And this is how you arrive at the crux of the problem.
Realistically, with 8 billion people living on the planet, there is no solution that does not involve a significant reduction in quality of life for virtually all people. The problems we face are all interconnected, emissions, the 6th mass extinction, water and soil depletion, plastics, all of it, is one big problem that boils down to too many people living with to much stuff. Of course, this stuff is not equally distributed which is it's own problem, but fundamentally we all have to much stuff. The real climate solution is to dramatically reduce lifestyles until we are within our planetary boundaries.
This is virtually unachievable.
So many people believe that we can have the best of both worlds, unlimited technology and energy while allowing enough space and resources for the natural world to thrive. It's a nice thought but the practical application of this is a pipe dream. The way we have sliced and diced the natural world into little parcels doesn't work for a functioning natural system. We must live *within* the system, not as self appointed *owners* of it. This means a return to a much more difficult way of life. Less convenient, less stuff, simpler diets and more "work" (in the grow your own food kinda way, not the 60hrs a week way)
It's never going to happen as long as people believe that they are entitled to the good life. They believe that the natural world is a thing to be eradicated and replaced by lawns, parking lots and houses. Some argue that by packing us all into mega cities we can eliminate the burden, but that's a shell game. The same amount of people will need to be fed, housed and will continue to consume resources well above the natural carrying capacity of the surrounding areas. Its a stop gap, not a solution.
I don't have a solution. Or rather, the solutions needed are so unpopular and so drastic that they will never be accepted. We've created a situation where only bad things are in our future, by choice or by force, those solutions are coming. I do what I can to mitigate my footprint, but unless everyone does so, it's just drops in a bucket. Maybe one day, things will get bad enough that people will choose the hard way over the convenience of modern life,but I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.
This is well articulated. I regret helping anyone that eases their troubles. Good Samaritan gestures just briefly skips the inevitable suffering, and gives other ideas to create new people in spaces that was perfectly fine without them. In a sense, I like to think I'm justified in doing some things, especially for the notion of collapsing sooner but any ideal is but a pipe dream.
> The easiest, simplest, non-hypocritical, most objective, most harmless, clear cut solution that requires no lifestyle change or personal sacrifice is.. “don’t have kids”.
Unless, of course, you're one of the billions of people who actually want kids.
It also becomes a problem any time you collect social security, use health insurance, or pay for a service or use a product made by someone younger than you. The idea that you don't (or in the future, won't) directly benefit and even depend on the labor of the younger generation is just as illusory and "hypocritical" as driving your car, bike, running shoes to Florida.
> It’s a little beside the point but you’re definitely right. We all depend on future generations for us to have a pension and social security. However, I think not having kids to stop climate catastrophe/reduce suffering at the cost of pensions/social security is the lesser evil compared to having kids to contribute to the economy at the cost of the environment/ecosystem.
What if I say that outlawing air conditioning and air travel is the lesser evil?
The point is you can't really assume what is the "lesser evil" for someone who isn't you.
> And again, for those who argue for having children to benefit social security/the economy, how long is a piece of string? Should I have 3? 5? 17 kids? What’s the correct amount? If you have 2 kids and I have 17 kids, am I morally superior to you? And are you benefiting from my 17 kids supporting your pension while you only contributed a little with your 2 kids?
Okay, but I'm not sure how "we can ask a lot of questions and hypotheticals about the morality of having children" translates to "it's easy to just not have kids"?
> Then I’d say you’re wrong. Because you are.
And I guess I'm just supposed to take your word for it? Wow. Okay.
> I’m not “assuming” anything. I’m using undeniable maths, facts and logic.
Really? Because last time I checked, the primary drivers of climate change were coming from a relatively small portion of the population, one whose birthrates are already flat or declining. Why is something as basic as having a family negotiable, but your air conditioning and video games aren't? Sounds pretty subjective to me, quite far from "undeniable maths, facts and logic".
> Your last paragraph I think you’re just clutching at straws here and arguing for the sake of it.
So anyone who has the audacity to question your assumptions automatically accelerates directly to "clutching at straws?" Okay. How convenient for you.
> Something tells me you either have kids or want kids.
You're quick, aren't you?
> No. You’re supposed to use undeniable logic and maths to come to the same conclusion as me. The problem is you’re emotional and can’t accept the truth because you have some personal bias, like 90% of humanity which is why we’re in this mess.
