This "we are doomed" attitude is unhelpful towards positive change. It forces us towards selfishness and away from empathy and mutual-support. In some ways, it is a self-fulfilling perception of the world. It is an excuse for personal inaction.
I was deeply depressed with this attitude a year ago, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. What helped, was helping. Specifically volunteering and volunteerism. Realizing that the world doesn't revolve around my experience, and that I can make a positive affect on people's lives.
If you're worried about climate change (like I was, like I am), join a cause to address it like Citizens' Climate Lobby, the Environmental Voter Project, or something local. If you're worried about food insecurity, help at a food bank, at your local urban farming project. If you do this, you'll quickly realize that we are not alone in our feelings, and through that togetherness we are powerful.
I'm in an odd state with this. I refuse to let myself slide into apathy and not have some level of action. I register voters, I support climate activities (financially, letters to representatives, and lifestyle changes) and look for opportunities for local action.
I do this despite truly believing it won't matter and things will just keep getting worse. I'm smart enough to know I'm not smart enough to be confident in that assessment, but it is what I believe and feel. I simply can't face myself in the mirror if I allow myself to be inactive or uncaring because of my own forecasts for the future.
This is how I started getting into it, not really believing in my actions but doing something because I felt it was principally, morally right. Through CCL and their science-based approach and reliance on external studies, I've learned that we are on a trend that is far better than most people think. Sure, it's not good. But it's not devastating.
Renewable energy is on the rise like never before. Electric cars are being pushed harder and harder each year. More of our elective representatives support climate initiatives each year. The conservative climate caucus is a brand new thing that is happening. Other countries are introducing carbon pricing with border taxes that will hurt the US economically unless we introduce our own.
It can be hard to do work and not expect to see payoff, but if you take the long view instead of the short view, statistics about support and momentum are actually on our side.
Afaict, and I follow this significantly, we were never going to see significant climate devastation in our life time. With lag, it'll be our children and our children's children.
While the developed world has been able to offset emissions (renewable growth, but also just pushing manufacturing to the global south), it still has not been nearly enough to avert the worst impacts.
And we also don't know at what point positive feedbacks will become runaway and humans will stop being the primary driver.
Things are improving, but not so much that I would be actively optimistic.
It's very likely within a decade or two we'll see so little water coming out of Mead that the Hoover dam cannot produce electricity.
We also might see a "blue ocean event" in the same time scale.
Do you not consider these "significant climate devastation"? There are many other examples, but since you "follow this significantly" you probably know about them, but for just these two I'm honestly confused how you can see these as non-issues.
Sure, I guess when I am using that phrase I am using it in response to people who are suggesting that there is existential and/or civilization-collapsing level of risk within our lifetime.
Significant climate devastation to me means significantly degraded quality of life or difficulty staying alive.
You can definitely isolate a lot of things that are being impacted by the climate changing, but even if the entire Hoover dam can no longer produce electricity it will not reach those levels to me.
To me, it's neither here nor there that the collapse may occur in our lifetime. It's the beauty of the natural world that I mourn, seeing it fail, and diminish, and the world becomes less colorful and whole.
My most comforting thought is that the Earth will continue, life will continue, and even in a worst-case scenario it's likely the complex ecologies will re-establish in the fullness of time.
The conclusion I drew is that socially acceptable forms of resistance like voting and writing letters are socially acceptable because they are ineffective. Just get more radical it's more effective and you'll feel better too.
What I’ve personally found is it is important to recognize that others can’t or won’t do that, and it’s necessary to recognize real threats to oneself and the ones they care about because of it - which necessarily will interfere with a growth mindset.
It doesn’t matter how many soup kitchens someone who lived in Marioupol was going to, if they stayed in Marioupol. They were objectively going to have a bad time, and likely would be dead by now.
I have found that what you’re talking about can help absorb information coming in so one can make better decisions.
If someone is hard locked on worrying about the kids childcare instead of noticing how dangerous the overall situation is, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees.
> This "we are doomed" attitude is unhelpful towards positive change.
What's unhelpful is the unceasing denial. It's not good for mental health and it creates increasingly hostile and aggressive people. Not being able to talk about the very likely fact that we are going to witness the collapse of everything we know and love in the coming decades is unhealthy.
