The world we live in and what I'm doing to change it

'The world we live in and what I'm doing to change it'...
The long and short of it? Nothing, really. Like 99.99% of us, I live my life under the illusion that we are immortal, we are forever, and that miracles do happen and somehow we'll be saved. I still consume far too much plastic, I still leave far too big an ecological footprint, I still contribute far too much to what's wrong with the world. I admit I do like my coca-colas, my sodas, my beers, my junk food. All of these are things that are not only detrimental to me healthwise, they're also detrimental to the planet itself. Insofar as I may call people sheep, I number myself among them.
So what can I do to change? Well, for one - though not being a vegan or anything of the sort - I rarely eat meat these days. Fish even less, never been a huge fan. But my dairy consumption is big - I eat cheese and yoghurts and I use milk for my cereal and shakes. Can that be reduced? Absolutely, it must. Many things must change with what I do and how I live my life, if only to be able to be a bit healthier. Maybe what I do makes a difference. Maybe it doesn't.
It won't, really.
There's a sad reality that we can't truly come to acknowledge that is climate change, though some scholars and scientists increasingly refer to it as climate tragedy. It's this climate change, above all, that hastens our doom, our march to oblivion. It would take a tremendous shift on a societal level for this to change, but that's not going to happen. My last post outlined some of my reasons why I think this way.

One thing that always bothered me about myself was my refusal, for many, many years to not only finish high school, but to get a degree of some kind. For a number of reasons, after I left school to join the Air Force, my education never became a priority to me, mainly because I though myself far more intelligent than people I knew who were in college, and because I was a well-read person, because I thought that me reading John Milton's 'Paradise Lost' when I was in the 9th grade meant more than studying a stuffy old school book. I deemed myself more intelligent, but alas - I just wasn't smart enough, not even to know the difference between 'smart' and 'intelligent'. And one of the things that I always thought I lacked - a certain kind of focus - is also something that I've also envisioned further learning could hone. I know how my mind works, and it's always been a chaotic jumble, it's never had the sort of mental organization and acuity I recognize in those who pursued that higher education. A part of me always thought that you can truly develop a keener mind when you follow that path, and my willingness to remain dull in that respect always galled me.
This doesn't make me stupid, though. Yes, I believe that higher learning can help you develop how you think, but I don't necessarily agree that it does teach you the right things to think. Like all things in life, it can always be skewed one way or the other.
I do a lot of thinking on my own, rarely sharing my insights my anyone - neither in person nor online. Maybe that needs to change too.
I've been reading a lot lately about societal collapse, and how much of that will be directly caused by the climate tragedy we're (mostly) silently going through. I put my best predictions for our survival to be no more than 50 years - I'm thinking now we'll not have that long.

Look, for things to change so much that we actually have a shot at surviving this calamity one of three things need to happen very, very fast :

a) There's a societal upheaval, on a worldwide level, where we all make a concerted change, and we do away with pretty much everything that we have in our modern lives, and we somehow create a global community that stops being dependent on fossil fuels, that prioritizes grassroots living, that works together to educate, heal and evolve. The odds of any of that happening? Pretty much slim to none.

b) We actually have a massive technological paradigm shift where we actually develop safe technologies to take care of many of our problems that plague us globally - waste management, cleaner water, the preservation of ecosystems, the reduction of CO2 emissions, etc. Do I believe these things can be developed? Yes. Do I believe that they can be developed in time to give us that fighting chance? No.

c) Even unlikelier than any of these is that we somehow develop spacefaring capabilities that would allow us to leave the planet en masse and find home elsewhere in the vast universe. But how could we accomplish this when we're still so reliant on fossil fuels? We'd need a faster than light drive to take us somewhere far from here in time enough for everyone to be still alive when we settled on a new world. But that would also mean that we'd have to have developed a viable form of zero point energy by then. And we'd have to build a large number of very large spaceships in order to get a decent amount of people away from here, and we'd somehow have to develop some sort of cryostasis, and an AI dependable enough to guide us while we slept, not to mention the logistics of keeping people fed and with some form of constantly renewable water system to keep us from dying from dehydration, among so many other things that we'd have to contemplate. Oh, and we'd have to have deep-space scanning built in and some way to plot navigation through the cosmos, because what good would it be all this if we travelled inside the heart of a star? And though we may all be partial to some sort of adherence to the anthropic principle, well, things like the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation sort of leaves things looking a bit hopeless, because when push comes to shove, we're an anomaly in the universe, glorified outliers who managed to starve themselves into extinction. This is it. This is all we've got. This is our one shot. We've squandered it.

I might, of course, be wrong in all my assumptions - but I don't think I am. I've been doing my reading, been doing my research. I highly recommend reading Professor Jem Bendell's papers on climate change and what we can do and how we can adapt - see here and here - as well as J.A. Screen and C. Deser's paper on the emergence of an ice-free arctic ocean as early as 2030 here.
We think things are bad now - we can´t even begin to imagine how bad they'll be soon enough. As these papers so grimly state, cascading effects of widespread and repeated harvest failures will cause famine on a global level. Not very far from now, there'll be such a scarcity of resources available which will mean that there'll be lines and lines of people waiting to be fed a few morsels. There'll be looting and there'll be killings and there'll be people dying of hunger in untold numbers. Truth be told? All of this is already happening in parts of the world - perhaps in more parts than we care to admit.
Why does this all happen? Well, ultimately... because of us. We think that the Gretas and the Extinction/Rebellion movements can save us. No. No, they can't. Theirs is a false call to arms, theirs is the path that enables our demise.
Why? Because their idea of revolution is getting politicians and corporations to enforce stricter laws and to legislate more expensive fines for those who profit from human misery. Their idea of revolution is protests. Somewhere in the world there is a room with many many screens where these captains of industry and bankers and generals are watching these protests, sipping from whiskeys that are more expensive than the minimum wage, puffing on their cuban cigars, and laughing their asses off because while they make a buck from our suffering, all we can do is protest how unfair everything is. Sigh. We really do play into their hands, don't we?

I wish I could see any glimmer of hope. I really do. Because if we acted now, right now, we could still make a difference. But we won't... we don't want to. We're all of us keyboard warriors and slacktivists, enablers of human exploitation. Things are going to get bad soon. Much worse than we can imagine. And none of us will survive this because we chose to comply and obey and be subject to the whims of tyrants.
We'd have to do this together - all of us, together - to get to the point where we may survive. But we won't. Some of us, individually may choose to retire from society altogether in order to spend what time we have left trying to make as a clean a living as we can. An admirable pursuit, to be sure, and one that might even be in the cards for me. Somewhere there might yet be a place untainted or abandoned to which I could retire to. It'll all be far too little, and far too late. Because we could all have a finer world.
I can only wish that you stay safe, and stay strong.
As for me.. well. I'll be healing myself, and taking care of my health, and in the meantime I'll be doing some regular posts about music and whatever else might cross my mind.
Down we go together, my friends. Down we go.