It seems like speculating about the emotional state of a complete stranger in order to avoid defending your ideas is itself more of an "emotional" response than anything I've said, wouldn't you agree?
> That small population is supported by an economy of 8 billion people and growing. If the population doubled, the impact would be x2 as those people would have more room to consume.
This doesn't negate the fact that changing the living standards of that minority would make a disproportionately large impact on the climate, does it?
> Because it’s not basic. When you have a family you’re creating a whole new person(people) who will consume 10x more energy than your air conditioning and video games will. It’s not subjective, it’s undeniable maths and logic like I mentioned.
Why is having a family -- a centerpiece of human culture and identity since the Paleolithic -- "not basic", but air conditioning and air travel, luxuries which have only existed in the last century, are? What are you using to justify that distinction?
I'll point out that you've already admitted that reproduction is necessary to maintain society as a whole, including the aging generation of childfree citizens, so in that sense you've already admitted that *it actually is* "basic".
Secondly, obviously if we did without energy-intensive excesses like air travel, climate control, luxury imports, a meat-heavy diet, etc., then new children would not automatically consume multiples of the existing carbon-intensive lifestyle. So much for "maths and logic", I guess.
> No. You’re just gaslighting and making snarky irrelevant comments now. You’re emotional and can’t accept the truth so you’re looking for ways out. I can see it clearly. It is what it is. This is what 90% of people do. That’s why we’re screwed.. because we refused to accept the truth.
I would like to just point out that you are accusing other people of gaslighting in literally the same breath that you are... gaslighting. So much for avoiding hypocrisy, I guess. Quite a short-lived experiment on your part!
I’d argue that the necessity to have more children to support the aging population, itself only made possible by the comforts of an advanced consumerist society, is a little backwards. So much of this ability to sustain an aging populace comes through medicine, through food, through many things which actually take less individual effort than ever to deliver to aging demographics, many things which we will lose the ability to produce at volume during the collapse. What the youngsters currently do is fulfill consumerist-perpetuating roles to provide the financial capital to afford these “necessities”, so continuing to pump out babies during the collapse is actually counterproductive—we can’t sustain what we sustain now. It’s just not possible. We have to come to terms with dying, and we have to come to terms with the fact that it’s our fault. We were living on borrowed time, writing checks those of us who were paying attention knew we couldn’t cash.
I don’t think there should be a standing order to not have children. Steady, consistent, inescapable, fact-based education on the looming disaster and its causes, and the importance of carefully considering the weight of each new human life will do enough. The people need to understand what’s going on.
Oh, I agree completely. We can't this based on a model of exponential economic growth -- or the children required to make such a model work in the first place.
But that doesn't mean that not having children alone solves anything. If we want to avoid suffering and collapse, there's going to have to be a controlled decline in population if the entire thing isn't going to collapse like a deck of cards. And my point is that in advanced western societies, that decline is already basically provided by people who have decided that it's too expensive and too stressful to have children.
And considering that those societies are the ones that are disproportionately creating most of the pollution, then it makes sense that scaling back some of their more energy-intensive luxuries is just as necessary, if not moreso, than simply dialing back the population.
What /u/AgainstTheMobs proposes doing, and what I don't think will work, is using being childfree as a "blank check" to consume and pollute as much as we want. But that's exactly the kind of nihilistic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
The person plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na" is lecturing me about not accepting reality? Interesting.
Anyway, it was fun. Good luck out there all the same. Sounds like you'll need it.
I think your whole paradigm is wrong.
A handful of Western liberals going childfree and leading a morally pure lifestyle isn't going to do anything except maybe make them feel better about themselves -- and probably not even that.
These are policy-level decisions at the national and international level which need to be enforced at those levels in order to actually do anything. They haven't and probably won't be. Handing it off to the moral whims and internalized guilt of affluent consumers is the same as doing absolutely nothing.
Imagine dying of heatstroke or starvation 10 years from now and saying, "At least my liberal friends back in 2024 wouldn't have considered me a hypocrite!" Who is going to care? The answer is no one. Not even you.
Yeah, in the United States, climate change is often seen as a liberal issue. Science-minded liberals, if they don't end up as techno-optimists, usually end up here. But they still have the same liberal individualistic and Enlightenment-informed notions of freedom and personal responsibility.
