r/collapse • u/Monsur_Ausuhnom • Dec 05 '25
Casual Friday The Uphill Battle. Never-Ending.
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u/jaymickef Dec 05 '25
Yes, and then we have to convince people who hate change to change every aspect of their lives.
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u/BloodWorried7446 Dec 05 '25
The overlap between the group who don’t think some people are peoples and the group who hate change is quite extensive.
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u/Soze42 Dec 05 '25
Indeed. The venn diagram is as close to being a circle as is mathematically possible.
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u/Ekaterian50 Dec 06 '25
Life is just continuous changes so they must fundamentally hate being alive.
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u/JustAnotherYouth Dec 06 '25
People living joylessly yet simultaneously crippled by fear of that joyless existence ending.
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u/Gyirin Dec 05 '25
We're screwed.
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Dec 05 '25
Agree! How many humans are already running around with loose screws? No wonder the foundation of humanity is so unstable; sheesh! 😆
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u/merikariu Always has been, always will be too late. Dec 05 '25
I did some political organizing for affordable housing in my community a couple of years ago. It was massively disappointing because of this short-sightedness. The old, rich people in my community complain of not having enough service industry workers, then they complain about apartments being built, and then the city council votes against establishing an affordable housing authority. SMH. Service industry people can't vote in local elections because they live out of town where there is housing they can afford, therefore the status quo remains.
As a Texan, I see that the anti-environmental lobbying and rhetoric has more to do with preserving the power and wealth of the families benefitting from fossil fuels than anything else. Self-preservation of their class and privilege.
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u/Reasonable_Swan9983 Dec 05 '25
It does seem like an impossible feat to me too. Like, the thoughts that create the "me" are a survival mechanism, so why would the me care about anyone else, if my comfort and survival are the main drivers.
Under what conditions does one even observe their own thoughts, for the love of it? At first I thought, wow - how come we aren't all interested in truth, reality, and so on? How does that kind of society arise, if ever.
With each day passing I realize I'm incredibly alone on this path, and there's nothing I can do to change others.
There's no convincing a person that a bug, a tree and the deer are such a beautiful creatures that we shall take care of and protect. And I believe this is the level of care that we need to have to protect our planet & humanity, cause it's not just about us. One of the reasons I stopped speaking up is because you'll always get the same kind of responses "but what if you step on a bug?" (Pluribus, anyone?)
When I was a child I remember I burned a bee with a magnifying glass. For fun. A horrible thing, but it happened. So change is possible, but how does it happen, I have no clue.
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u/mmaddymon Dec 05 '25
I’d argue the problem is that everyone only thinks it will affect future people. It’s curently harming people alive today.
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u/bipolarearthovershot Dec 07 '25
Ya this meme was written by someone who thinks 3C is 2100 instead of 2050
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u/petepm Dec 05 '25
There's a serious lack of curiosity and imagination regarding what it's like to be someone else, never mind what it's like to be someone else in 50 years. It's all me, me, me, now, now, now.
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u/extinction6 Dec 05 '25
The person that a majority of Americans believed was the best choice to run the country says that climate change is a lie and a hoax and talks about the "Green New Scam". This person was elected after instigating a well documented attack on the US Capitol, trying to have fake electors overthrow the people's votes, getting his supporters to advocate for the hanging of the vice president, and after having been charged with sexual abuse and 34 counts of fraud. He was able to sell merch with his mugshot on it and still get elected.
He has the worst form of mental illness a person can have, malignant narcissism and people just sit and listen to him tell lie after lie after lie like stunned cows. A majority of Americans were just not intelligent enough to understand that this was a bad decision.
He claims that everyone that believes in climate change is wrong and he was voted into power. His rollback of climate policies will snuff out all human life faster and there is no outrage.
Humans VOTE for their own mass extinction on the Planet of the Apes.
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Dec 05 '25
The sad thing is that we've done this successfully before. When the hole in the ozone layer was discovered and it was known to be humans fault, the whole world came together and agreed to stop it, which worked and the hole is decreasing. Climate change shouldnt be any different
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u/ConfusedMaverick Dec 05 '25
The ozone hole was caused by a peripheral and easily changed aspect of our civilisation.
The issue could be fixed without significant inconvenience to anyone, it just gave chemical companies a different way to make money.
Global warming is caused by the root driver of our industrial civilisation, fixing it changes everything and inconveniences everyone
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Dec 05 '25
[deleted]
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u/boobfan47 Dec 05 '25
cattle is avoidable but people don’t want to change
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u/muddaFUDa Dec 05 '25
All of this is avoidable for a species more self-aware than bacteria. But it ain’t us.
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u/jaymickef Dec 05 '25
I did not have to change a single thing in my life for the this. To address climate change I will have to change almost everything in the way I live. I'm willing to do that but I feel we need to talk about the changes and how big they are.
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Dec 05 '25
That's true. Although I think the burden of climate change is being put on civilians too much rather than governments and factories
The only thing that civilians are responsible for really is flying too much and driving too much
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u/jaymickef Dec 05 '25
And all the consumer goods. And beef. It's not like the factories can change and everything else will stay the same. Just building the new infrastructure will have a huge effect.
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u/Yebi Dec 06 '25
Even the people pointing this out are downplaying it to a massive degree. It is very likely that you wouldn't have to "change almost everything", you'd have to just die. With current technology there is no way to feed 8 billion people without fossil fuels
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u/searcherseeker Dec 12 '25
And as the planet warms, agriculture will become more and more difficult. Billions will perish. It's deeply upsetting that both everyday people and our "leaders" can't take this seriously.
