Apocalypse Fatigue

Things We Normalize That Should Terrify Us

Welcome back to Life Intelligence. This is Week 2 of Things We Normalize That Should Terrify Us. Last week, we discussed what these things are in the context of relationships.

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The Trump Administration wants everyone to have kids. Not as many as Elon Musk, but not zero either. They think $1000 per kid born between 2026 and 2028 will make young Americans hurry up and make some. According to the recently passed Bill, companies can also invest in children's accounts up to $ 2,500 annually, which will not be counted towards income. Sounds amazing, until you find out why people are not having kids.

Spoiler alert. It's not about money only.

According to a study cited by The Guardian, the overwhelming majority of young Americans 16 – 25, across the political spectrum, worry about having kids because of climate change. 85% said they were at least moderately worried about the climate crisis. Nearly two-thirds believed "humanity is doomed.

"There was no state sample where the endorsement of climate anxiety came in less than 75%."

Axios mapped out the climate anxiety felt by many and concluded:

"Devastating hurricanes, severe drought, wildfires, extreme heat and other consequences of human-caused climate change are a growing source of anxiety for many Americans."

About 25 – 30% of millennials cite climate anxiety as a cause for not having children, alongside the increased cost of living and decreased independence.

Meanwhile, the same Bill rescinds dozens of environmental and climate-related funding streams, including grants and programs for greenhouse gas reduction, methane mitigation in oil/gas systems, environmental justice, climate data collection, funding for low-carbon building materials, EPA environmental reviews, and even species recovery plans.

It phases out most clean energy tax credits enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act: EV credits, solar/geothermal installation incentives, and other renewable-support programs. Energy analysts estimate that the law will cut new clean power capacity growth by 53–59% from 2025 to 2035, risk over half a trillion dollars in clean energy investments, cost 830,000+ jobs, and raise household energy bills by hundreds of dollars annually. All because Trump doesn't like windmills.

Simultaneously, the Bill prioritizes fossil fuel development, including new drilling on federal lands, reverses methane emission fees, and creates a 2.5% tax credit for metallurgical coal, mostly used in steel production and heavily exported.

Yes, the current Administration is actively sidelining climate change as a policy priority.

In early July 2025, the EPA under Administrator Lee Zeldin moved to revoke the 2009 "endangerment finding", the scientific and legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Without this finding, the agency would lose its authority to enforce emissions controls for vehicles, industrial facilities, and more.

Multiple executive orders, including EO 14148 and EO 14162, explicitly rescinded Biden-era climate initiatives, dismantled climate policy offices, and withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, essentially abdicating the United States' climate change leadership on the world stage.

The Administration stripped climate-related content from federal websites and replaced climate references with vague terms like "resilience," signaling an institutional erasure of the issue itself. The very website www.climate.gov now leads to a page under NOAA.

According to analysis from NRDC and Yale, "denying science no longer works, so the federal government is pretending the climate crisis doesn't exist at all."

While the Trump Administration obfuscates climate change to prevent industrial accountability, a huge percentage of Americans feel eco-distress, exo-anxiety, or even eco-grief with symptoms including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder linked to experiencing severe weather events or simply worrying about the devastation of life on Earth.

Yet, we've now normalized two things related to climate change. 1) We've become habituated to seeing natural disasters and the impact they have on the communities they hit. 2) We've normalized climate denialism as just a normal part of the political landscape and a quarky thing about people we know.

If we feel increasingly unresponsive to the terrifying images of extreme weather events, we're less likely to insist on policies to prevent or mitigate them.

And if we shrug off denialism as just "one side of the debate," we've already lost the plot.

Discussing climate change is no longer about political differences. It's become systemic gaslighting by the current government as they pull out the wiring of the fire alarm while the building smolders, then offer you a check for a future baby and a discount on your propane tank.

Meanwhile, the disasters keep coming.

The Texas floods killed over 130 people, devastating wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, and the tropical storms that battered the Carolinas devastated multiple communities. But media coverage flickered briefly then got buried beneath AI headlines, celebrity scandals, and summer sales. We doomscroll, then buy a plane ticket to Cancun. Because what else are we supposed to do?

That's the terrifying part. Not just the destruction, but our numbness to it.

Psychologists call this "apocalypse fatigue." It's what happens when our nervous systems feel so overstimulated by crisis that we retreat into distraction or dissociation. We stop reacting. We care, but caring feels useless and exhausting. So we fall into emotional triage: we normalize the unbearable and hope it won't happen to us, people we know, or our own communities.

There's wisdom in not obsessing over things we have no control over. We should stay present. But I wonder at what point staying present becomes a coping mechanism and leads to doing nothing of consequence. At what point does feeling powerless make us complicit?

I don't believe we are powerless. However, we've been conditioned to feel that way and are privileged to have options for ourselves and numerous distractions. Making individual sacrifices to protect the environment, when industry and policy pollute on a massive scale, feels like removing a tiny drop of water from the ocean. What's the point, right?

So, how do we resist normalizing what should terrify us?

1) Watch this TED talk.

2) Less doomscrolling, more local action. Less arguing with climate deniers, more amplifying those building new systems.

3) Surround ourselves with people who haven't given up. Fund creators and journalists who refuse to let the fire alarm go silent. Exercise our political agency, even if it feels like screaming in a soundproof room right now.

4) Making individual choices that make environmental sense – from what to have for lunch to where you want to build a house and how, so that you are better protected if a disaster strikes. It might seem small in the scheme of things, but it will make you feel more hopeful and stronger to keep fighting for what you believe.

Any other ideas???

Thanks for reading and for carrying.

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