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It is difficult for me to explain to Kids These Days what, exactly growing up in the late Cold War was like; all I can say is that I am so delighted that kids today do not have to grow up under the threat of those two miserable swords of Damocles.

As a child of the 80s, AIDS was a death sentence! It is astonishingly great that it simply isn’t these days.

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We all knew, we were rock solid CERTAIN, that we were going to die at a time and a place not of our choosing; we’d either be incinerated by nuclear hellfire or we’d live long enough to get HIV and die that way.

I was obsessed with the nuclear arsenal, with what an exchange would look like, where I could go to maximize survival (we lived in NOVA, so the answer was “nowhere lol”)

I don’t understand people who believe in climate doom because if you’ve ever talked to anybody who remembers the past you know that there’s just always a thing people believe will destroy the world, it always seems rational, and it’s never happened

It's not going to destroy the world or make humans extinct, but it will cause a great deal of death, disease, dislocation, and general human misery that we could have and should have avoided.

It will further immiserate the poorest and most vulnerable and is therefore a moral imperative to remediate, even as it poses no existential threat to humanity at large.

I remember the ozone hole as a big problem. We greatly reduced the problem by restricting CFCs as part of the Montreal Protocol. People a bit older than me remember acid rain as a big problem. We greatly reduced that with laws like the Clean Air Act.

I distinctly remember my high school teacher in India talking at length about the deleterious effects of Ozone layer depletion and the inevitable menace of acid rain, only to end the chapter on a pessimistic note: 'We won't be able to avoid it, and that's given.' And here we are.

I mean, I’d argue that it’s not the case that we don’t have to worry; more, that we as a species have been extraordinarily lucky, when potentialities have contracted, we’ve simply dodged the bullet.

We shouldn’t assume that Fate will save us! We are beating AIDS through the pure force of human ingenuity; we survived the Cold War because Petrov wasn’t an asshole!

Yes but sometimes we avert it through massive effort and it only looks like it was overblown. My mom was a COBAL engineer who worked on the Y2K issue, and when people think it was nothing, I think of the actual years of overtime she put in to make it nothing

Less rationally, though probably a good early indication of my OCD, I was convinced by DARE and that one cartoon with the drug use and all the 80s cartoons that high school was a death sentence: if the drugs didn’t get you, the gangs would.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you avoid spiraling into doomerism? I got jumpscared on Bluesky with a report about an imminent H2H bird flu outbreak, and that turned into me doomscrolling through r/collapse and other unrelated doomsday-adjacent forums and blogs. I'm not proud, but I am tired. 😭

If you have the sort of brain that tells you you have to worry about the worst case situation: If the world ends tomorrow, and you spent all of today worrying about, you’re still probably dead. who cares If it doesn’t end tomorrow, all the Normal Stuff You Have To Do But Didn’t will wreck you

(Not the OP but) for me, it’s been reasoning from the position that people have always been and will always be subject to extinction , so we have to just get up in the morning, pull on our pants, and just get on with taking care of our loved ones.

I don’t believe in climate doom, but nuclear fire required no one to push the button. Fixing the climate requires a whole bunch of well-heeled people to change their behavior. Not impossible, especially as things change around them, but rather a different task.

My point is that I watch people making life choices based on “climate is going to kill us all” and they’re exactly like people from my parents’ generation who thought nukes would kill us all. People find excuses for nihilism in every generation