Anyone else decided to ‘stay’ to see if the world might be ending anyway, and it all might be moot to CTB?

[KenniferJames]

I won't post my story and journey to being in this community (really a lurker until now) in a post like this, but for now I'll just say I'm a political scientist and diplomat-in-training. With the US election fifty days-or-so away, I really am just too piqued as a politics geek to CTB before I see how it plays out as well as the geopolitical stage throughout 2025… I mean, I feel like things will get BAD in a way that makes 2024 look like the good ol' 90s. I know (speaking only for myself) someone predisposed to being…here… might be a bit of a pessimist (lol), and I'm definitely oversaturated in international affairs and US politics, but come on! It's surreality made real.

Feel free to insert biblical comparisons or what have you; I'm not of a Judeo-Christian persuasion, but there are undeniably some such similarities to the world today to classical Abrahamic prophecies, IMO.

 

[uglyugly]

I have a friend at work who is extremely end-times Christian and is always bothering me to accept Jesus.... like daily bothering. No offense to anyone, but that is not my thing - I'm not religious and will never be. Meanwhile, my friend is preparing to meet Jesus because the world is supposedly ending.

People have been predicting the end of time since the beginning of time. Frankly, I don't worry about it.

 

[MxTuesday]

So much crazy shit in the world the perspective of just staying to watch and feeling unattached/able to exit feels like a whole kind of valid life choice

 

[Fvck_Society1337]

I don't got the balls to pull the trigger.

 

[amaluuk]

A few years ago when I was 14 and climate change was freaking me out I resolved my despair by figuring I would just stick around to see how things go and check myself out once it got too real.

Well, I'm a few days shy of 19 and over the summer several African countries were so flooded with dead bodies due to heat waves alone the morgues stopped taking them and people had to store their bodies at home, and Israel's committed another epic massacre in Beirut with regional war now seeming inevitable. You could argue about a decade ago that we were still pre-apocalyptic, but I'd argue we're now in the opening stages. I'm not saying nukes are gonna come down tomorrow, that's not how this works. The 'pre-apocalyptic' stage arguably took 20-30 years, and it's not going to just slide into total chaos overnight like it's Threads. No, it's gonna be slower than that, but I don't want to watch everyone I know and care about slowly fall into despair and increasingly desperate bids for extremism as they try to salvage the futures they were promised they'd get but are not going to have. They can join me if they want but I don't want to see any friend I have who isn't already into politics slowly consider it more purely so they can decide they want to see climate refugees die.

I understand the need for optimism a lot of people have but even if you don't think we're "100% fucked" (relative definition for some) we need to have an understanding of the world and where we're going that at least somewhat approaches baseline reality, and that baseline reality is that billions of people are going to die this century from things we could have prevented 30 years ago but didn't, and no amount of hopium or polemics against doomer nihilist incel rage will actually stop that. Take the blackpill or leave it, I'm tired of living in a society that is willing to see the rest of the world die just to keep supplying me with petty comforts. Suicide isn't just a personal obligation for me anymore, it feels like a humanist necessity to fundamentally reject being the beneficiary of global exploitation, or the closest thing I can do considering my mental disabilities.

 

[BoulderSoWhat]

One way to think about this is, okay so what if the world ends. Like right now, it starts to end. What is that actually going to look like? What, shall earthquakes be summoned at all points of the earth? Is fire going to rain from the sky? Are buildings going to collapse?

In the most catastrophic ways that we can imagine of the world suddenly ending, we can create a very long list of ways people can be killed in such an event. Arguably, a lot of these deaths would be worse than a successful ctb. If fire falls from the sky, being burned alive is probably a worse experience than other ways of ctb. What if the earth cracks and you fall through a crevice, deep enough that you can't get out but you won't die right away, you just die from starvation, dehydration, maybe bleeding out or infection if your bones break.

So, staying alive just for the chance of experiencing the end of the world sounds kind of...not a line of reasoning I would follow. That's just me though

 

[ThatStateOfMind]

Not really tbh, I've never given much thought to the world ending and I genuinely don't think it will any time soon.

I could be wrong though, just one natural disaster can cause so much destruction, like the recent Hurricane Helene in Big Bend, FL all the way to the Carolinas and Georgia, even hitting Tennessee and Kentucky.

In pictures: Hurricane Helene destruction - BBC News

The category four storm leaves a trail of death and destruction after making landfall over the Gulf Coast.

www.bbc.com

If something like this happens more often (which seems like a given due to global warming increasing the frequency of disasters) or on a larger scale, the effects could be bad, on the US at least, and that would have a ripple effect on the rest of the world because a large number of countries rely on the US for protection, etc. Very doomer thinking but felt appropriate for the question

 

[Blue Dream]

Partly yes, but also I don't want to hurt those I care about so I'm holding on as long as I can bear. They're dealing with enough shit as it is.

The longer I live the more needlessly hostile, exhausting and insane the world seems to get though.

 

[KenniferJames]

A few years ago when I was 14 and climate change was freaking me out I resolved my despair by figuring I would just stick around to see how things go and check myself out once it got too real.

Well, I'm a few days shy of 19 and over the summer several African countries were so flooded with dead bodies due to heat waves alone the morgues stopped taking them and people had to store their bodies at home, and Israel's committed another epic massacre in Beirut with regional war now seeming inevitable. You could argue about a decade ago that we were still pre-apocalyptic, but I'd argue we're now in the opening stages. I'm not saying nukes are gonna come down tomorrow, that's not how this works. The 'pre-apocalyptic' stage arguably took 20-30 years, and it's not going to just slide into total chaos overnight like it's Threads. No, it's gonna be slower than that, but I don't want to watch everyone I know and care about slowly fall into despair and increasingly desperate bids for extremism as they try to salvage the futures they were promised they'd get but are not going to have. They can join me if they want but I don't want to see any friend I have who isn't already into politics slowly consider it more purely so they can decide they want to see climate refugees die.

I understand the need for optimism a lot of people have but even if you don't think we're "100% fucked" (relative definition for some) we need to have an understanding of the world and where we're going that at least somewhat approaches baseline reality, and that baseline reality is that billions of people are going to die this century from things we could have prevented 30 years ago but didn't, and no amount of hopium or polemics against doomer nihilist incel rage will actually stop that. Take the blackpill or leave it, I'm tired of living in a society that is willing to see the rest of the world die just to keep supplying me with petty comforts. Suicide isn't just a personal obligation for me anymore, it feels like a humanist necessity to fundamentally reject being the beneficiary of global exploitation, or the closest thing I can do considering my mental disabilities.

I would love not connect with you and become friends… you're a likeminded geopolitics enthusiast and socially conscious intellectual. Would you be interested in talking off of here?