Drought and massive sudden influxes desperate migrants are the big looming specters for both southern Europe and Australia.

The USA is peerless as a place to be rich. It's an increasingly hellish place to be poor.

Agreed. The premise of this question is absurd, because there are too many unknowns, and there's no such thing as complete or guaranteed safety. The best place to be is going to vary a lot based on what kind of catastrophic event happens first, how the world responds to it, and on an individual level, what sorts of hardship you're willing and able to ride out.

Even you identify some r/RemotePlaces where a person like you would thrive, and is likely to be less hard hit by any of the likely apocalyptic scenarios, the problem then becomes that you certainly won't be the only one headed there. Costs of living and competition for basic resources will skyrocket.

The whole notion of “externalities” — recipients of one’s actions that can be safely disregarded and walked away from without consequence, troubles me deeply, and very much puts the “dismal” in “dismal science”. We clearly evolved in a world where externalities abounded, and could be counted on. Is our species capable of handling a world where there aren’t, and cannot be, any externalities? I hope so, but I’m not at all sure.

Didn't the Japanese Ministry of Health just declare an official end to the necessity of public mask wearing? Whoops.

And I’m exactly the opposite — a lifelong theist, who is skeptical that the Twelve Step programs should be the gold standard, let alone the be-all-end-all, of addiction recovery. And nevertheless, you and I more or less agree on this matter, lol. Way too much black-and-white thinking and bandwagon side-taking these days, and it’s frankly refreshing to find people and spaces where that’s not the case. All the best to you this new year, dude. ❤️

Maybe it’s just the subs I subscribe to, but I can barely allude to the Twelve Step programs without starting a circlejerk about how appalling ineffective, culty, and offensive to folks’ atheist sensibilities all these programs are. I mean yeah, they’re not for everyone. Under no circumstances should anyone be mandated or court-ordered to attend one. But there are people who owe their successful recovery to them, for some people they are effective, and there’s not a lot to lose by giving them a try.

Yep. If there’s one line of speech that sums up what depression feels like, it’s “There is nothing I can do.”

Source: Am a physician and have suffered from depression

I'm surprised to not yet see the term cognitive dissonance in the comment chain at all, because that's basically what the author of this article means by "fragmentation". It sounds like he's saying that cognitive dissonance is stressful, and stress increases the likelihood of giving into temptation, in an attempt to relieve stress. This seems pretty simple and sensible to me. Cognitive dissonance is really a form of double bind: "I can't (or shouldn't) but I must." And double binds are the wellspring of stress, according to every good psychologist I've spoken with. They're not entirely avoidable, but they can be kept to a tolerable minimum.

I'm pretty sure this is why the Serenity Prayer is so central to the Twelve Step programs — it's an attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance and double binds that tend to underly addiction in the first place.

I cite the above with much trepidation, because I'm well aware of how despicable the Twelve Step programs are to the majority of Redditors. I'm not saying I necessarily endorse them. I think they work for some people in some situations, but definitely not all. I'm just making a point about the rationale behind one of their most popular mantras.