Pirate's Cove

Really, should it be RUINING YOUR LIFE AND WE’RE ALL DOOMED? In all caps? Because they’re always losing their mind

What to Do If Eco-Anxiety Is Ruining Your Mental Health

When you’re young, you look to the future with equal doses of dread and optimism: fearing the obligatory baggage that comes with getting older but craving responsibility all the same. 30 years ago, the baby boomer generation was threatened with the possibility of war causing a kind of nuclear apocalypse. Nowadays, that sense of your life’s ambitions being thrown into disarray is marred by something different.

The climate crisis has drastically shaped the fate of the planet. You know the deal at this point. Scientists have claimed we’ve got just 12 years to save ourselves from impending doom, but corporate greed and climate crisis deniers in positions of immense political power are stalling us from making crucial, global changes. How does one process that information?

Fred is 20 years old and from Sydney. “I read somewhere that climate change is a concept too large for someone to ever fully understand, and I guess my relationship with it is like that too,” he tells i-D. “It’s too huge and scary and vague for me to comprehend how to cope, or even how exactly it causes my anxiety. I know that it’s real, and catastrophic.” Fred is one of many young people whose visions of the future have been clouded by the possibility of the climate crisis taking it away from us. A dark thought, but one that can’t be ignored if we stand any chance in stopping it.

I’d recommend he not use fossil fuels, get rid of the energy hogging smartphone, grow his own veggies, give up meat, move into a tiny apartment (can’t use natural gas!), and live like it’s 1499. Anyhow, what can they do per the story

That aforementioned report by the APA points out four ways in which we can collectively keep check on our own mental health in a moment of crisis like this, stating that we should build belief in one’s own resilience, foster optimism, cultivate active coping and self-regulation skills, maintain practices that help to provide a sense of meaning, and promote a connectedness to family, place, culture and community.

So….nothing about making their lives carbon neutral, giving a large chunk of their money to the Government, along with most of their freedom and choice? Huh.

“I have a lot of anxiety about the future,” says 15-year-old Ontario-native Sagan. “Like, on Friday there’s a climate strike going on where I live, and I can’t go because I have a cross-country meet, and it’s just eating me up inside because, like, why can’t I just be inconvenient and go?” These decisions are hard for kids like Sagan to make because, as much as the pressure to rebel exists, the demands Gen-Z put upon themselves to be studious and work hard to get further in a more cutthroat job market do too. To escape it all, he runs, makes art and plays music: “I just try to get off the internet and do things in real life.”

ZOMG, someone has anxiety about the future? And turns to music and art to escape? Gets outside? Welcome to the Real World, where that’s been happening for thousands of years.

“We have to make a distinction between anxiety and eco-anxiety,” child psychologist Rafael Dupré says. “Most other forms of anxiety are based on an irrational fear of a danger that is very unlikely. Eco-anxiety, however, is based on a danger that is very real, it exists and is proven to be a threat to human life.”

So, here you have a child psychologist telling kids they’re doomed. That’s helpful

Hannah is a 21-year-old senior at NYU. She suffers from a form of solastagia, and has taken Julie Scheiner’s advice, spending last weekend at the climate protests in Manhattan. “I find it interesting that when I went to my school’s counselling centre, they didn’t have any information about dealing with climate anxiety even though all my friends say that is the main thing making them anxious,” she says. Instead, to quell her nervous episodes, she meditates. Hannah is also comforted by the fact that she has the right to vote; to make a difference of some kind, no matter if it feels insignificant at the time. Is there a mantra that she wants to get out there, to help others paint a vision of the climate crisis that doesn’t exacerbate fear, but offer a promise of change?

Wait till life truly kicks her, rather than this imaginary fear of a tiny increase in the global temperature which is completely within the norm for a Holocene warm period. Really, blame the adult Warmist for causing the kiddies to have irrational fears.