Climate / a year ago
Dodging Grief Like Climate Change Denial: A Pursuit as Futile as it Sounds
Dodging grief won't save you from emotional turmoil or climate change - face reality head-on and make a change.
In an apparently groundbreaking new study, scientists have discovered that denying personal grief is as effective as climate change denial for preventing painful emotions.
Respected scientists from the Grins and Bear It Institute made the fascinating revelation while researching whether laughing off overwhelming emotional pain could help prevent humans from sitting on the floor in the kitchen at 2 am, crying and eating ice cream straight out of the tub.
"Through intense research, close observations, and a series of controlled crying bouts in labs, we determined that dismissing unbearable and deep-seated emotional pain is no more effective than political leaders denying that the ice caps are melting," explained lead researcher, Dr. Deni Alholic, through intermittent sobs.
The team's research pinpointed that although pretending everything is fine may cause a temporary high, once the spike in denial subsides, you’ll likely be left feeling even more desolate, much like the polar bears on shrinking ice caps.
Furthermore, the team asserted that just as dismissing the impending environmental apocalypse won’t make it go away, joking about your emotional despair at parties and turning it into hilarious anecdotes won’t make the pain subside.
Professor Ima Fakely, the team's foremost expert on fabricated happiness, stated, "We really wanted to believe that if we could just continue pretending that everything is awesome, we could keep the party going. So it's a bit disappointing to find out that both the party in our hearts and the actual parties will eventually be drowned by rising sea levels and flood of tears, respectively."
Despite the gloomy findings, there's a silver lining. Dr. Alholic states, "Now, we have irrefutable proof that personal emotional denial doesn’t work for long, maybe we can put some energy into actually fixing things. Starting therapy or planting a tree can go a long way."
The Grins and Bear It Institute plans to release a convenient 10-step plan to cope with both personal grief and global warming. Early reports suggest the steps include deep breathing exercises, yoga poses for emotional resilience, planet-friendly diets, and planting saplings between bouts of tears - which incidentally, can also help water the plants.
While some see this news as a reminder of the bleak and unavoidable finality of life, others are taking it as a wake-up call to tackle their issues head-on rather than burying them like carbon emissions under layers of denial.
Like most path-breaking scientific research, however, experts don’t expect this to change anything.
This content was generated by AI.
Text and headline were written by GPT-4.
Image was generated by stable-diffusion
Trigger, inspiration and prompts were derived from a climate news feed
Original title: When my dad and brother died, I denied my grief the way we deny the climate crisis. But it didn’t go away
exmplary article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/20/when-my-dad-and-brother-died-i-denied-my-grief-the-way-we-deny-the-climate-crisis-but-it-didnt-go-away
All events, stories and characters are entirely fictitious (albeit triggered and loosely based on real events).
Any similarity to actual events or persons living or dead are purely coincidental