> It forces us towards selfishness and away from empathy and mutual-support.
I've found the opposite to be true for me. Everyone I know who is "collapse aware" so to speak is much more empathetic towards others. It's the denial in my experience that makes people so hostile. They're scared and angry but aren't allowed to develop towards a state of acceptance. Constant cognitive dissonance leads slowly to derangement.
> If you're worried about climate change ...
If you don't really believe you can fix things, if you don't really believe that everything can be solved (which I an many other don't) doing these things is the textbook example of nihilism.
The acknowledgement that "we are doomed" does not have to lead to a permanent state of depression, that's only the initial phase (once you get past the anger and denial). There is acceptance, there can be healing and there can be asking questions about "how do I want to life in a world in collapse?". The more people that are able to openly admit this and talk about it the less nihilism (and it's dangerous consequences) we'll see.
> Not being able to talk about the very likely fact that we are going to witness the collapse of everything we know and love in the coming decades is unhealthy.
I would be curious if this level of pessimism is a novel thing or has been around for a long time.
I don't see why you would believe something like this, it doesn't seem well supported by any evidence. Even the climate catastrophe is not something that will lead to a collapse in our lifetime, all of the evidence is that the impact will be greatest on our children's children.
> I've found the opposite to be true for me. Everyone I know who is "collapse aware" so to speak is much more empathetic towards others.
Except for the extreme border fixation by the ascendant far right? Except for the militias and preppers? They use a different vocabulary but these groups are collapse-aware as well.
We don't usually call it this anymore but this is basically ecofascism. Environmental awareness does not inherently come with an outward facing altruism.
> They use a different vocabulary but these groups are collapse-aware as well.
They are not remotely "collapse-aware", the slogan "Make America Great Again!" tells you this. The are many books written about the relationship between nihilism and the rise of fascism. This was Nietzsche's prediction 200 years ago.
These are people that feel the effects of collapse but refuse to acknowledge it. The only difference between these groups and people talking about denying what's happening and fighting against climate change is that the latter group has not been hit with material despair yet. Once they do we'll see an increasing emergence of fascism from this group (we already to do some extent, but it will get worse quickly).
I recommend Nolan Gertz "Nihilism" for a quick overview of the subject.
I'm not sure what the article is about, their bandwidth limit was hit. So, just responding to your comment:
I think one thing that "we are doomed" people miss is, no matter how badly we screw up, unless it is like Nuclear War, the world isn't going to switch into Mad Max/Walking Dead all over, overnight. If shit really does end up hitting the fan, it seems like these groups that are trying to prevent the problem are self-selected for people who are
1) aware of the problem, likely have some idea of what it will entail
2) are conscientious and proactively try to solve problems
In a post-apocalyptic movie these are the groups that end up turning into a cult or build a nice little village only to get wiped out right after the protagonist shows up, to show how grim and gritty the story is. But in the real world, seems like a pretty good post-realistic-crisis group to belong to, TBH.
Big oil expects 2019 to be peak oil year because they know that all easy fracking spots are spent. The easy fracking is gone and can only survive through heavy subsidies.
This is an infantile understanding of shale oil. From needing ever-shorter bores to the move to non-toxic frack fluid, fracking technology is improving at a breakneck pace. Global shale reserves are over three times the size of traditional oil reserves. This has and will radically transform global energy economics. For example, the full-cycle breakeven oil production cost for the United States just dropped below the OPEC average.
Maybe. This is largely a "we don't know" situation.
Everything you say is correct, but it's also correct that the "Sweet Spot" effect is real, that well spacing parasitism hasn't been solved, and that the well decline rates haven't really changed with advancing technology.
We really don't know anything about reserve recoverability ten years from today. I do think it's certain the author is wrong that we won't beat 2019 production. It's inevitable that we do, but I'm not sure for how long.
Shale oil reserves are huge, but also very expensive to exploit. At best, they can never compete with renewables, but most likely they can't even be profitable without subsidies (and worst case, they won't even be energy-positive).
I saw this in 2020 and I had the same problem with it then that I do now: if you are so certain that civilization is going to collapse, why are you making an OS about it? Certainly there's prepping that makes more sense..
