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NoPotatoes wrote

The perfect path is already unavailable: we can’t transition away from our current state of affairs without any war, violence, or chaos, because so much war, violence, and chaos has already happened. At the same time, the worst possible path is also unavailable, because there are already people who are doing permaculture and regenerative agriculture, there are already people tending the wild, and there are already people trying to ease that transition however they can. So the future will lie somewhere between those two extremes of perfectly gradual and easy transition versus apocalyptic hellscape. That means that every single thing we do will push the outcome closer to one side or the other. Since neither extreme is possible, there is no “win” or “loss” condition. There is only how much you push it towards a gentler, more gradual, less violent outcome.

I had to read this a few times to understand. Seems he is just stating that violence/suffering is inevitable, but outright extinction is not.

If you’re alive today, then this is the calling of your life. At no point in the history of our species or any other have there been people who faced a mass extinction and were in a position to do anything about it. No creature has ever faced a calling like ours, because no creature has ever had the capacity to answer it that we now possess.

Why is he stating what my motives are or should be? Didn't he establish early in the work that humans are self interested and will put their own well being above the greater good? Is he explicitly suggesting that we set aside our needs/wants for the greater good of the world?

There are an awful lot of us right now. If we can acknowledge the crisis we’re in, a few billion brilliant imaginations just might be able to save the world.

Seems like he is contradicting himself from two paragraphs back. How can a world be saved if he already established that there is no total "win" or "loss"? Does he mean " partially saved"? And who is to say what saved even means, isn't that subjective?

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