What are the downsides to being highly intelligent?
I’ve reached the point where I don’t even care anymore. There’s nothing I can do as an individual besides vote (as if there’s a choice that will even do anything), so I’m going to just live my life with my head in the sand as much as possible and try to enjoy the years I have left (I also moved to an area that won’t be directly impacted by climate change in my lifetime). Anything else is too anxiety inducing and stressful.
I get why people think this but the reason climate change is happening is BECAUSE of individuals. A lot of individuals! Everything we all do has an impact. It's not one thing, but little things done a lot by billions of people.
Not driving a car, not having kids (or having just one), not eating meat or eating less meat, limiting the use of disposable items, not purchasing unnecessary products.... All of these behaviours done by billions of people makes a huge impact and changes society and consumer demand and industrial supply, in addition to voting for representatives in favour of environmentally-friendly policies.
I realize many actions that we can take are not feasible for many people because they are dependent on an inefficient and environmentally-destructive economy and our own individual survival is each of our own priorities, but cumulative action, though seemingly small on an individual basis, can change the world.
Personally I have zero faith in people, corporations, governments, or in myself being able to change our behaviours for the better.... But it really is possible!
Except we won't make those changes, and we shouldn't have to.
Most of our greenhouses gas emissions come from power generation and industry.
We must accept that our electricity needs will only ever increase, and then the industry generating the power needs to clean up its act.
I take issue with this attitude honestly. I'm not saying that normal individuals are really extremely at fault - most of us know it's certain cultural norms formed by large corporations and governments.
But it's just tone-deaf or really head-in-the-sand to act like as individuals we have no responsibility at all. The corporations and governments need us to survive, and our demand specifically fuels corporate behavior.
To say we shouldn't have to make changes, suggests that we should continue down the trend we've been going down, where we consume more and more and more. This is not possible without individuals wanting to. What it takes to make our phones, computers, etc is more and more intensive because we just need that next best thing, even though 10 years ago our phones could easily text, call, take pictures, access apps like facebook, etc...
What it takes to make our cars is getting worse and worse because we just need that larger, newer vehicle and we just need a new one every 5 years rather than having a vehicle that lasts 20 or even more years, which isn't unheard of for a car built in the 90s, and contrary to popular belief even modern cars tend to last at least that long, we just don't see them that way anymore.
That's partly due to car and phone manufacturers doing planned obsolescence, but come on, be honest. The vast majority of people just get a new phone or car because they want that new fresh thing, not because their last one was actually all that bad. a 2008 vehicle still runs pretty well if it was taken care of, but most will opt out of them.
This change that everyone wants corporations to make? This is the result. Us having less new things, making things last longer, and stop obsessing over the bigger and better things that we don't really even benefit from them being bigger and better over the rush of having something new. Whether it comes from corporations or from individuals, the result is similar if we want true climate action.
It's completely unreasonable to expect individuals to change their behavior collectively. History has taught us that given the opportunity to act against our long term self-interest in favor of our short-term self interest, we will. So rather than trying to fight that inevitability we need to change our environment so that doing so isn't harmful.
All recent major civil rights cases have only survived and thrived under collective actions starting on an individual level. M.L.K. wasn't some huge corporate overlord that made decisions from the top to make change, he was just one person in a movement of millions of people that took consistent individual action to make change.
Gay marriage didn't just suddenly become legal, protests and pride parades and other people individually choosing to go out of their way made that happen.
It's really not all that different. I think we have two choices. Accept our fate our stand up together. As it's always been
I agree we should do what we can to make certain things less harmful. The thing is, we already are, but people don't care and choose the worse way because they just don't care to even acknowledge that there's anything they can do. Choosing paper rather than plastic is a minor inconvenience at most. Using reusable bags again, minor inconvenience. Conserving power, being mindful about your purchases but purchasing the same thing, all these things are easy and possible today. But we choose not to do them. That's the problem. Willful ignorance and spiteful inaction/counter action to climate solutions.
we've all collectively know for decades
That's not true. Climate scientists and people that were exposed to the knowledge, and a small portion of others were. But the real wave of climate science and knowledge beyond a surface level only really blossomed in the late 2000s forward.
I think more than consumerism, we want constant improvement. We are deceived into thinking many of the "improvements" we are getting have any merit. When in reality they take a larger toll on our wallets and climate
The majority of people that grew up in the 80s wouldn't have been able to tell you about it until much later, the majority of people that grew up in the 00s and 2010s know a lot about it. That's the discrepency I'm talking about. But yeah 2000 - 2024 I guess I never considered that decades because time flies it doesn't feel like it's been that long
I didn't say that nobody knew about it. Just saying it didn't seem like something that most people knew about. We're both speaking anecdotes so who knows whose right