I originally published this post as one long article, but decided to divide it into two slightly more bite-sized pieces. This is Part 1. Part 2 is here.

I recently came across a post on Reddit that said, in part:

“I’m a teen and I’m really scared for my future

“I’m so afraid of climate change. I just turned 17 not so long ago and I’m afraid I’ll never get to grow up because of the way our Earth is going.

“Most of my friends and family are apathetic, such as my parents who don’t like me talking about this stuff since they feel we can’t really change anything. My mom thinks it’s completely irreversible. I hate holding it all inside all the time. …

“I guess what I really wanna hear is it’s all gonna be ok even though it’s probably not the truth. I’m just scared. I’d appreciate any positive news or insight from those who feel the same way and how you manage it while doing everything you can. Thanks for reading.”(source)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what to say to a teenager like this young person to help them prepare for the dangerous world they are about to inherit. I concluded the best advice I could give would be to suggest some questions they need to consider. So here are four questions I believe any young person who wants to survive the 21st Century needs to ask and answer for themselves:

In Part 1:

• What predictions can you rely on?
• What will give your life meaning?

In Part 2:

• What skills and mental habits will you need?
• How will you live?

What predictions can you rely on?

There are some things that are pretty safe bets for the rest of this century. I’ve discussed many of them in detail in previous posts, so I won’t go over all the evidence that supports them here. I’ll simply say this: these are things that can either be predicted with certainty, or are likely to occur with a very high probability.

If you want to be a climate survivor, I suggest you take these seven predictions as “givens” around which you will need to plan your life. If you think of your life’s journey as a highway into the future, these are the potholes and debris in the road you will have to weave your way through. If you don’t know they’re there, or if you deny they’re there, you are much more likely to crash into them.

It’s going to get hotter

The number one thing we can rely is the fact that global warming will continue. Global average temperatures of at least 2.0°C above preindustrial levels are already baked-in, and our current lack of progress in curbing CO2 emissions implies that even hotter temperatures are coming soon. As for how much hotter, that depends on when we stop adding GHGs to the atmosphere, which is currently a big unknown. But there’s one thing you can rely on: It’s unlikely to get any cooler in your lifetime (source).

The weather is going to get more unpredictable and more extreme

As I write this, we are waiting for the first hurricane to hit California since 1939. Recently, the state was struggling through a 22-year drought. Then, this winter, we were hit with 31 atmospheric rivers in a row that dumped years worth of water on the state in weeks, resulting in record snowfall, deadly flooding, and a sudden end to years of drought restrictions (source).

We’re learning that the future isn’t going to be a simple story of unrelenting heat. It will be a story of relenting heat, interspersed with wild weather swings, including regional cold spells, torrential downpours, and unprecedented heat waves. Hurricanes in Los Angeles. Polar vortexes over Texas. Heat domes over Siberia. When it comes to weather, you must learn to expect the unexpected.

Natural disasters are going to arrive at greater and greater frequency

Along with more extreme and less predictable weather, you will see throughout your lifetime more and bigger natural disasters, as every tenth-of-a-degree of additional warming adds more heat and energy to an atmosphere already saturated with moisture released from overheated oceans. Climate change isn’t just making natural disasters worse, it’s causing them to occur more frequently and in places they rarely did before (source).

Economic inequality (income and wealth) is going to get worse

Exacerbating the impacts of weather and natural disasters will be increasing inequality in the world, both within and between nations. Inequality is a natural feature of modern capitalism because, as Thomas Piketty has shown, return on capital historically grows faster than return on labor. In other words, money makes more money sitting in little Tommy’s trust fund than any wage earner can hope to accumulate by simply working. So capitalist accumulation inevitably increases the gap between rich and poor (source).

Inequality will have massive implications for how humanity responds to climate change throughout your lifetime. It will be a highly negative force because it erodes any sense of common purpose among people facing a common threat. Inequality creates massive power differentials that provide opportunities for exploitation of the poor by the rich. It also creates incentives for the powerful to prioritize protecting their own wealth over solving collective problems of humanity writ large, like climate change. It breeds selfishness and conflict, which are counterproductive to any meaningful responses to climate change.

We will continue depleting the natural world

As if cooking the planet were not bad enough, humanity is also creating a crisis of biodiversity loss and resource depletion. This crisis tends to get less attention than climate change, but it is just as deadly, although in a different way. Climate change has one cause: increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Biodiversity loss is caused by several interacting drivers: habitat loss (converting forests, grasslands, and other natural areas to urban and agricultural uses), invasive species, overexploitation (extreme hunting and fishing pressure), pollution, and of course, global warming itself (source).

