@Joy_intl

The more beauty you see the more beauty you will see.

@Joy_intl I wasn't hopeful at all. I became aware of the fact that the Industrial Age is headed towards its own collapse at an ever increasing speed when I was a nerdy child in the 1980s, I became an angry anarchist as a teenager in the 1990s, and now I'm a middle-aged anarchist still hating the system for constantly ruining everything.
We know what's coming. We've had a rough outline of the coming collapse since Limits to Growth (1972), and all the individual crises which are part of the polycrisis have been escalating since then. Something like the Jackpot from William Gibson's The Peripheral is coming for this modern civilisation, a series of catastrophes spread out over many decades, not a single one of them being enough to end it all in a bang, but after each one, things will be a bit worse and not get much better anymore, until there isn't anything left of our modern way of life, and our population numbers will also be much smaller.

Creeping fascism and never ending, ever escalating crises have been with us for many decades now. Everybody paying close attention to the entire picture instead of exclusively focussing on single issues like environmental protection or climate change has always been aware that the overall situation has always been a slowly escalating global catastrophe, even when we managed to restore some damaged landscapes to ecological health here and there and brought some populations of rare wild animals or plants back from the brink of extinction. Everybody who took the risk of global pandemics seriously knew how unprepared the world was for one, how lucky we were that SARS 1.0 (Covid is just SARS 2.0) petered out so quickly, and that the Swine Flu didn't become a deadly pandemic in the 2010s. The world _could_ have been prepared for pandemics when Covid hit, we could have had mask and disinfectant stockpiles and disaster plans, but no government wanted to pay for that, so they all pretended that no pandemic would ever happen again. Until it did.

It's even worse with environmental destruction, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, etc. That's something we cause directly through our actions, yet there isn't any significant political will to change that because our fucking global capitalist economy depends on us keeping the machine running.

@Joy_intl were we living in the same reality?

2020 was not hopeful at all for me. Covid fully started at the beginning of the year, then everyone thought it was over without thinking it'll bite them back, which it did, and then I burnt out.

This decade has been rough on me and to a certain degree I'm surprised, I still have my sanity.