How do you deal with the doom? How do you get through the day or find meaning in your life when you know that every minute of your life you are contributing to the destruction of the planet that we live on? I am asking because I am dealing with it just fine, most days, but I don't know how. I don't know how I deal with the presence of this idea that my very existence is the problem with our ecosystem. The human race is a virus with no vaccine, we are the apex predator with no controls on our growth; we are unchecked and unmatched, Every breath we take produces more carbon, more death to our planet, along with close to eight billion others who are doing the same. Each day we have less forest to absorb it. Most of us know this and yet we go on. How do we do it?
I guess I know the answer but it can't that simple. The answer is that we don't deal with it. We just ignore it and go about our day as if nothing is wrong. Denial. Like John Lennon sings in Strawberry Fields: "Living is easy with eyes closed." I would think that this applies to most of us, but I could be wrong. It could just be me; maybe I'm the outlier. I ignore it most of the time. I just slip into my routine, like a comfy suit and go about my day as if I am not on a virus on a dying planet. Obviously this isn't a full time thing, because if it was I wouldn't be writing this now. If no one thought about it, then no one would be working on it. But most of us are going about our day in complete denial. Some go even further, they are completely clueless about it. I envy these people, they go about their day never thinking about it because they have no idea what I am talking about. I hear people say stuff like "I want to have a large family, maybe eight kids" as if this is actually a viable option. There they are, the clueless, I think to myself. The bell curve on human existence is long past. The top of the curve was probably some time in my parent's lifetime, the boomers, and we are tripping down that hill, the ass end of that bell curve, fast ... like a roller coaster. No stopping us now.
I hate to break it to you, parents, but your little ball of sunshine does not have a fairy tale life in front of them. If things continue as they are, and I see no reason why they won't, either in their lifetime, or if they are lucky, in their children's lifetime, they will experience war over resources like clean water, long bounts without electricity, famine, pandemics galore, environmental upheavals like we have never seen, etc. I know the response to my saying this by many of my friends (many of them very liberal) will be that humanity will figure it out and fix it like we tackled the hole in the ozone layer. A message to them: please see above paragraph about denial. By the time humanity "figures it out" the population of the planet will have doubled. We are not discovering another earthlike planet nearby or terraforming Mars anytime soon. We are fucked!
Don't look to our leaders for an answer. If we were serious about this problem, we'd have better leaders who were talking about it, at least. Instead we have the opposite. America just voted for the worst person possible, a global warming denier, to be president twice, and he almost won the middle election as well. So fucked indeed!
Distractions help. For some it is drugs, sex, television, religion, sports, video games, art, music, pets, hiking,reading ... all of the above. I use several of these in a bouquet of distractions. Now that I am unemployed (aka retired), I have way too much time to think about such stuff. I play Civilization V on my pc and fill my brain with dopamine that helps me get through the day; each time one of my missile cruisers sinks one of my enemy's nuclear subs, I get a spike of happiness that gets me through the day. Escape, escape, escape.
Not convinced of our destruction? Here's a short list of problems being caused by you, me and 8 billion others going about their day:
- Climate change and global warming: driven by green house gases from burning fossil fuels and mammals exhaling, rising temperatures are causing severe droughts, melting ice caps and extreme weather.
- Biodiversity loss: human consumption and habitat destruction push countless plant and animal species toward extinction, weakening vital ecosystems.
- Air, water and soil pollution: contaminants from industrial waste, chemicals, and poor sanitation choke oceans, poison water supplies and degrade arable land.
- Deforestation: clearing massive areas of forest for agriculture and infrastructure destroys carbon sinks and wildlife habitats
- Plastic pollution: single-use plastics accumulate in landfills and oceans, breaking-down into microplastics that disrupt marine and human health
- Shrinking cloud shield: we are so fucked that even the clouds are a problem. Satellite data shows that global reflective cloud cover has dropped over the last two decades, allowing more sunlight to hit the Earth's surface, resulting in more heat being trapped. The cause of this is polluted air, higher humidity and a warming ocean.
None of these problems are getting better.
I try to live a simple life. I barely buy anything I don't need to survive. But even that is too much. Everything you buy contributes to our destruction. No matter what it is, it requires some burning of fossil fuels to get it to you and to make.
Why go on? I know this is the logical next thought to this problem. If my killing myself would solve the problem I would do it, but it doesn't even come close. Even if a thousand of like-minded people embarked on a suicide pact, it would not even scratch the underlining problem. One person isn't the problem; one person isn't the solution. One thousand people aren't the problem; one thousand people aren't the solution. Eight billion people ... now, that is the problem!
Excuse me, time to move on. I am due for another dose of denial. I have a novel to read, a movie to enjoy, a walk to enjoy with my dogs, etc. etc. etc. I thought about this enough today.