I'm quite optimistic about the future, and most scenarios I'm preparing for, both including and not including collapse, involve me owning my own hardware, software, and data as much as possible, because I've been burned by version creep, planned obsolescence, and hastily retired services, etc. way too many times to count.
So, as much as possible, my "CollapseOS" involves only languages with stable runtimes, data formats readable for many years already, and hardware which lets me access the filesystem, leveraging the Lindy Effect as much as possible.
There is an often quoted rebuttal to this which goes "this isn't helpful"
...I would say to those people, neither is being optimistic (i.e. unrealistic)
This person is not the best writer I'll grant you that...and an OS in forth isn't exactly the best way to prepare either but that's irrelevant to the central argument that we are...on a not particularly long timeline, doomed if we continue a pattern of behaviour that we have done now for 300 years.
It isn't being pesimistic to say we are in trouble here, nor is it "unhelpful" to be that way. Positivity and individualism were the two stick that we used to beat the world into the state it is in and the first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging it.
So you don't think it's helpful to point out the gun pointed at your kids? Ok let's do helpful stuff then.
We need to stop buying phones every year that are synthetically slowed down, we need to invest in public transportation that runs on renewable energy and reduce the number of gas and deisel engines in use significantly. We need to find ways to recycle the precious metal we painstakingly extract from the ground and we need to reduce our reliance on travel in a world where we can talk to anyone at anytime with virtually no delay.
But none of those things happen until you can get people to understand the inconvenient truth that this is not going to last and that requires you to put aside your feelings on the matter.
Responding to the truth with "this is not helpful" is...not helpful
This kind of discourse doesn't make depressed because of its content, but because of how BORING it can quickly become.
It's a mix of oversimplification and self-entitlement that I can't do but find irrelevant. The more recent updates also prove how little this person actually knows about key topics like the economics of the energy market.
Why is it so high up on Hackernews?
Doom sells. Always has. It seems to be all the rage these days too.
Maybe it's our continually declining testosterone changing our attitude towards monumental but surmountable problems like climate change, resource conflicts, culture wars, wealth gaps, etc. I don't know. It's really sad to see young people so hopeless when right now their biggest enemies are their minds.
The system won't have to kill us if it convinces us to kill ourselves first. Hopelessness and small mindedness will doom us all if we're not careful.
It's on everyone. Young people are largely depressed because the older people in power are basically saying [incoming oversimplification] "you're wrong about the science and even if you're right about the science there's nothing for us to gain from radically forced change to the economy". The old people are correct that doom and gloom aren't the best motivator, and the young people are correct that we're destroying their birthright.
All of those monumental-but-surmountable problems can be surmounted with massive, unprofitable collective effort. All the evidence of my lifetime and my parents' says that our society as it exists now can only coordinate collective effort if it is profitable. ∴ those problems will not be solved.
I believe we've avoided a civilization ending, peak oil disaster. Currently ~35-50% of global energy consumption (including shipping, automobiles, etc) comes from petroleum. You might say, that's a lot!, and you would be right. But the percentage of total energy consumption petroleum takes up is going down. Over the next 50 years petroleum will get more and more expensive and renewables will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. If another energy source is cheaper, it will win.
If one of the many "super battery breakthroughs" we've all read about in the last 15 years comes to fruition in the next 15 then consider the oil crisis solved.
Yes, converting everything to electricity will be expensive but that's cheaper then relying on oil. The trend lines look promising. Of course this is all speculation based on the Western world being able to keep it's shit together.
Relying on price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves though, and that means civilization ending levels of climate change.
We need a way to keep lots of oil in the ground even if it is profitable to get out.
> price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves
Unlikely. Exploration and production is capital intensive because there are minimum scales many projects require to be profitable, e.g. pipelines.
High prices amid falling volumes can obscure the production destruction inherent to infrastructure first ceasing to be developed and then being actively shut down. Whale oil prices went up amidst depletion and decommissioning [1].
Their point is that oil will only continue to have value if it's kept scarce, and that because there are viable and growing affordable options away from petroleum where there wasn't 10-20 years ago, we will have both a tug of war between producers keeping it in the ground to keeps prices high while their net market shrinks consistently until we're really only left with oil utility where the economy of the resource makes sense (if any). The energy sector will have moved on to the most exploitable sources of power in whatever shape that looks like due to innovation.