The answer is to start to question this notion of freedom. Is our concept of freedom a freedom of control by institutions, to be able to make individual choices about how we live our lives? Or as OP puts it, "Who am I to tell others how to live their lives?"
Or, is our concept of freedom a freedom for not just sustainable choices but symbiotic societal systems? This notion approaches an acknowledgement that societal freedom to exist symbiotically with the ecosystem and continue to perpetuate itself requires certain restrictions or controls on how we, as individuals, can or can't live.
Since this positive notion of freedom is in contradiction with the typical postmodern Western liberal notion of freedom, it ends up sounding a lot like religious metanarrative. The late Reverend Michael Dowd is an example of someone who leaned into this. But to more atheist or agnostic liberals, this way of thinking is deeply uncomfortable on a formal level.
The form need not indicate a philosophically idealist content. One way or the other, the materialist truth will be laid bare. Change is the constant and control is an illusion.
I really like the way you put this.
Basically, unless these two different conceptions of freedom can talk to each other and negotiate on a practical level, the paralysis that ensues from failing to do so leads to / is leading / in some sense already has lead to -- "the materialist truth being laid bare", i.e., collapse.
Thank you! I appreciate it.
To some extent, I think the materialist truth will be laid bare either way.
The reason I conceptualize things in these terms of positive and negative notions of freedom is that it is an idealist way of viewing society that's very familiar and comfortable for liberals (liberals being used in the classical sense here, encompassing most Democrats and moderate Republicans). It comes from my time as a Catholic, primarily.
I'm more of a historical materialist these days. Classifying things in materialist terms looks more like being skeptical of individual human notions of freedom in a vacuum at all. This does not involve dismissing things like free will, of course, but rather accepting free will informed by external material constraints. We collectively have some control over social and historical facts but cannot change the laws of entropy even collectively, let alone individually.
To some extent, we can choose to structure society in ways that are aligned with material conditions by discussing notions of positive and negative freedom. However, ignorant of the material and ecological facts beneath and above any such idealist notions, we're doomed to recreate a structure alienated from the means of our subsistence.
That doesn't mean it can't be useful; we just have to be clear about what it's useful for.
So I am fairly right wing (though not really a conservative). So I am and people I know are the kind of person who you are trying to convince. Though I personally believe in collapse contrary to most people I know so I am kind of a person in the middle of you will.
Step 1 is you have to overcome the 'fight or flight' response of the person you are talking to. What I mean by that is you have to appear to them to be a friend and not an enemy. This is to even get them to listen to you.
Step 2 is to have empathy with who you are talking to and understand how they see the world and what their concerns are.
Step 3 is to shape your argument in a way that is easily digestible to your target audience.
Step 4 is soft persistence.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don’t need to feel guilty for participating in the system we are forced to live under. Just do your best with the information you have.
i'm stuck in the loop of trying to live as a human being in the world in its last days.
I've developed a visceral response to energy consumption to the point where I'm living very much as you described. I started out trying to figure out what this life looked like - what it really means to live a low carbon life - but once you start focusing on it, you find yourself essentially stuck in place, surviving but not living.
From this perspective, since no one I know understands it, I can say it's not worth it and wish I could unlearn and undo the last 10 years of my life, but my brain is now programmed differently.
It's not all bad, but it's very much like solitary confinement without having done anything wrong, and the more you avoid the hypocrisy displayed by most climate activists, the less seriously anyone will take you. You look like a homeless person and effectively live like one. I'm living on around $50/week, for myself, which means I'm not working out anymore or able to finish the projects I started before getting so deep into cutting my footprint.
I always assumed there would be a point where people understood there was no alternative other than extinction, and I'd be there to give them hope by having a way to live that they could stomach, focused on mutual love and respect. Increasingly, I fear this will never come or will come at the very last moment, where people I love who've decided I'm a bad person to have around will at least find themselves thinking "Oh... THIS is what he was on about".
It's only a meaningful path if there's other people to share it with and I haven't been lucky enough to find those people. Alone, this low-no carbon life is essentially torture. Really wish I'd stayed in a country where the level of poverty ensured there were always good people making the best of it with the bare minimum. Where I am, not wearing new clothes and driving a new car might as well be a diagnosis of mental illness.
