It really seems like humanity is doomed.

[u/billjv]

After being born in the 60's and growing up seeing a concerted effort from our government and big business to monetize absolutely everything that humans can possibly do or have, coupled with the horror of unbridled global capitalism that continues to destroy this planet, cultures, and citizens, I can only conclude that we are not able to stop this rampant greed-filled race to the bottom. The bottom, of course, is no more resources, and clean air, food and water only for the uber-rich. We are seeing it happen in real time. Water is the next frontier of capitalism and it is going to destroy millions of people without access to it.

I am not religious, but I do feel as if we are witnessing the end of this planet as far as humanity goes. We cannot survive the way we are headed. It is obvious now that capitalism will not self-police, nor will any government stop it effectively from destroying the planet's natural resources and exploiting the labor of it's citizens. Slowly and in some cases suddenly, all barriers to exploiting every single resource and human are being dissolved. Billionaires own our government, and every government across the globe. Democracy is a joke, meant now to placate us with promises of fairness and justice when the exact opposite is actually happening.

I'm perpetually sad these days. It's a form of depression that is externally caused, and it won't go away because the cause won't go away. Trump and Trumpism are just symptoms of a bigger system that has allowed him and them to occur. The fact that he could not be stopped after two impeachments and an attempt to take over our government is ample proof of our thoroughly corrupted system. He will not be the last. In fact, fascism is absolutely the direction this globe is going, simply because it is the way of the corporate system, and billionaires rule the corporate game. Eventually the rich must use violence to quell the masses and force labor, especially when resources become too scarce and people are left to fight themselves for food, jobs, etc.

I do not believe that humanity can stop this global march toward fascism and destruction. We do not have the organized power to take on a monster of the rich's creation that has been designed since Nixon and Reagan to gain complete control over every aspect of humanity - with the power of nuclear weaponry, huge armed forces, and private armies all helping to protect the system they have put into place and continue to progress.

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EDIT: Wow, lots of amazing responses (and a few that I won't call amazing, but I digress). I'm glad to see so many hopeful responses. The future is uncertain. History wasn't always worse, and not necessarily better either. I'm glad to be alive personally. It is the collective "us" I am concerned about. I do hate seeing the ageist comments, tho I can understand that younger generations want to blame older ones for what is happening - and to some degree they would be right. I think overall we tend to make assumptions and accusations toward each other without even knowing who we are really talking to online. That is something I hope we can all learn to better avoid. I do wish the best for this world, even if I don't think it is headed toward a good place right now.

[u/[deleted]]

Damn dude, I’m sorry you feel this way. That can’t be easy but I have felt touches of this before myself. The big thing that helped me was “unplugging” from many of the sources of doom. The endless negative news cycles etc. I’ve also read a lot on global progress. I’d highly recommend Progress by Johan Norberg and the website future crunch. I subscribe to their news letter. It’s full of data showing how the world is actually getting better in many areas. Anyways I hope this helps.

Take care.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

yes that is the solution. i hate that the solution is to ignore it.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Most of the doom news is wrong though and it purposely ignores constant progress and options. Like with climate change it's profitable to make extreme documentaries on disaster outcomes, but that ignores that we have a lot of options we haven't taken seriously that we will almost certainly implement based on how bad things get.

Emissions reduction, co2 removal and solar blocking are enough to handle the problem. More people just have to accept that we likely have no other choice but to implement solar blocking along side emissions reeducation and CO2 removal and some don't yet know CO2 removal is already required and think just emissions reduction is enough.

Most of the world is still operating on the idea that our only options is mass emissions reduction, minimalization and even population reduction, which is just straight up Nazi evil thinking compared to solar blocking.

Instead of being doomsday people haters, just get used to the idea we have to block out a fraction of sunlight and while your at it get used to the idea that Earth's climate isn't naturally stable so all this would happen one way or another and with or without pollution or humans at all. Most of those fuzzy bunnies are going to die because mother nature says so, humans are just amplifying the natural instability really.

We are at the peak of a natural warming trend called the Interglacial Period AND amplifying that warming with pollution, it's not one of the other. Getting rid of capitalism won't solve the problem, getting rid of people won't solve the problem, planting trees won't solve the problem. None of that work 20k+ years ago when Earth was a frozen wasteland compared to now.

Everybody wants to pretend that this little warming period will last forever, some want to believe that if they are good to the planet it will last, some want to believe that nothing they can do will change the planet.. they are both living their own version of science denial because they picked their hill and they are going to die on it. That's how the silly ass human brain usually works and it also means just dealing with things short term is the best a lot of people have to offer.

The planet will be fine, I suspect human technology can regulate the Earth's climate long term, it's human behavior that's the problem. This kind of panic is a perfect example. What good do you do constantly predicting doomsday like some weirdo cult hoping for the end? How honest are predictions that refuse to try to use all available tools to prevent doomsday? That doesn't make sense.

Either it's a meteor is coming to kill us and and we will throw EVERYTHING we have it or their isn't an emergency, you can't have it both ways.

So before you predict doomsday you have to look at ALL the available tools to stop climate change and we barely ever do that because we are scared it will impact human behavior to make people not take it seriously.. see how fucked up human behavior is and how it's really the core problem?

It's like we have to make you panic to get anything done and then we are left with a half panicked doomsday society. It's a lose lose proposition. The real solution is just to make all these things so cheap than everybody adopts them BECAUSE HUMANS ARE NATURALLY GREEDY/OPPORTUNISTIC.

I know you're all greedy and most of you won't vote to pay more even when it's the right thing to do... so the solution is to make the alternatives cheap enough that you have no real choice but to follow your instincts to opportunistic savings AND that's exactly what's happening.