Not just (potentially) civilization-ending levels of climate change—but the near-certainty that, if civilization does end, losing us our current industry and expertise, it will be massively harder to get back to the point we are today, because oil is the conveniently concentrated and portable energy bootstrap that got us this far.
There’s 50 years of proven reserves alone. Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out.
50 years is easily enough time to switch to electric cars. With cars being replaced about every 11 years and ICE being phased about by 2030 to 2035 the entire fleet should be electric by 2045.
> Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out
More pointedly, it's declining because we're swapping it out. American oil companies are returning cash to shareholders. Not investing in new wells. OPEC, similarly, sees the writing on the wall, preferring to cash in now even if it means cannibalising future demand through sustained high prices.
These sort of articles are so boring. Give me a date, or a year. Otherwise Doomers will continue to be vague and when something does happen, maybe, they’ll all come out of the woodwork saying I told you so.
Until then I’ll enjoy the unprecedented prosperity we’re enjoying here on earth.
It’s the same with stock market doomers, housing doomers, etc etc. no one ever gives a specific date. People just make unfalsifiable claims.
I mean, your parent's doctor doesn't tell you a specific date your parent is going to die from cancer. Why would anyone else be able to predict dates that depend on more complex factors?
It's happening right this second. Right now the American West is suffering from incredible drought, right now there are water problems there. Right now heat waves in India are causing crop failures meaning then are considering to stop the export of wheat at the same time that a war for resources in Ukraine is cause them to reduce wheat exports.
I've been a "doomer" so to speak since 2016. I'm shocked at how many things I was concerned about have come to pass. If you were to describe the world of today to someone from 1996 they would be horrified and think you were full of nonsense.
But denial is a hell of a drug, so I'm guess you and many other will still not see it no matter what happens. There was a documentary on the sinking island of Tangiers. The mayor of the town (and many residents) remained rabid climate change deniers even as they witnessed their own home be consumed by the sea. Watching that made me realize that nothing will for people to realize what's happening when that realization comes at such a high mental cost.
Seems too focused on the NYT article? I don't think this because the NYT said so, I think this because PaLM's chains-of-thought approach seems to match how my own brain works. I think LMs have huge intelligence overhang atm that is hidden by the way they are forced to respond. If we figure out how to train LMs with propagation through hidden chains of thought, we'll see a huge jump in capability, and also this is the obvious next step that the industry will aim for.
We have quantum AI math developed and photonic accelerators are currently in development. The moment those work reliably, machine learning will hit an exponential curve — particularly since those photonic circuits are already partially designed by AI.
The feedback loop of quantum-accelerated AI refining its own hardware is one breakthrough away.
This is an interesting criticism. I grew up on wired magazine and sci-fi. Even then I recognized the dangers of shallow knowledge and maybe I can’t avoid it even now. But I’m actively working with GPT3 and I must say it is startling. I’d say we’re a few years from automating most knowledge tasks (I created a tool that I chose not to release because it was too powerful). We could be a decade from general purpose artificial intelligence (or it might not be possible at all. For a fun thought experiment ask GPT3 if it is truly conscious). The answer it gave me was surprisingly coherent wise and useful. From there (AGI) we could be minutes away from artificial super intelligence. That starts to look a bit like a point pst which standard prediction breaks down. But like you say, pop sci might be hindering rational thinking on this score.
I used to work in physics, which seems to attract a lot of people with shallow knowledge, and ML seems to be going in a similar direction.
To be clear, I'm actually quite bullish on AI (well, bullish on it ultimately happening, not necessarily on how it will impact humanity). I was mostly reacting to the timeline for photonic quantum computing rather than on ML advancement, actually.
Language modeling is extremely impressive. I've been saying since 2017 that modeling language is basically modeling the world/intelligence, but at the time most people did not seem to believe that. People still don't really seem to believe it, but I think the smarter among us are beginning to now that they see GPT-X & PaLM. I think there is still a substantial gap from "good language model" to "embodied agent taking actions in the world" that we have not bridged and will be potentially pretty hard to, more than mere "minutes."