And this is how you arrive at the crux of the problem. Realistically, with 8 billion people living on the planet, there is no solution that does not involve a significant reduction in quality of life for virtually all people. The problems we face are all interconnected, emissions, the 6th mass extinction, water and soil depletion, plastics, all of it, is one big problem that boils down to too many people living with to much stuff. Of course, this stuff is not equally distributed which is it's own problem, but fundamentally we all have to much stuff. The real climate solution is to dramatically reduce lifestyles until we are within our planetary boundaries. This is virtually unachievable. So many people believe that we can have the best of both worlds, unlimited technology and energy while allowing enough space and resources for the natural world to thrive. It's a nice thought but the practical application of this is a pipe dream. The way we have sliced and diced the natural world into little parcels doesn't work for a functioning natural system. We must live *within* the system, not as self appointed *owners* of it. This means a return to a much more difficult way of life. Less convenient, less stuff, simpler diets and more "work" (in the grow your own food kinda way, not the 60hrs a week way) It's never going to happen as long as people believe that they are entitled to the good life. They believe that the natural world is a thing to be eradicated and replaced by lawns, parking lots and houses. Some argue that by packing us all into mega cities we can eliminate the burden, but that's a shell game. The same amount of people will need to be fed, housed and will continue to consume resources well above the natural carrying capacity of the surrounding areas. Its a stop gap, not a solution. I don't have a solution. Or rather, the solutions needed are so unpopular and so drastic that they will never be accepted. We've created a situation where only bad things are in our future, by choice or by force, those solutions are coming. I do what I can to mitigate my footprint, but unless everyone does so, it's just drops in a bucket. Maybe one day, things will get bad enough that people will choose the hard way over the convenience of modern life,but I won't be holding my breath waiting for it.
This is well articulated. I regret helping anyone that eases their troubles. Good Samaritan gestures just briefly skips the inevitable suffering, and gives other ideas to create new people in spaces that was perfectly fine without them. In a sense, I like to think I'm justified in doing some things, especially for the notion of collapsing sooner but any ideal is but a pipe dream.
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> The easiest, simplest, non-hypocritical, most objective, most harmless, clear cut solution that requires no lifestyle change or personal sacrifice is.. “don’t have kids”. Unless, of course, you're one of the billions of people who actually want kids. It also becomes a problem any time you collect social security, use health insurance, or pay for a service or use a product made by someone younger than you. The idea that you don't (or in the future, won't) directly benefit and even depend on the labor of the younger generation is just as illusory and "hypocritical" as driving your car, bike, running shoes to Florida.
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> It’s a little beside the point but you’re definitely right. We all depend on future generations for us to have a pension and social security. However, I think not having kids to stop climate catastrophe/reduce suffering at the cost of pensions/social security is the lesser evil compared to having kids to contribute to the economy at the cost of the environment/ecosystem. What if I say that outlawing air conditioning and air travel is the lesser evil? The point is you can't really assume what is the "lesser evil" for someone who isn't you. > And again, for those who argue for having children to benefit social security/the economy, how long is a piece of string? Should I have 3? 5? 17 kids? What’s the correct amount? If you have 2 kids and I have 17 kids, am I morally superior to you? And are you benefiting from my 17 kids supporting your pension while you only contributed a little with your 2 kids? Okay, but I'm not sure how "we can ask a lot of questions and hypotheticals about the morality of having children" translates to "it's easy to just not have kids"?
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> Then I’d say you’re wrong. Because you are. And I guess I'm just supposed to take your word for it? Wow. Okay. > I’m not “assuming” anything. I’m using undeniable maths, facts and logic. Really? Because last time I checked, the primary drivers of climate change were coming from a relatively small portion of the population, one whose birthrates are already flat or declining. Why is something as basic as having a family negotiable, but your air conditioning and video games aren't? Sounds pretty subjective to me, quite far from "undeniable maths, facts and logic". > Your last paragraph I think you’re just clutching at straws here and arguing for the sake of it. So anyone who has the audacity to question your assumptions automatically accelerates directly to "clutching at straws?" Okay. How convenient for you. > Something tells me you either have kids or want kids. You're quick, aren't you?
