Reading /r/CollapseSupport for the first time... WTF?
I had never heard of /r/CollapseSupport, I found that subreddit through this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/164599k
So I went and had a look:
www.reddit.com
This was literally the very first post I saw... someone openly contemplating suicide:
Morality of dragging on
I can live until world crumbles
Or
I can die
Do I have the balls to do the right thing? Am I going to be the person, who killed the planet? Dying is the only way to revolt against this society. Else I'm just like everyone else, a cancer cell in the body of decaying planet. There's no saving. The only difference is when. I have all the luxury of the world. I indulge myself daily to numb myself. And consume...
I don't know. I guess this post won't change a damn thing. I'm still alive, even though I should die. I hate that I won't have the balls to do it. I want to die, dammit! But I also don't. I envy those, who are already there. Maybe I'll enlist in Ukrainian war.
P.S.: Thanks everyone, who came and commented. It really helped. I think the idea that the world will still need good people in its dying moments resonated with me. Helping people suffer less, as we close in an apocalypse. Thank you all so much
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/16c04vd
People reply telling them not to do it, but they admit they're feeling the same way and have lost all sense of hope. One person says:
"I accepted human extinction as a good thing in the grand scheme of the universe, second I decided to live my life for only me. Why invest in a future that isn't there, live life for now."
I have literally never seen so much doomposting in one place in my life, and I was a teenage Marilyn Manson fan:
All of this self analysis, mind you, is retrospective, as it wasn't until talking to others who had grown up very differently than me that I realized just how much I was denying my emotions and my true thoughts my whole life, and the reasons why. Which brings me to today. I've now come to realize that a large part of my depression over collapse wasn't just collapse itself, but the fact that I literally had no one in my life with whom to share these thoughts and be vulnerable with. Outside my therapist, I have never formed a somewhat deep and reciprocal emotional connection with another human, because I learned that to express emotions was harmful. So I just became the most passive, agreeable person I could and filled the void with materialistic distractions. Of course the idea of collapse would knock me on my feet -- my only support system was my belief in the comfort civilization would continue to supply me with, so learning how broken the world truly is took the floor out beneath me, and there was no one to catch me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/160bl6m
So let me get this straight: /r/CollapseSupport is some kind of a pro-suicide subreddit where teenagers who are terrified at the idea of climate change are edging one another to commit suicide to save the planet? Is that what this is?
I am fucking exhausted of this capitalist death project
I can’t take it anymore, I don’t want to be here anymore. This planet is a giant gutter In outer space. I am fucking sick of humanity and it’s filth. Humanity is a giant fucking tragedy that should have never existed. We don’t deserve this planet or it’s animals. I hope the extra terrestrials fucking kill us all and let what’s left of Mother Earth heal.
Edit: Wow, . I have severe bipolar with psychotic episodes. Just comin back to reality today. I love a lot of people and I’m sure there are so many millions of decent people just trying to survive this desolate world. I fucking hate world governments and corporations, they hold us hostage in this capitalist death project shithole society. Hope everyone has a good day. Stay strong out there friends
Upvote 346
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/1651nqk
There's also this: women who feel they can't justify wanting to become mothers due to climate change
Realizing I will never be a mother
I wasn’t keen on having kids all through my 20s. Then my wife and I both realized that’s what we want…6 months ago. Now we know it’s impossible and unethical. It just hurts. We were both finally ready to be mothers and now we can’t, especially with the climate around LGBT people in the US. It’s crushing. I thought it would give me direction and purpose.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/16ausr4
Someone responds to the above woman claiming that the mere act of having kids during climate change is an act of child endangerment:
"Now, we both can't see any good reason to have the children. It's child endangerment and ethically fucked with what we know."
There's those who already have kids, but they were so traumatized by the idea of climate change that they can't be there for their kids & regret having them:
For those who became collapse aware after having kids, how do you manage?
I’m drowning in remorse that I’ve brought two human beings into the world to suffer. I have trouble being present, or finding enjoyment in my time with them, when I can’t stop thinking about how miserable their future might be.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/16a3be3
Someone responds with this, these people are a leftwing version of far-right prepper survivalists fantasizing about a post-industrial society:
It of course depends on your views of collapse, but they way I see it is life is just turning back to normal.
Life for most people was more or less the same for 10,000 years with only minor changes every century or so. Then humans have had an almost 200 year old wild party and abnormal times. Now things are going to go back to the normal of the last 10,000 years.
Looking at things this way I am sad, but not depressed. The party is over and there will be a wicked hangover, but I don't think it is 'the end'
Yup, this. I just tell kids to learn to cooperate, to learn skills that are useful or that might be useful, to notice when the group is doing work and do work too.
Because I'm pretty sure their futures will not be spending all day working at someone else's business to make someone else richer and coming home to pay a mortgage and worry over bills.
Eventually just gonna go back to hunting-gathering-farming-herding like humans have always done. My stepsons will be just fine, they make friends well and whatever the group is doing they're happy to help. Whatever skills they don't have, they'll probably have a friend who does and is willing to help them.