> The answer it gave me was surprisingly coherent wise and useful. From there (AGI) we could be minutes away from artificial super intelligence
What am I missing? I assumed of course that they didn't mean literal minutes but more metaphorically, but my reply was also using it in the metaphoric sense - it could be a potentially heavy lift to go from point A to point B.
e: I guess I am missing that they are conflating GPT with AGI and saying it will be minutes from AGI to artificial super intelligence in the literal sense. That, I actually do agree with, but I don't think GPT-X or PaLM or LMs in general qualify as such.
I read it in a different way, where we’d go from “plays chess like a bad human” to “plays chess superhumanly”, applied to general knowledge synthesis tasks — something that would be a rapid change once it was able to synthesize general knowledge answers.
Upon reflection, my comment was too critical for having a different read than you did.
Microsoft QuArC has published a number of papers on QAI, and I both work on photonics and discuss with other companies who do the accelerators being developed. Accelerating AI with photonics is an active area of development.
I think you’re projecting that your knowledge of this is only based on pop-sci.
We’re not more than a single breakthrough from being able to make photonic accelerators — and there’s already worked out algorithms to accelerate ML once those circuits are available.
sigh I've lived with family members who have hand-wavy opinions like this. I also have the unique-ish experience of having been part of a charismatic Christian cult in my earlier life that was constantly hand wringing about the end of the world. There were weekly "prophecies" about Armageddon due to gay rights, peak oil, financial system collapse, abortion, anything-we-don't-like-understand-or-are-uncomfortable-with, etc.
One thing that was burned into my mind from this experience is that human beings' ability to divine the future is significantly limited as the time horizon moves to the right. You might be able to predict what is going to happen tomorrow, next week or even next year with some accuracy, but as soon as the timeline extends beyond that, there are simply too many variables to predict what will happen with too much accuracy.
My father has been predicting/prophesying global collapse of the financial system "next year" for 20 years now. It may happen due to climate change or nuclear war or pandemic or asteroid impact or or or or....but it sure as hell won't be because he prophesied it. Climate change is a serious risk and it needs to be addressed but being fatalistic about it is a completely self-destructive and incorrect approach.
In the meantime, because my father has refused to save for retirement, take care of his physical health, or pay off his mortgage due to "the world collapsing next year", he is now living in near destitution with a life-threatening illness, and no retirement money. This is a man who used to make a million dollars a year as an HP consultant in the 90s/00s. It can happen to anyone.
Mindset matters. Don't ignore risk but fatalism helps no one, least of all, yourself.
It doesn't seem that the 'total collapse of civilization' would be so strongly tied to the oil industry as the writer suggests. If there truly is a reducing EROI in oil, it feels more likely that that industry would start losing resources to other renewable energy sectors. If things were as dire as he puts it, I would assume a bigger push for nuclear energy as existential fears start to outweigh NIMBYism.
"Unlike the climate changes challenge, the energy challenge is imminent: peak oil is now. However, it is important to note that the effects of climate changes and peak oil are cumulative: raging forest fires, "once in a century" yearly floods, bomb cyclones..."
How are those events tied to 'peak oil' specifically?
"Also, please note that I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs."
- why write like this?
Parsing this I felt like Bighedd when questioned by the attorneys in Silicon Valley.
> The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly.
> for example, the fact that lithium mines are an environmental disaster
Are they though? I mean, sure they are - all mining is to an extent, but not only are they relatively benign considering lithium is nowadays obtained from brines, not solid material, we don't need a lot of lithium in the first place - global resources excluding seawater are estimated to be around 80mln tonnes, meanwhile annual iron ore production is over one billion tonnes.
The European Union will have some pretty extensive reforming to do once the Ukraine war has ended. I doubt the EU will dissolve, but I'm pretty sure it be quite different from how it is now.
If we assume the current (relative) unity will last for a decade or so while Ukraine is rebuilt and we get waned of fossil fuels, then we'd have to start preparing for internal political shitstorms '32, as there'll be a lot of elections '33 and '34. If we make it past the EU parlaiment elections in '34 I'd say we're good for a while after that.
Edit: But yeah, things definitely go up and down in cycles. No doubt about it. No single nation state will remain forever, but the entire latin-anglo-slavic-germanic-fenno-ugric clusterf*k we call European civilization won't just go away within such a short timeframe. An eventual decline will take many decades, if not centuries.