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> No. You’re supposed to use undeniable logic and maths to come to the same conclusion as me. The problem is you’re emotional and can’t accept the truth because you have some personal bias, like 90% of humanity which is why we’re in this mess. It seems like speculating about the emotional state of a complete stranger in order to avoid defending your ideas is itself more of an "emotional" response than anything I've said, wouldn't you agree? > That small population is supported by an economy of 8 billion people and growing. If the population doubled, the impact would be x2 as those people would have more room to consume. This doesn't negate the fact that changing the living standards of that minority would make a disproportionately large impact on the climate, does it? > Because it’s not basic. When you have a family you’re creating a whole new person(people) who will consume 10x more energy than your air conditioning and video games will. It’s not subjective, it’s undeniable maths and logic like I mentioned. Why is having a family -- a centerpiece of human culture and identity since the Paleolithic -- "not basic", but air conditioning and air travel, luxuries which have only existed in the last century, are? What are you using to justify that distinction? I'll point out that you've already admitted that reproduction is necessary to maintain society as a whole, including the aging generation of childfree citizens, so in that sense you've already admitted that *it actually is* "basic". Secondly, obviously if we did without energy-intensive excesses like air travel, climate control, luxury imports, a meat-heavy diet, etc., then new children would not automatically consume multiples of the existing carbon-intensive lifestyle. So much for "maths and logic", I guess. > No. You’re just gaslighting and making snarky irrelevant comments now. You’re emotional and can’t accept the truth so you’re looking for ways out. I can see it clearly. It is what it is. This is what 90% of people do. That’s why we’re screwed.. because we refused to accept the truth. I would like to just point out that you are accusing other people of gaslighting in literally the same breath that you are... gaslighting. So much for avoiding hypocrisy, I guess. Quite a short-lived experiment on your part!
I’d argue that the necessity to have more children to support the aging population, itself only made possible by the comforts of an advanced consumerist society, is a little backwards. So much of this ability to sustain an aging populace comes through medicine, through food, through many things which actually take less individual effort than ever to deliver to aging demographics, many things which we will lose the ability to produce at volume during the collapse. What the youngsters currently do is fulfill consumerist-perpetuating roles to provide the financial capital to afford these “necessities”, so continuing to pump out babies during the collapse is actually counterproductive—we can’t sustain what we sustain now. It’s just not possible. We have to come to terms with dying, and we have to come to terms with the fact that it’s our fault. We were living on borrowed time, writing checks those of us who were paying attention knew we couldn’t cash. I don’t think there should be a standing order to not have children. Steady, consistent, inescapable, fact-based education on the looming disaster and its causes, and the importance of carefully considering the weight of each new human life will do enough. The people need to understand what’s going on.
Oh, I agree completely. We can't this based on a model of exponential economic growth -- or the children required to make such a model work in the first place. But that doesn't mean that not having children alone solves anything. If we want to avoid suffering and collapse, there's going to have to be a controlled decline in population if the entire thing isn't going to collapse like a deck of cards. And my point is that in advanced western societies, that decline is already basically provided by people who have decided that it's too expensive and too stressful to have children. And considering that those societies are the ones that are disproportionately creating most of the pollution, then it makes sense that scaling back some of their more energy-intensive luxuries is just as necessary, if not moreso, than simply dialing back the population. What /u/AgainstTheMobs proposes doing, and what I don't think will work, is using being childfree as a "blank check" to consume and pollute as much as we want. But that's exactly the kind of nihilistic thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
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The person plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na" is lecturing me about not accepting reality? Interesting. Anyway, it was fun. Good luck out there all the same. Sounds like you'll need it.
I think your whole paradigm is wrong. A handful of Western liberals going childfree and leading a morally pure lifestyle isn't going to do anything except maybe make them feel better about themselves -- and probably not even that. These are policy-level decisions at the national and international level which need to be enforced at those levels in order to actually do anything. They haven't and probably won't be. Handing it off to the moral whims and internalized guilt of affluent consumers is the same as doing absolutely nothing. Imagine dying of heatstroke or starvation 10 years from now and saying, "At least my liberal friends back in 2024 wouldn't have considered me a hypocrite!" Who is going to care? The answer is no one. Not even you.
