[bambax]

All true, but while listing all the reasons for being depressed, it curiously misses the state of the environment.

And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.

We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.

Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.

Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.

The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.

[JackMorgan]

I do not understand why this is downvoted. I see a fatalism in my peers that causes incredible stress. I think of animals that won't breed in captivity when there's too much noise or not the right food, but instead attack each other and self-harm.

We have high stress, lots of convenient unhealthy food, lots of noise and light, long hours, and the awareness that the planet is getting more hostile to human life. Of course we're biting and scratching each other, performing self-harm, and not reproducing.