I believe in price signals and market adjustments more than any of those doomsday projections. Unless for unknown reasons, all oil reserves suddenly disappear overnight, I am not concerned.
This isn’t about building tech, flagged: “””
now, it's fashionable to be outraged about those poor civilians. You were overreacting when Rwanda was happening, but now you're heartless for not tearing your shirt and not shouting "war!" to the top of your lungs. They're caucasian, those poor children, haven't you seen? Did you see that study that says that an all out nuclear war wouldn't actually mean the end of the human race? Pretty uplifting eh? Look! she was pregnant!
One word keeps coming back. Genocide. It keeps being thrown out like nobody ever opened a dictionary, never even stopped at what this word means, shrinking past horrors, erasing memories so that today's two minutes of hate can be more effective. Eerie.
Update April 12: Oh, even Biden dropped the G word now. How quaint!
“””
>I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent.
Climate change isn't making it inevitable. In fact, climate change and a shift in society will make the collapse impossible. The economic boost of needing to adjust society to handle the migration away from oil regardless to climate change will employ many people and should reduce scarcity greatly. Crisis situations are what bring economies to bare. It's the idea of the war economy, but really any crisis economy operates the same. We have even see the moon race economy, the entire 'crisis' can be entirely artificial.
Peak oil? No, we are artificially depressing the oil industry with carbon taxes and other similar efforts. We aren't at peak oil. Not to mention, we haven't even hit the price scarcity threshold to push synthetics to the forefront of production, and so synth peak oil hasn't even started rising.
Cultural bankruptcy? I'm not sure what that even means? Reading the footnote and the rest of the article never explains this to any satisfaction.
>What I'm more interested in is that regardless of its timeline, we're going to get there, we're going to reach the threshold where civilization collapses. So, you can make the point that civilization still stands at 3C. When does it fall? 4C? 6C? 8C?
Read exactly what 8.5 actually says. It's an unscientific, 'we magic coal out of thin air' to pollute more than the fossil fuel reserves could possible do and it's still only 3.7c by 2100.
There is no 4C, 6C, or 8C.
>We're going to reach it because we've already failed. 1.5C was the limit, we busted it. The goalpost has moved to 2C, but we're going to bust it too. The feedback loops have begun and are out of our control now.
Says you? That's not the limit at all.
>It's official, we've passed peak oil in 2019. Big oil now officially admits it itself: even in their more optimist predictions, they are not expecting production to reach 2019's level again.
Lol no. Tons of governments are actively working against 'big oil' and artificially created peak oil and that isn't even official like you said. In fact, your peak oil assertion was disproven only months ago post-ukraine.
>The underlying cause of this is that for 200 years, we've been on an energy binge. We're at the end of it, we're looking for our next fix, but there isn't going to be one. We just need to drastically reduce our energy consumption.
China and India is literally building Gigawatts of coal power plants right now with amortization periods of 20+ years. We are VERY far from reducing energy consumption. This binge just started.
You know what's collapsing right now. The political viewpoint that is behind this article. You can definitely tell.
I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent.
The beauty of this position is that it's structurally unfalsifiable.
> Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations.
A "civilisation" is more than the modern notion of a nation-state. Ancient Egypt lasted ~3000 years. Ancient Sumeria/Babylon (the Akkadians were the inheritors of that culture) lasted ~4000 years. Sumeria itself ~2000 years. Greece lasted ~3000 years (I'm counting from the Myceneans to fall of Constantinople). China is still going (~5000 years). And so on.
Recognisable "European" civilisation is only around ~1500 years old. If you go by history, we've got at least another 1500 years.
Our nation (USA right?) has had many decades in its history where it seemed like things were falling apart as well, with much much greater turmoil than what we are currently experiencing.
I was deeply depressed with this attitude a year ago, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. What helped, was helping. Specifically volunteering and volunteerism. Realizing that the world doesn't revolve around my experience, and that I can make a positive affect on people's lives.
If you're worried about climate change (like I was, like I am), join a cause to address it like Citizens' Climate Lobby, the Environmental Voter Project, or something local. If you're worried about food insecurity, help at a food bank, at your local urban farming project. If you do this, you'll quickly realize that we are not alone in our feelings, and through that togetherness we are powerful.