Feels like the apocalypse

[housinghero]

Is just me or does it just feel like the bloody end of the world at the moment..

ridiculous heat
water shortages
food shortages
Collapsing government
cost of living
energy prices
impending recession
staff shortgages
risk of fires

We are only just getting over a world wide pandemic- i haven't forgotten that yet....

If I didn't have kids then I would be looking for the nearest tall building.

Plagues? I'd hardly call monkeypox a plague, and the potential cases of polio are down to downright stupidity rather than anything else.

Yep true. A lot of people must surely be having what they voted for 🤷🏼‍♀️

Could be worse at least we can riot without getting rained on.

Honestly, just stop watching the news.

That sounds like a pleasant afternoon, although I'd probably choose a different book.

I always resort to PG Wodehouse at times of doom and gloom.

Staff shortages = apocalypse 😅😂

You'd think so the way some people behave when they have to gasp wait for something.

It’s the cycle of things. There will be hardships and drops in standards of living for sure but all you can really do is just keep going. There are still a lot of people who want things to be better and that’s a start.

I'll be outside in the garden later with a vodka and a spliff, at least I'll be to out of it to give a shit😉

I think apocalypses might be listed among the exclusions. Best check your policy.

Things have been much worse in the past. Poll tax riots may have got rid of poll tax but we didn't get a refund of all the extra money we had paid. In fact I don't recall ever getting cost of living payments and help with bills. I know people who handed back the keys to their houses due to negative equity and losing their jobs. Then when the houses were sold for less than the outstanding mortgage they were slapped with the debt to pay off.

I was thinking about this the other day and how we managed in 70's, 80's, 90's 2008/9. We didn't have all the non-essential stuff people have these days to cut back on. No fancy mobiles/cars/holidays/meals out/coffee out etc.

Actually I've just remembered I had an office cleaning job 5 evenings a week after working full time in the day. There are a lot more jobs around these days than there were in the 80's and 90's.

My advice is to watch the Drama channel. Always takes me back to better times. Don't watch BBC News or read the papers, the media love to scare the life out of people.

Yes. Things have changed.

Stop reading the Daily Mail and listening to the BBC!

We mostly go to Aldi and it is pretty well stocked, at least where we live. Similar with Sainsburys - some brands might be missing, but no empty shelves.

Yep

The only thing that really frightens me is climate change. The other stuff (Ukraine, inflation, recession, energy prices, etc) will pass, but climate change is going to get worse. This summer scared the crap out of me. Forty degrees just isn't normal. A climate expert on Newsnight said that without climate change, the UK would never hit 40 degrees. It just wouldn't happen.

I've heard several idiots (all men, all at barbeques) say "well, if this is climate change, bring it on!" But climate change doesn't just mean nice summers. It's everything that goes with - flooding, drought, crop failure. Then there is mass migration. Africa's population is going to double by 2050. When climate change gets worse, that booming population will migrate north to Europe, totally de-stabilizing the continent. Climate change sets off cycles of problems: infrastructure is shattered and crops fail, people then get displaced, which in turn triggers wars or revolutions, which then escalate, and so on. Right now we can cope. But if it gets as bad as some fear, we won't, not with the world's population heading to nine or ten billion.

It's overpopulation combined with climate change that scare me. Those two things will combine to crash our civilization. In 1800 there were roughly 1 billion humans on earth. By 1900, it was 1.5. By 1960 it had doubled to 3 billion. By 2000 it had doubled again to 6 billion. We're now close to 8 billion. I feel like the population will keep increasing, and climate change will keep getting worse, until we reach a kind of endpoint and our civilization collapses.

I think it’s more that there were a few decades when everything in UK was very very easy for most people and we had a series of competent governments, low inflation, great exchange rate etc. So all the brightest/richest people went into business or put their feet up and didn’t notice until recently that management of the country had been left to total buffoons.

I’m very worried about Putin having turned into Hitler, and about climate change, but most of what you mention is side effects of letting idiots run the country.

Don't worry OP, the Tories are in government. You're in safe hands.

😂😂😂

Nobody’s oppressing me! I can use SM to say what I want, within reason. I can organise a peaceful protest. When the next election comes around I can vote.

Pimms and skunk aside, I’d say yes, we are looking at the beginning of the end. Or maybe middle of the end.
The species that we rely on cannot evolve fast enough to keep up with unpredictable weather. Collapse of ecosystems, pollinator species. Desertification. Deforestation. Forest fires in the Amazon rainforest. Extinctions. Melting ice caps. Novel diseases, pandemics. The very real scourge of social media, social alienation, the relentless commodification of the human experience. All this against a background of exponential population growth, exponential demand for increasingly limited resources (often for the ends of increasingly banal consumerism), unprecedented economic disparity. Politicians who clearly do not give a flying fuck and barely even bother to pretend to.
We've never seen any of this on this scale and so universally before.
Unfortunately humans cannot evolve beyond the limits of their basic and immediate self interest to be able to deal with this. That much is obvious. There is no happy ending, but if it’s any consolation, there never was going to be one.

@Featuredcreature

High five - been saying this a lot this year…..

of course we’re not allowed to talk about it because ….. resilience and stoicism…..

And do be careful about mentioning riots - a long running series of threads got deleted last year on another board because it was interpreted as incitement ….. 🙄

I totally agree op - scary times 😢

You're very dramatic OP.

I haven't seen food shortages - I shop at Asda, Sainsburys and Waitrose so broad spectrum.

Yes it's hot and droughty but we have had similar before.

The govt isn't collapsing; the ruling party is changing its leadership.

The strikes aren't having much impact. The Openreach/BT one was pointless for the CWU. Rail strikes have been going on forever.

Switch off the TV and social media; have a cold drink and a snooze. You'll feel better.

You need to switch off the news and focus on your own world and the people around you. In my world, the only thing that’s changed noticeably is the food prices have gone up (some considerably, others a bit), diesel has gone up and occasionally isn’t available (although it seems to have sorted itself out) and energy prices have gone up.

There haven’t been any food shortages here and everywhere is open and fully staffed.

We’ve had a conservative government for years and we probably always will because they more or less control the media. They destroyed Jeremy Corbyn …no way was he ever going to get in and it’ll happen whoever leads the Labour Party. I hope I’m wrong.

It is hot though and we haven’t had any rain for a very long time.

I’m in the middle on this….it obviously isn’t great and I’m not sure how long the right wing climate change deniers can keep up the ‘It’s just summer’ nonsense. But on the other hand, my elderly mother is very caught up in all the drama and is ruining the time she has left worrying about energy bills and having one bath a week.

😁

Yabu and offensive
You are suggesting that people who don't have kids have nothing to live for so may as well kill themselves!

I also haven't seen food shortages or a crumbling government, and yes its hot now but weather for next week is rain and temps in the early 20s so no I'm not nearing suicide!

I'm actually pretty happy at the moment, been for a lovely swim, going to have a cold beer in the shade now, wedding on the weekend, and catching up with lots of friends I haven't seen for ages.

If your life is so miserable you're contemplating suicide due to some very minor inconveniences compared to how a huge proportion of the word lives maybe look into therapy?