I’m not depressed (at the moment, well maybe a little), just feeling philosophical.
Edit: the idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?
Just why?
I’m not trying to convince you on this, but this is my personal belief:
There are runaway reactions already being triggered in the atmosphere that will make the planet hotter and hotter without stopping or slowing down for millions of years. Where are you going to live when the minimum temperature is 60C or higher? A difference of 30C or so is enough to make life impossible for us but isn’t even a rounding error compared to the temperature range of a planet. Look at Mars.
Will it happen in the next few centuries or even millennia? No. But those timescales are miniscule compared to the life of the Earth or the lifecycle of an entire species.
We will be the cause of not just climate “change”, but pretty much a life reset. Like the asteroid. EVERY animal larger than 10 or so cm will die. There’s no way out of it. This is the great filter.
It might be interesting to you that the total number of humans who have lived and died is about 110 billion. So in the last 100 years or so 10% of all humans who ever existed were born.
And regarding the warming for millions of years, I think we had multiple periods on earth with higher CO2 levels. No humans existed back then but life in general was quite fine. We are at about 400 ppm right now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Not to be too optimistic, we are heading for an unprecedented crisis. But reducing emissions matters because we are not going to go inevitably extinct.