How are you coping with climate change?
How are you coping with climate change?
This has been a doozy of a year. And it's the best year so far blah blah. So how are you all coping? Does it hit anyone else like a bolt of lightning that probably I - we - won't die of old age?
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Yesterday I had a climate change anxiety attack. I came to the conclusion that despite wanting to have children, I shouldn't because the earth is currently dying underneath our feet. Watching outside my window, a cat I've been taking care of brought her litter of kittens to take shelter under my awning, and it had me feeling very bitter, that I would never know the blissful highs and devastating lows of parenthood. All the joy and pain and love that embodies raising a child, past generations have forfeit through destructive environmental/corporate/profit-centered policies.
I was able to calm myself down, oddly enough through a few memes I saw. one of which being an old cunieform tablet that had a transcription of a man from Assyria decrying how the world was falling apart back in 1200 BC. And the second, one of Neil Degrasse Tyson saying simply, "If we can geo-engineer other planets, we can certainly fix our own."
Made me feel a little more hopeful, that we could still prevent the worst of it, and perhaps fix what we couldn't prevent.
Still not sure about having kids though. If I still even can, with the level of microplastic in my testes, and PFAS everywhere else.
You won't even adopt?
If I were in a better place financially/emotionally, I ABSOLUTELY would.
Same.
It's devastating. I want to be a mother so badly, but I know I'll never be able to. It's not even the fact that I'm infertile. After all I've been through my life has just been left too unstable. I've been left too unstable. I would love to adopt and raise a kid, but I know deep down I could never provide the upbringing that they deserve. I would just watch in horror as a precious child deals with the consequences of my instability.
We've both been afforded far too much trauma. It's not our fault, but I'll be damned if I make my problems someone else's. It's like, the one thing I don't want to do. There are other ways to make a positive impact on the world without having children, heck, just look at Mary "Mother" Jones!
Kids are very adaptive. They will grow up in this changing world and it will be normal to them. They will grow up instinctively being able to deal with things that we will forever strugle with. Kids are amazing in finding their own solutions, even at a young age.
I think it is much more important to be financially and emotionally able to support a child. You should ask yourself if you are able to do that. You can get financial and emotional support from your environment, many people do that ("it takes a village to raise a child"), but you can't afford a full blown mental breakdown when you have kids.
I'm not trying to convince you to have children or not, just giving my two cents. There's probably plenty who disagree, especially in a thread like this, so feel free to ignore me.
In my head, I envision year 2084 as one where humans are isolated mostly to the poles of the Earth, the only suitable farmland left. Where life is nothing like what I would recognize, and we're merely prolonging the inevitable migration into underground dwellings, away from the harsh barren hellscape of our own creation.
But that's not the reality. Human beings have the remarkable ability to adapt, and change our environment to suit our needs. I know that there are people smarter than I, that will figure out how to curb, and ultimately roll back the most devastating aspects of our pollution crisis. I know that we will survive, and thrive into the future, even if it means shrinking the population down from it's current 8 billion.
But today, I can pick any spot on the globe, and find a terrible human caused crisis there, and some conservative politician doing everything in their power to make it worse (and make money off of making it worse). And that just fucking kills me.