This post is about the environmentalist left but I've seen such attitudes on KF:
it’s really gross to me how many people seem impatient for collapse
when i was a kid, i was raised in a fundamentalist christian church in the middle of nowhere. few children, lots of fogies. everyone had some sort of obsession with prophecy of the “end-times”, about how excited they were for jesus to return in fury and wipe out the sinners and take them home. i didn’t know any different of course, i believed all of this was inevitable. but hearing people maybe 6 decades older than me calmly state how ready they were to get it over with just made me sick. it was traumatizing. since i was a believer at the time, i felt immense pressure to fall in line, and i was ashamed of my dread. here were all these old people who had children, grand-children, their whole lives full of accomplishments behind them. it didn’t seem fair to me that i had to just accept it and be prepared for everything i knew to be destroyed some day.
needless to say, this was toxic, and a prime motivator for me to leave the church. i couldn’t imagine loving the god they loved. in the years that followed, i felt an intense sense of relief that i wasn’t bound by this fear of god, or some righteous apocalypse anymore. it was very freeing, and i felt a renewed desire to make something of myself.
here we are now, and it feels very much the same. granted, the people in this community are MUCH more hip than the ones back in my old church :) however, i’m sickened by the people who are impatient to get it over with. i understand, waiting for a shoe to drop is agonizing. no one likes this situation. but i feel consumed by the void of my future. it’s like living with a chronic illness.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/164pvio
Imagine being such an unrepentant far-left accelerationist that you would post this claiming you're
"tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop":
It isn't that people want the collapse we're just sick of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The way the social contract is built at least in developed countries is that you're supposed to work hard for 40 years or so and then you get to relax and actually enjoy your life.
Right now people are being squeezed more than ever. Housing prices have gone up by about 500% in the last 20 years. We're sick of working hard and always being exhausted and knowing that things are just going to get worse and we have nothing to look forward to. And yet, we're expected to keep dancing to this tune, to keep making contributions to our 401k. To keep working meaningless desk jobs that contribute to the environmental calamity we are hurtling towards. It's exhausting. It's emotionally draining. It's depressing and it's isolating and I just want it to be over and by "it" I kind of mean life in general
On their subreddit they openly admit they're like doomsday Christians but claim they're that way for the right (unselfish) reasons:
This is the difference that separates doomsday preppers and doomers. For preppers it's an escapest fantasy, for doomers it's a harsh reality.
7 years ago I would have agreed with you but now I think the faster this happens the better. There's a really fast path to zero emissions, the collapse of globalization. Unfortunately the human will to live is strong and people will continue on with civilization until we boil alive.
The doomers on here have a key difference than the fundies you grew up with, though: the fundies wanted the world to end for their personal gain (Rapture), whereas most doomers want collapse to happen to mitigate suffering.
Personally, I’d rather collapse happen sooner rather than later for two reasons. The first is that it’s inevitable, so I don’t want to drag it out. I view it the same way I view a chronic, terminal illness. If I’m going to die regardless, and I have the choice between a long painful death and a short painful death, I’d rather take the short.
The second reason isn’t so much that I want billions of people to starve to death, but I want the current corrupt system to be overturned. If we could reorganize society into a more egalitarian system without the need for collapse, I’d be all for that. But I don’t think this capitalist meat grinder CAN be reformed without triggering a collapse. And Im sick of myself and others being chewed up while the sociopaths at the top bask in their riches they stole from the poor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/164heks
Waiting with dread is particularly unpleasant when you don’t know when the proverbial shoe will drop, Sweeny told me. She found in one study of law students that indefinitely waiting for results for the bar exam was so painful that finally getting those results brought immense relief to her test subjects—even when they found out they had failed. Other studies show that people would rather experience a higher voltage electric shock immediately than wait for a less intense jolt and that they make similar choices even when deciding the shocks for someone else.
None of us can choose to pull dreaded climate events forward and into the present just to eliminate the waiting. And a consequence of constantly seeing those inevitable and immovable disasters—and knowing that more, and worse, catastrophes are coming—can be a feeling of overwhelming doom and helplessness, said Barbara Easterlin, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “You get this sense of not being able to act or move forward,” she said.
Here's a thread about the Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism where they complain about chatbots instead of humans answering the phone now:
I'm in a similar boat.
Applied for unemployment in Virginia, never got any official update. Call their line?
No human line.
Voice activated robot line. Try to request a human being? Not possible, you gotta talk to the robot. Ask the robot what's up. Robot doesn't know shit. You go through the hoops for the robot to try and get ANY RESPONSE. ANYTHING HELPFUL AT ALL. Robot doesn't know shit.
The entire United States is becoming this giant wasteland of automated garbage. It's so damn bad they have chatbots handling the suicide hotlines now. My god.
I'm losing my mind.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/1642qwx
Some of them imagine environmental collapse to be like the movie
The Road and other such dystopian post-apocalyptic movies:
"What does your worst collapse fear look like?", "Being gang raped until I die. It's why I keep a very big bottle of pills in my bug out kit."
https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/comments/1689apm