These drivers of biodiversity loss are themselves driven by human population growth and increasing rates of resource consumption per capita. The overall effect is ecological overshoot (source). This is what happens when we take more from the natural world, more quickly, than the world is capable of replenishing. For humanity during your lifetime, “stuff” is going to start running out because (a) the natural world is the ultimate source of everything humans create and consume, (b) the natural world is finite, and (c) we are reaching the upper limits of our ability to extract, grow, or manufacture many of the ingredients that underpin our global civilization (source, source).

The effects of climate change will be unevenly distributed around the planet

As we saw in stark terms this summer, our hotter world is already here. But it’s not arriving everywhere and all at once. Some areas will be hit harder, sooner, and with greater devastation than others. I’ve discussed the implications of this in two previous posts (source, source) so will not belabor the point here. Like economic inequality, uneven climate impacts will lead to uneven responses, differing calculations of national, subnational, and regional interests, and opportunities for exploitation and conflict both within and between nations.

We will run out of oil and gas

People have been predicting it for decades, but your generation will be the first to actually experience it — the end of fossil fuels. We will not run out of fossil fuels in the literal sense, by using up all our available reserves. Rather, we will stop extracting fossil fuels when they become energetically unprofitable. That will happen when the energy input required to produce a unit of energy (like a barrel of oil or a cubic meter of gas) becomes greater than the energy outputthat unit can provide. (For a deeper dive on the future of fossil fuels, see source.)

As for when this day will arrive, most scientists tracking this issue believe oil and gas will remain viable energy sources for about 50 years, while coal, should we continue burning it, could last 100–150 years (source, source).

One fact worth keeping in mind is that fossil fuels are already massively and artificially underpriced compared to their true cost. This is because governments continue to deeply subsidize the fossil fuel industry. In 2022, direct and indirect governmental subsidies to the fossil fuel companies totaled over seven trillion US dollars (source). If governments were to cut back or turn off those subsidies, perhaps in response to out-of-control climate catastrophes, our Age of Oil could end even sooner than otherwise anticipated (source).

Facing up to the hard truths

This is quite a smorgasbord of dangers and challenges you will have to confront over your lifetime. The first big obstacle you will have to face is your own mental resistance to accepting that these massive disruptions are probably inevitable and likely to occur within your lifetime. That is a very hard pill to swallow, but rest assured, those who can swallow it are going to be much better prepared to survive the 21st Century than those who continue to deny reality and hide their heads in the sand.

If there was ever a time when people needed to be “woke” to what is really happening in the world, it is now.

What will give your life meaning?

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan began developing what they called Self-Determination Theory (SDT) in the 1970s. SDT emerged out of Deci’s interest in intrinsic motivation. At a time when most psychologists believed humans could only be motivated by external triggers — rewards, threats, or punishments — Deci saw that we are often motivated to do things just because they are interesting and enjoyable — a type of motivation he called intrinsic, as opposed to outside-in motivation, which he called extrinsic (source).

Attempting to understand this behavior more deeply, Deci began searching for the underlying needs that intrinsically motivated behavior seemed to fulfill. He and Ryan discovered three motivators that appeared to represent basic or innate psychological needs (source, p. 209):

• A need for autonomy: People need to feel self-directed and in control of our actions. We are more motivated to pursue activities we voluntarily and freely choose for ourselves, as opposed to activities we feel are imposed on us by other people or external circumstances.
• A need for competence: People need to feel accomplished and capable. We are more motivated to pursue activities we feel competent to accomplish. We are also motivated to pursue activities that allow us to increase our competence through practice and repetition.
• A need for belonging: People need to feel connected to others. We are more motivated to pursue activities that make us feel closer to others and that can be pursued in a supportive social context. This need is called relatedness by Deci and Ryan.

As developed in the 1990s and 2000s, Self-Determination Theory took the concept of basic needs much further, arguing that these three needs were not just “nice to have” but were innate, essential, and universal. A person’s ability to fulfill them, the evidence indicated, was a fundamental source of psychological well-being.

Throughout their research, Deci and Ryan studied how the goals people pursue on a daily basis and throughout their lives fulfill basic needs and contribute (or not) to personal wellbeing. In these studies, they found compelling evidence that:

“placing strong relative importance on intrinsic aspirations was positively associated with well-being indicators such as self-esteem, self-actualization, and the inverse of depression and anxiety, whereas placing strong relative importance on extrinsic aspirations was negatively related to these well-being indicators.” (source, p. 75)

How do these findings relate to your life? Although the world around you is likely to get more unpredictable and chaotic as the century progresses, a good life is not beyond your grasp. SDT says you can lead a life that is meaningful, fulfilling, and satisfying, provided you concentrate on pursuing your intrinsic aspirations and resist the siren-song of extrinsic aspirations. This will not be easy, because the job of modern marketing and consumer culture is to instill in you a gnawing desire for stuff you do not have (source).

On to Part 2 …