Comment by oarabbus_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oarabbus_ | Hacker News Reader

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I realize this post may come off as abrasive, but here it goes.

> but recent news has made it clear to me that travel is one of the human obsessions that is destroying this world and that the future will not happen:

If you think that impending climate change (/climate catastrophe) is significantly impacted by the "human obsession" of travel, you are drinking someone else's kool-aid and pulling wool over your eyes as to the real causes (industry greenhouse gas emissions, industry and non-industry energy generation, and agriculture).

>My advice, for all age groups, is to enjoy what you have now and don't have kids-

My advice for all age groups is to take with a massive grain of salt what a 23-year old suggests to you, perhaps going as far as to completely discount any "life advice" given by this demographic. And I'd also suggest to make a decision about having or not having children based on your life circumstances rather than some absurd claim (coming below) that the world sucks.

> the world even 10-20 years from now isn't one worth living in.

We get it; you're a pessimist. People have espoused this same sentiment for decades (actually, centuries or longer).

Fair enough, but tourism is estimated to account for a tenth of global carbon emissions which is not insignificant: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/tourism-climate-ch...

People have been espousing that we are doomed for decades, but many of them were actually right: we have not meaningfully deviated from the predictions made by the 1972 report The Limits of Growth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth) for example. Reality has continued tracking along with our climate models, which were used to predict doom decades ago. Some doomsday scenarios have a preponderance of evidence that they are happening, and I feel that understanding that is not pessimism but realism.

The thing about pessimism is that it's a very attractive mindset for people who don't like to think all that much, but want to have answers.

It's also the mindset for people who stagnate and adopt a defeatist attitude.

It's also an extremist mindset, that closes itself away from other options and is fueled constantly by more pessimistic thoughts.

It's also a mindset that can quickly lead to depression, due to the constantly negative and skewed perspective of life.

It's also an easy mindset to disguise as "realism". There is no realism in what you've advised, in fact the advice for people to stop reproducing due to a doomsday scenario is perhaps the least realistic thought when it comes to reactions to global warming. The absurdity of such an advice is only explained by the naivety of someone who only now started life (which is accurate).

On the other hand the human life & culture we've developed might not give us a "realistic" means for dealing with the environment and climate change. Reread what you've written and look at it from the perspective of someone concerned about climate change, whose read the reports that we're likely to see effects of it within our lifetimes, and who lives in a world where the response to a progressively worsening disaster is ranges from "not my problem", "don't be so negative", to "what can we do?".

Young people today are born into a world with a considerable amount of inertia leading it to a not so happy place. The evidence points to this not being just pessimism, but a reality they will have to face and deal with in their lifetimes. Rising sea levels, political instability as once habitable and arable land become inhabitable and barren, increasingly sever weather, etc. Pessimism and optimism in this case refers to how severe these problems will be and whether we can either put them off or mitigate the consequences, not whether or not they are happening.

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