Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness

What do you expect people in general to do? Granted, driving an F150 is not an environmentally friendly activity, but suppose they all cut their "carbon footprint" [0] by 50%. How much would that help?

The answer is actually "not much." It turns out that 70% of greenhouse emissions have come from ~100 corporations. [1] Until we, collectively, do something about their practices, there's precious little that individuals can do to get us to net zero.

Individuals have no power to influence corporations in this way, either. It needs to come from things like carbon taxes -- and not just from one country, but worldwide.

There's far more that can be said here, but I think I've successfully conveyed the point: feeling hopeless in the face of all this is actually pretty logical. At this point, we really are basically doomed to suffer the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, and possibly much more, no matter what we do right now.

I don't want to oversell this to the point of saying we should all just roll over and die; by all means, we should all work on reducing our consumption, because at this point, the choices that are going to provide us a better future in the next couple of decades are essentially those that reduce consumption. The other alternatives are reducing the number of people on Earth, or drastically increasing energy efficiency across the board. A couple decades' worth of energy efficiency increases isn't going to do it, and if we choose not to reduce consumption, the effects of climate change will ensure that the number of people on Earth decreases, whether we like it or not.

So, we're essentially left at reducing consumption. But, as you've mentioned, people don't seem to want to do that. I don't know how to deal with that at a personal level, myself. Do you? Is it any wonder teenagers don't?

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[0]: Make no mistake, this is just a propaganda term intended to blame you and not the actual (mostly corporate) actors responsible for making most of the emissions.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-pe...

I don't know what the answers to the world's big problems are, but I'm pretty sure that smashing, burning, and pushing for violent revolution, insurrection, or civil war is not the answer.

It is easy to generalize ( see? ) and be cynical.

Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?

Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?

When people only access the world via car and avoid walking around, they never build familiarity with their own neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for, are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.

Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income households, the only location where children were safe and tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds dystopian even as I type it out.

Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for this travesty to take place.

People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter to the built infrastructure.

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I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get to know your neighbors.

The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in leaving their younger children under their supervision, in return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent their time.

North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.

But is that an anti-environment stance or an anti-big-green stance? I can understand people being sick of the mishandling of the crisis that is being funded with their money.