It's really awful that people have encouraged this type of anxiety so much; I hear this sort of sentiment on a regular basis from intelligent, well-educated young people who are utterly demoralized.
I'd recommend turning the news off and buckling down to work at making your own life better. Firstly, things are not as bad as they are made out to be. Secondly, there are a lot of people trying to gain by inflating this sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Thirdly, if you take care of yourself and keep your shit in order, you'll be better setup to deal with anything that does come.
I'm genuinely curious, who do you think is "trying to gain" by pointing out the (really quite dire, IMHO) looming crises on several fronts?
From where I sit, activists have been trying to spur movement on major environmental and social problems for decades now, and getting basically nowhere. The people who are getting rich are the ones who have been doing well under the status quo.
Companies selling consumer products - the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you might as well drink a White Claw, buy a Prada bag, and eat a Popeye's chicken sandwich. Damn the future, spend now.
Politicians - if you can pump up a crisis, and present yourself as the solution to that crisis, gold and power flows into your hands.
Ok, I can maybe give you consumer products, but you could equally argue that they benefit as much from happy complacency as from despair.
Have any politicians in the West in the last three decades run successfully on a hard-environmentalism and anti-poverty campaign?
The crisis that's been political gold recently has been human migration, but it doesn't seem to me that the voters animated by that issue are feeling anxious and despondent. (Maybe they are, it's a little hard for me to relate to that mindset) They seem absolutely furious and enjoying their revanchist political power.
Journalists and politicians of course. Journalists because that kind of stuff drives eyeballs which result in ad clicks and subscriptions if they have a paywall and thus money. Politicians because it grabs people's attentions which hopefully then results in them getting voted into office.
I'd recommend turning the news off and buckling down to work at making your own life better. Firstly, things are not as bad as they are made out to be. Secondly, there are a lot of people trying to gain by inflating this sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Thirdly, if you take care of yourself and keep your shit in order, you'll be better setup to deal with anything that does come.