts of participation in life. That tells me that, despite everything you’ve written, some part of you still knows life is worth caring for. I hope that part of you continues to have room to breathe.
You have responded with more grace and understanding than I expected. Thank you for that. In truth your post triggered me a little and forced me to confront head on this climate grief I was trying my best to ignore. As a hyper object, climate change is too monumental for anyone of us to carry alone so you are on the right track trying to build a community. I lean on my family hard at times like these, but clearly that isn't always enough. Cheers.
I want to go back to before capitalism colonized my mind. The productivity mindset and worship of money is evil and anti human to its core and I will resist it till my dying day.
It's that tribal and irrational fear of exclusion-of not being "enough"- that has everyone consuming and chasing more than they need while ruining our collective basis for continued survival. An abstraction like money in and of itself is not evil, just an effective tool we need to organise and distribute value. Where evil does come in is when it is no longer a means but an attempted end to silence a fear that cannot be silenced, only confronted.
Have you read Ishmael? There are actually only two modes of being on Earth, one where you live in harmony with nature and one in which you don't. All the other abstractions are fictions we created to justify humanities delusion that we are gods who can procreate without limits and abuse and poison the planet as we see fit. But we aren't. Climate change is just the inevitable punishment for our collective sins. The cost for our hubris will be paid in blood and likely the destruction of our entire species. Things did not have to be this way, but the damage was already complete before I was even born and I no longer believe our species can be saved. The rot has sunken in too deep. I feel as if I was born just to watch everything die and fall apart and wonder what evil I did in a past life to deserve this fate. Now I am resolved to just keep building my garden, love my family and friends as generously as I can and make and consume quality art on the sidelines while I wait for our civilization to inevitably collapse under the weight of its inherent hypocrisy. Nothing else really matters to me anymore. Is this fatalism or am I simply one of the few people unable to deceive myself about what is actually happening here? Hard to say. I wonder what the thousands of people who just died this week in catastrophic heat waves would have to say about it? Who knows, they are dead, and in a few decades the rest of us will join them. Opting out of the system entirely until that happens is pretty much the only moral choice I have left.
We have never left nature. We are one of nature’s products, expressing one of nature’s possibilities. The tendency to imagine ourselves as somehow separate from it is a profound misconception when looking at our genome, which bears the imprint of an unbroken chain of life stretching back nearly four billion years.
We are not outside nature watching it die. We are nature becoming conscious of one of its own maladaptive trajectories. How fast we adapt and how much suffering is mitigated as a result is an open question. But treating that question as already settled seems to me like closing curiosity precisely where we need it the most.
My grief is precisely located in the fact that I am here right now paying the price for hundredsbof years of short sighted actions of my ancestors. Our species is collectively committing suicide and I am along for the ride whether I like it or not. Unless you truly believe it's possible to convince all 8 billion of us to return to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, their is no possible future in which the coming century will not be full of calamity unlike anything modern man has ever experienced. A few years ago I felt the same as you, but blind hope is not a solution. AI is not going to save us, fusion is a fantasy, and our species is too fucking selfish collectively to save ourselves from what is coming. Every serious climate scientist on the planet readily acknowledges we are fucked. Curiosity has nothing to do with it, these are objective facts no one wants to face because the weight of it is too much for our nervous systems to bare. I believe your heart is in the right place, but we are not going to vibe code ourselves out of this disaster and by the time people start dying by the millions and governments are forced to act it will already be too late. You are looking at all the same data as me and simply wishing this was not the case. I am tired of lying to myself. Best case scenario you have another 40-50 years to live the best life you can manage before the global crop failures and water wars begin in earnest, hope you make the most of it. I'll leave you in peace from now on, I am an interloper and am acutely aware my take is not a popular one and rarely talk much about climate change these days because even the people who know the science as well as I do are able to make themselves face the reality of what that data means. But to be honest this situation in Europe has me royally pissed off and I gotta dump these feelings somewhere or I will go even madder than I already am.
I don’t think you’re an interloper at all. If anything, I think you’re expressing a grief that many people either never allow themselves to feel or don’t yet know how to articulate. I appreciate you trusting me with it.
