Saving the planet is unprofitable.
Feeding the hungry is unprofitable.
Housing the homeless is unprofitable.
The world is run by selfish assholes.
I can understand the greed class wanting to maximize their profits. However I can’t understand half the other 99% voting against their own best interest.
Simple, my dear Watson.
They aspire to merge into the former. “Someday I’ll be a billionaire too, so I better vote to make sure they have their tax breaks for when that day comes!”
I honestly think it’s worse than that. They think those with money have that money because they are smarter and better than those without money, and therefor the poors need to follow those superior people.
I’ve listened to several (former) friends and relatives give me this line of reasoning. It’s not unique to Christians, but definitely preys upon Christian guilt. I wish more people went to therapy…
Too many people don’t believe in tomorrow.
Odds are, whoever you are reading this, you also have that feeling to some degree. We see it glaringly and absurdly when people cite Christian rapture fantasies or rich assholes spewing transhumanist bullshit, but there is a vast portion of moderate/progressive youth who have that stereotypical attitude of “I don’t plan on living past forty” when asked about their future plans and worries.
Ya’ll are contributing this. If you saw yourselves in that world of tomorrow realistically, you would be fighting harder for a better future instead of doomscrolling and bitterly replying to faceless notes on the internet calling that out. You know it’s right because it makes you pissed to read. Direct that anger where it belongs.
“What can one person do anyway?” Well that’s your problem, you don’t feel connected to others, no sense of community, large or small. Go out, socialize, make friends, get better at something you suck at, plan for tomorrow. Ask others their plans for tomorrow too, because you’re all going to be there without “us” and you won’t have anyone else to turn to.
At some point, you or your peers are going to be the ones holding the keys and making the decisions.
Can you please provide data that Gen Z doesn’t plan on living past forty? I can understand people saying they have nothing planned, but I’d need to see some information supporting that they all expect to be dead in a handful of years. That sounds like an exremely hyperbolic stretch.
You’re not wrong but as one of those post-nihilistic absurdist youths (relatively speaking) it can be difficult to envision life past your 30s when it’s not unlikely that by that time the world will be in am unfathomably different and more dystopic state. As someone who does genuinely believe in a brighter future and acknowledges I need to do more to see it happen, I see myself enjoying that tomorrow in my 60s or 70s not anytime soon. I believe that we can get there but things are going to continue to get a lot lot worse for a good while before they have a chance to get better. Ignoring the geopolitical and socioeconomic states of the world and focusing on the issue the meme presents, even if we cut off all greenhouse gas emissions now we have a couple more decades of warming as emissions from the past 40 years haven’t fully taken effect. We have already surpassed multiple key tipping points for systemic collapse of global systems and it is likely that the damage caused in the Anthropocene is irreversible. Even being optimistic, we are well past prevention and are blowing by mitigation. I am hopeful for a brighter future, but that brighter future will be based on how we recover from these slow, impending calamities and how much of the planet we’ll be able to save from ourselves.
But the only way to do that is organization and communiry building so we can stop living in dire excess and out of sync with our ecosystem. Finding a sustainable equilibrium with our planet and natural resources is key, which will require an overhaul of existinf systems of governance
In your lifetime you’re going to see the biggest changes to social systems that we’ve ever seen in our world, however, it bears remembering that we’ve been doing this for over 40,000 years (that we know of) and we continue to survive, we continue to find things worth living and fighting for. It’s part of the deal.
And you are right, that community is our way forward. It’s what’s helped us survive through climate changes before, it helped us survive plagues and wars and days of darkness and violence unlike anything we can imagine today. Our world is built on a mountain of skulls, but the long arc of history has only moved up and out of the tribulations and even if we see a lot of really bad shit in the next century, it’s still going to be an improvement from barbarism and suffering that our ancestors endured, and the chances of you being born now, in this time of miracles and wonders, is like winning the goddamn lottery. Do the absolute best you can with it, remember us, tell our stories to our granddroids.
Let’s be real though. It’s us we’re wanting to save. Us and a couple of very sensitive species. The planet will get on just fine after we die off and stop fucking it up.
A few very sensitive species? We are fucking over the whole ecosystem, from pollinators to polar bears.
Life as a whole will be fine, but most species won’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#Contemporary_extinction
Hijacking this comment for a PSA; We are currently in the midst of a mass extinction event; many more plant, animal, and insect species are on the brink of extinction than normal. Scientists also estimate that forty-one percent of ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. Climate change, human encroachment, pollution, hunting, etc. have done a number on the environment.
Ruling class:
So let’s accelerate this!
Phew. I can stop worrying about how I’ll be able to afford to retire.
I’m just going to rob the hell’s angels.
If the labor class wasn’t losing a class war to the capital holders you’d see 10x the support for saving the planet. But right now cost of living is so bad that folks are easily susceptible to propaganda that divides the labor class, and environmentalism is just one of the issues they’ve chosen to use as a wedge issue.
It’s obvious how “do you want the cost of gas to go up?” is an effective propaganda message. Or “Do you want your taxes to go up and be used to wash sad animals while your own kids go hungry and get no Christmas presents?”
That’s the real kicker here, a huge number of folks are barely scraping by and the propaganda lies and tells them the only way we can have environmentalism is by them suffering more. They’re already scared and desperate, sad animals is nothing compared to their own families suffering.
The reason it works so well is, again, class war.
The moment citizens began accepting the doctrine that climate change is a “consumer-led” problem, they lost. The pressure should have always, always been and remained on corporations, not consumers.
So instead of this, now they get away with asking questions like “We can help if you let us raise your essential service taxes, is that okay?”
It’s so ingrained that no one even fathoms to check the “other” box in the survey and write “Actually, you’re the only one whose taxes need to be raised in order to fix this. Let’s do that instead, cut your funding by half while we’re at it, and pass a bill outlawing lobbies for offshore drilling” instead of pearl-clutching about how environmentalist groups are forcing all their heating bills to rise.
They could literally snap their fingers and fix the problem, they have the means to do so and still keep every single yacht they own.
you’d see 10x the support for saving the planet.
Or 10x the consumption because people want to eat more steaks and drive faster cars and travel farther with their bigger share of global resources.
“Saving the planet costs money! We don’t have money to spend!!” - biggest polluters, which also happen to be some of the world’s biggest companies
Not just “biggest companies” they are biggest profiteers and lobby against regulations on their industries in order to legally kill the planet. Its ethically immoral and how do they expect to bring their money into the afterlife? They act altruistic but only support themselves
Let’s stop eating cows entirely
How inconvenient
Just move to India lol
Hi some people
For the most part we already don’t eat the leather. Of course, many still lick boots.
It shouldnt be our responsibility. Its corporations. We should hold them accountable.
One might even say it’s our responsibility to hold them accountable