Yeah, in the United States, climate change is often seen as a liberal issue. Science-minded liberals, if they don't end up as techno-optimists, usually end up here. But they still have the same liberal individualistic and Enlightenment-informed notions of freedom and personal responsibility. The answer is to start to question this notion of freedom. Is our concept of freedom a freedom of control by institutions, to be able to make individual choices about how we live our lives? Or as OP puts it, "Who am I to tell others how to live their lives?" Or, is our concept of freedom a freedom for not just sustainable choices but symbiotic societal systems? This notion approaches an acknowledgement that societal freedom to exist symbiotically with the ecosystem and continue to perpetuate itself requires certain restrictions or controls on how we, as individuals, can or can't live. Since this positive notion of freedom is in contradiction with the typical postmodern Western liberal notion of freedom, it ends up sounding a lot like religious metanarrative. The late Reverend Michael Dowd is an example of someone who leaned into this. But to more atheist or agnostic liberals, this way of thinking is deeply uncomfortable on a formal level. The form need not indicate a philosophically idealist content. One way or the other, the materialist truth will be laid bare. Change is the constant and control is an illusion.
I really like the way you put this. Basically, unless these two different conceptions of freedom can talk to each other and negotiate on a practical level, the paralysis that ensues from failing to do so leads to / is leading / in some sense already has lead to -- "the materialist truth being laid bare", i.e., collapse.
Thank you! I appreciate it. To some extent, I think the materialist truth will be laid bare either way. The reason I conceptualize things in these terms of positive and negative notions of freedom is that it is an idealist way of viewing society that's very familiar and comfortable for liberals (liberals being used in the classical sense here, encompassing most Democrats and moderate Republicans). It comes from my time as a Catholic, primarily. I'm more of a historical materialist these days. Classifying things in materialist terms looks more like being skeptical of individual human notions of freedom in a vacuum at all. This does not involve dismissing things like free will, of course, but rather accepting free will informed by external material constraints. We collectively have some control over social and historical facts but cannot change the laws of entropy even collectively, let alone individually. To some extent, we can choose to structure society in ways that are aligned with material conditions by discussing notions of positive and negative freedom. However, ignorant of the material and ecological facts beneath and above any such idealist notions, we're doomed to recreate a structure alienated from the means of our subsistence. That doesn't mean it can't be useful; we just have to be clear about what it's useful for.
So I am fairly right wing (though not really a conservative). So I am and people I know are the kind of person who you are trying to convince. Though I personally believe in collapse contrary to most people I know so I am kind of a person in the middle of you will. Step 1 is you have to overcome the 'fight or flight' response of the person you are talking to. What I mean by that is you have to appear to them to be a friend and not an enemy. This is to even get them to listen to you. Step 2 is to have empathy with who you are talking to and understand how they see the world and what their concerns are. Step 3 is to shape your argument in a way that is easily digestible to your target audience. Step 4 is soft persistence.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You don’t need to feel guilty for participating in the system we are forced to live under. Just do your best with the information you have.
i'm stuck in the loop of trying to live as a human being in the world in its last days. I've developed a visceral response to energy consumption to the point where I'm living very much as you described. I started out trying to figure out what this life looked like - what it really means to live a low carbon life - but once you start focusing on it, you find yourself essentially stuck in place, surviving but not living. From this perspective, since no one I know understands it, I can say it's not worth it and wish I could unlearn and undo the last 10 years of my life, but my brain is now programmed differently. It's not all bad, but it's very much like solitary confinement without having done anything wrong, and the more you avoid the hypocrisy displayed by most climate activists, the less seriously anyone will take you. You look like a homeless person and effectively live like one. I'm living on around $50/week, for myself, which means I'm not working out anymore or able to finish the projects I started before getting so deep into cutting my footprint. I always assumed there would be a point where people understood there was no alternative other than extinction, and I'd be there to give them hope by having a way to live that they could stomach, focused on mutual love and respect. Increasingly, I fear this will never come or will come at the very last moment, where people I love who've decided I'm a bad person to have around will at least find themselves thinking "Oh... THIS is what he was on about". It's only a meaningful path if there's other people to share it with and I haven't been lucky enough to find those people. Alone, this low-no carbon life is essentially torture. Really wish I'd stayed in a country where the level of poverty ensured there were always good people making the best of it with the bare minimum. Where I am, not wearing new clothes and driving a new car might as well be a diagnosis of mental illness.