Where we differ isn’t in our assessment that humanity has placed itself in a deeply precarious position. I think we largely agree on that. We differ in what follows.
You seem to think I’m arguing for hope. I’m not. Hope is another prediction about the future. I try to avoid living inside predictions altogether—whether optimistic or catastrophic.
The moment I convince myself that history has already finished unfolding, curiosity ends. And once curiosity ends, so does my capacity to notice possibilities I couldn’t previously imagine.
None of that changes the seriousness of climate change. None of it guarantees that we’ll adapt in time. None of it denies that immense suffering may lie ahead.
It simply acknowledges something I don’t think either of us actually knows: how history ends.
What I do know is that every human being who ever lived eventually found themselves in circumstances they didn’t choose, carrying consequences they didn’t create. That has always been the human condition. We happen to have been born into this chapter of it.
So I ask myself a much smaller question:
What kind of human being do I want to be while reality continues unfolding?
For me, the answer has remained remarkably stable for many years now. I won’t distort reality to comfort myself, but I also won’t surrender my curiosity to fear. Whatever comes, those are the terms on which I intend to meet it.
If we’re heading into difficult decades, then I see even more reason to cultivate people who remain capable of thinking clearly, loving deeply, and adapting honestly under pressure. Those capacities don’t become less valuable because the future looks uncertain—they become more valuable.
I genuinely wish you and your garden well. To me, tending a garden, loving your family, and making art aren’t acts of resignation. They’re acts of participation in life. That tells me that, despite everything you’ve written, some part of you still knows life is worth caring for. I hope that part of you continues to have room to breathe.
You have responded with more grace and understanding than I expected. Thank you for that. In truth your post triggered me a little and forced me to confront head on this climate grief I was trying my best to ignore. As a hyper object, climate change is too monumental for anyone of us to carry alone so you are on the right track trying to build a community. I lean on my family hard at times like these, but clearly that isn't always enough. Cheers.
I want to go back to before capitalism colonized my mind. The productivity mindset and worship of money is evil and anti human to its core and I will resist it till my dying day.
It's that tribal and irrational fear of exclusion-of not being "enough"- that has everyone consuming and chasing more than they need while ruining our collective basis for continued survival. An abstraction like money in and of itself is not evil, just an effective tool we need to organise and distribute value. Where evil does come in is when it is no longer a means but an attempted end to silence a fear that cannot be silenced, only confronted.
Have you read Ishmael? There are actually only two modes of being on Earth, one where you live in harmony with nature and one in which you don't. All the other abstractions are fictions we created to justify humanities delusion that we are gods who can procreate without limits and abuse and poison the planet as we see fit. But we aren't. Climate change is just the inevitable punishment for our collective sins. The cost for our hubris will be paid in blood and likely the destruction of our entire species. Things did not have to be this way, but the damage was already complete before I was even born and I no longer believe our species can be saved. The rot has sunken in too deep. I feel as if I was born just to watch everything die and fall apart and wonder what evil I did in a past life to deserve this fate. Now I am resolved to just keep building my garden, love my family and friends as generously as I can and make and consume quality art on the sidelines while I wait for our civilization to inevitably collapse under the weight of its inherent hypocrisy. Nothing else really matters to me anymore. Is this fatalism or am I simply one of the few people unable to deceive myself about what is actually happening here? Hard to say. I wonder what the thousands of people who just died this week in catastrophic heat waves would have to say about it? Who knows, they are dead, and in a few decades the rest of us will join them. Opting out of the system entirely until that happens is pretty much the only moral choice I have left.
We have never left nature. We are one of nature’s products, expressing one of nature’s possibilities. The tendency to imagine ourselves as somehow separate from it is a profound misconception when looking at our genome, which bears the imprint of an unbroken chain of life stretching back nearly four billion years.
We are not outside nature watching it die. We are nature becoming conscious of one of its own maladaptive trajectories. How fast we adapt and how much suffering is mitigated as a result is an open question. But treating that question as already settled seems to me like closing curiosity precisely where we need it the most.