In response to climate change and environmental breakdown, degrowth has become one of the key concepts in political ecology and related disciplines. Degrowth provides a critique of the ideology of growth measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a core objective for capitalist economies. It argues that degrowth is possible, desirable and necessary to halt further ecological destruction and to build socially just and ecologically sustainable societies.
Realism isn’t defeatist. We are, in fact, losing badly. That’s just the objective reality. The issue now is much more than people want to think their current ways of life can continue; that is the real risk now. It’s also true that everyone can take meaningful actions today and tomorrow to improve the situation in the future. To your point, the “well will just live even more lavish now bc there is no hope” mindset is very dangerous. But so is thinking we do not have to change. Anyone in anything like the industrialized world will have to shift how they live in the very near term.