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i have really not been in a great mental space lately
i keep reading about how, you know, unless drastic climate action is taken we're talking about the end of the quaternary. major greenhouse earth period #6. no ice buildup anywhere on the planet, and the end of the evolutionary habitat humankind has had since there's been humans.
and even avoiding that there's the ongoing diminishment of life. currently at a 90+% decrease in bug populations; a 50%+ decrease in plankton. the collapse of the foundation of the food chain, and we're seeing it start to propagate upwards. we're talking about an empty world with only humans and the scarce cultivated plant or domesticated animal.
new york is planning extensive seawall constructions to handle harder storms and rising sea levels, but their plans are for one foot of rise before 2050. meanwhile at 2 degrees celcius increase in global temperature, the projection is roughly fifteen feet of rise. that might not happen until 2100, but even so any current plans are laughably inadequate. where i live they're replacing the water pipes, at 10 miles of pipe per year, leading to simply updating the water grid being a 100-year task.
and the worst part is, none of this is inevitable. if people could organize they could solve these problems. but the people who have the power to effect change are all under perverse incentives to make the problem worse, and it feels like everybody is just holding their breath, going "well things won't _actually_ be bad; this problem will be solved and there won't be any hard decisions to make. the world will keep going like it always has". more than anything else, 2018 feels like the death of my assumption that people can ultimately be trusted to make, if not the right decision, than decisions that are roughly proximate to _a_ right decision, with reasonably unselfish motives. but now even that seems laughably naive.
like "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" gets thrown around a lot, and like yes yes zizek is an asshole but here and now it's looking increasingly like the survival of the world requires the death of capitalism, and because of that we're all going to die.
and like okay sure i got anxiety and that's probably a lot of why i'm dwelling on this, but not dwelling on it doesn't really make it less of a plausible future.
all of this has been making it really difficult to care about doing anything at all. when it's like "oh right we are and continue to be on the run-up towards the apocalypse" "and people are talking about what popular video games are the best". maybe more psychologically healthy wrt having a breakdown but not really healthy at all in the long term. so it's been very difficult to get invested in just doing some dumb porn writing, or messing about with rendering, or whatever other junk i usually do. like sure that could be nice, but more and more it seems laughable to consider working on ten year projects when the world in ten years seems so likely to be unimaginably different and not really the kind of place where dumb videogames are important.
i keep reading about how, you know, unless drastic climate action is taken we're talking about the end of the quaternary. major greenhouse earth period #6. no ice buildup anywhere on the planet, and the end of the evolutionary habitat humankind has had since there's been humans.
and even avoiding that there's the ongoing diminishment of life. currently at a 90+% decrease in bug populations; a 50%+ decrease in plankton. the collapse of the foundation of the food chain, and we're seeing it start to propagate upwards. we're talking about an empty world with only humans and the scarce cultivated plant or domesticated animal.
new york is planning extensive seawall constructions to handle harder storms and rising sea levels, but their plans are for one foot of rise before 2050. meanwhile at 2 degrees celcius increase in global temperature, the projection is roughly fifteen feet of rise. that might not happen until 2100, but even so any current plans are laughably inadequate. where i live they're replacing the water pipes, at 10 miles of pipe per year, leading to simply updating the water grid being a 100-year task.
and the worst part is, none of this is inevitable. if people could organize they could solve these problems. but the people who have the power to effect change are all under perverse incentives to make the problem worse, and it feels like everybody is just holding their breath, going "well things won't _actually_ be bad; this problem will be solved and there won't be any hard decisions to make. the world will keep going like it always has". more than anything else, 2018 feels like the death of my assumption that people can ultimately be trusted to make, if not the right decision, than decisions that are roughly proximate to _a_ right decision, with reasonably unselfish motives. but now even that seems laughably naive.
like "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" gets thrown around a lot, and like yes yes zizek is an asshole but here and now it's looking increasingly like the survival of the world requires the death of capitalism, and because of that we're all going to die.
and like okay sure i got anxiety and that's probably a lot of why i'm dwelling on this, but not dwelling on it doesn't really make it less of a plausible future.
all of this has been making it really difficult to care about doing anything at all. when it's like "oh right we are and continue to be on the run-up towards the apocalypse" "and people are talking about what popular video games are the best". maybe more psychologically healthy wrt having a breakdown but not really healthy at all in the long term. so it's been very difficult to get invested in just doing some dumb porn writing, or messing about with rendering, or whatever other junk i usually do. like sure that could be nice, but more and more it seems laughable to consider working on ten year projects when the world in ten years seems so likely to be unimaginably different and not really the kind of place where dumb videogames are important.
