The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people
Many worry about what the future holds, and a daily grind of climate anxiety and distress can lead to sleeplessness, an inability to focus and worse. Some young people wonder whether it’s moral to bring children into the world. Many people grieve for the natural world.
Activists, climate psychologists and others in the fight against climate change have a range of ways to build resilience and help manage emotions.
Onlookers may give a weary shrug, but crude emotionalism is part of the narrative. Without this essential ingredient, even the easily persuaded may drift away towards other emotional outlets.
Believers are supposed to feel or at least feign anxiety, grief, anger, fear and helplessness - the fascination lies in their own emotions, not the real world.
It isn't new.
And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)
It isn't new.
And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)
6 comments:
"Anxiety, grief, anger, fear, helplessness. The emotional toll of climate change is broad-ranging, especially for young people."
Aieee!!! Serious grown ups go around saying we are all going to be boiled alive - that bound to cause an emotional toll, not climate change itself. Children actually *believe* fairy tales for a while, until they grow past them.
I'm sure that the climate changes. Will it change so much, so quickly, that we all die? No, it's just a fairy tale.
Perhaps North East will some day have the same annual average temperatures as the lucky people in, say, Norfolk. Unfortunately people in Edinburgh will have to wait a bit longer.
I'd like to live to see the day when I can plant Proteas in my northern garden.
DJ - yes, serious grown ups shouldn't say such things to kids, but they do.
Anon - they don't sound easy to grow, we avoid anything which won't survive a few degrees below zero.
Perfectly put:
"And you know it all comes from that same half-bakedness, that sentimentality. They are fascinated, not by realism, but by the emotional ideal side of socialism, by the religious note in it, so to say, by the poetry of it… second-hand, of course.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (1871-72)"
I was a young child during the war and distinctly remember , sheltering in the pantry under the stairs while the Luftwaffe was overhead. Then after our brick shelter was built , being carried down the garden in the dark to be placed on a bunk bed. From what I remember there was fear but also a determination that the bastards were not going to win no matter the cost.
We seem to have been ground down by the continual whining of the terminally stupid that everything is awful and there is no hope for anyone.
A realistic look at the world shows that we are better of now than we have ever been and most of the doom mongering is done by people trying to justify their non jobs and cushy existence.
James - it is isn't it? I particularly like "the poetry of it… second-hand, of course."
John - I agree, it's a weird situation where we can live well if we choose to and are still healthy, but as you say, the continual whining of the terminally stupid grinds us down. It's hard to judge how much impact it has on daily life, but the pandemic debacle warned us that it could become very bad indeed.
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