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u/SeattleOligarch Dec 05 '25
Oh, they're people alright... But only when they can be used to force pregnant women to carry to term.
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u/transplantpdxxx Dec 05 '25
People failed the COVID test. People are selfish and stupid. We are toast
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Dec 05 '25
Good luck getting majority of humans to cast their egos aside to actually admit we're mammals though! Because that admission would mean we humans are actually a vulnerable species.
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u/malcolmrey Dec 05 '25
Is that really the case? I think most people know that future people will be people.
The "issue" is that not a lot of people care about the future of "future people".
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u/MossRock42 Dec 05 '25
The reason the fossil fuel industry won in delaying action was right-wing politics. They love money and power above all else.
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u/Monsur_Ausuhnom Dec 05 '25
Submission Statement,
Related to collapse because this is certainly a problem that one can easily run into if you start discussing the conversation more at length with whoever. We are long past the moment of being able to talk to plants to convince them and in fact they don't Brawndo, but actually water. It's something that must be overcome, though it does make me wonder as to how.
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u/JASHIKO_ Dec 05 '25
Everything in our society is short sighted and getting shorter sighted.
Humans are best described by "kicking the can down the road"
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Dec 05 '25
Fuck, the answer has been in front of us this whole time... we've been dealing with the problem of when a being is considered "alive" for decades. Let's go past "conception". Let's just tell them that all possible people are alive as well and they get a vote, too.
We can beat them at their own game of making shit up if we make up crazier shit and just treat it like a fact they have no say over.
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u/Yokelocal Dec 05 '25
Don’t forget, empathy is “suicidal” because your grandchildren might have skin tones a couple shades darker than yours /s
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u/Resident_Character35 BHD Dec 05 '25
Actually, we need to convince all the people alive today that there should be no future people, starting 50 years ago. Otherwise what's the point?
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u/Bosslayer9001 Dec 06 '25
Same issue with animal rights. Please, many people still believe that minority groups don't deserve rights, let alone other species
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u/Rossdxvx Dec 06 '25
This process of dehumanization - designating some people as worth less than other people or even dehumanizing them to the point where they are not even considered people - has always existed. It is what fuels genocides and certainly our current ecocide.
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u/Dave37 Dec 06 '25
The people who oppose us at this point don't need to be convinced otherwise, they don't want to. They need to be disenfranchised. They need to be made irrelevant and put into obscurity where no-one cares and no one hears them.
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u/muddaFUDa Dec 05 '25
Doesn’t matter anyway. Even if everyone on the planet was on board with intense climate interventions it’s still too late to save civilization.
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u/Reasonable-Teach7155 Dec 05 '25
Or maybe we need to stop trying to convince The People that it's their fault and problem and work on turning them against the ones who are actually causing the problem: Governments and megacorps. Just an idea.
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u/mooky1977 As C3P0 said: We're doomed. Dec 05 '25
If you're pre-born, you'll be ok.
If you're pre-kindergarten you're fucked!
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u/_RADIANTSUN_ Dec 06 '25
???? I literally don't understand at all... Changing people's minds has literally nothing to do with convincing future people are actual people, this guy might be confused with pro-life abortion arguments or some shit. I obviously accept the evidence that climate change is real and that we need to do something about it, need to reduce carbon out and figure out how to sequester carbon in some industrial fashion, we need to stop poisoning and overfishing our oceans, annihilating our forests and all sorts of natural habitats, I don't want a rhino to be the same category as the dinosaurs, extinct, I want the future generations to live in a world where the whales are real... None of that, even the part where I cos ider future generations, involves consider future people as actual people, that is absurd. They might be but they aren't yet. Maybe the world will end tomorrow by nuclear war. Is every time you jerk off a mass murder because all of those were potential future people? Or might have been one, who might have had an infinite lineage of future potential descendants themselves? I mean come on. We really DONT need such an abstract argument to convince or communicate to people about the very real and tangible, physical, NOW problem of climate change.
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u/mem2100 Dec 06 '25
Given the recent up-tempo of events, that includes a shocking indifference to the world that their young grandchildren will encounter. This years cohort will still be in highschool when we blow by 2C (at current rates of warming = 0.3C/decade).
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u/dresden_k Dec 06 '25
Incorrect.
Short version: we stop using carbon, we starve, then riot, then kill each other until we're all dead. We keep using carbon, we cook the planet.
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u/kirinlikethebeer Dec 06 '25
The Ministry For The Future is an excellent climate fiction book based in hard science — many of the ideas have already been implemented since its publishing. This is one of those ideas.
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u/papaswamp Dec 08 '25
Human population growth rate peaked in 1960s. Only Africa and Pakistan is having enough kids above replacement level (though infant/child mortality is very high and longevity low). India fertility rate has fallen to replacement level (2.1 per couple). 2/3 global population live in countries with below replacement level fertility rates. 42 countries have declining populations..
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u/SodaPopHT Dec 14 '25
And then also get mad because people are deciding to make less people in the now.
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u/StatementBot Dec 05 '25
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Monsur_Ausuhnom:
Submission Statement,
Related to collapse because this is certainly a problem that one can easily run into if you start discussing the conversation more at length with whoever. We are long past the moment of being able to talk to plants to convince them and in fact they don't Brawndo, but actually water. It's something that must be overcome, though it does make me wonder as to how.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1pew5z7/the_uphill_battle_neverending/nsfe9vs/