People Are Sharing The Things We Should All Be Panicking About, But No One Seems To Care

User WaitingOutTheFlood posted to the popular Ask Reddit page to ask, “What should everyone be panicking about right now but no one seems to care?” and honestly, these were pretty wild. Here are people’s most interesting opinions:

1. “Health insurance companies are acquiring one another at an ALARMING rate. We’re going single payer, but not in the way we’d want and without any of the conversations that should be happening.”

—u/lucylately

“On the healthcare front: People should be paying attention to legislation going after HIPAA. Last year, there was a case in Texas. I think there have been a few other attempts/suggestions to dismantle it. With Roe v. Wade, a cornerstone for creating HIPAA, gone, it’s more vulnerable than ever.”

—u/porcelaincatstatue

2. “Literacy rates are dropping across the United States. Many students slip through the educational system with inferior reading comprehension skills. Functional illiteracy is a real thing, and it’s spreading.”

—u/mastamyagi

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3. “Water scarcity is the big one. Huge regions are running out of reliable fresh water, but it is not treated with the same urgency as other crises. Aquifers are being drained faster than they can refill, rivers are shrinking, and climate change is making droughts worse. It ties directly to food security because farming depends on water access.”

—u/fernandoquin

“For example, those mega plants made by companies like Meta that suck up all the water and leave communities with no water.”

—u/bwoah07_gp2

—u/Pythonixx

5. “Rent; more specifically, the qualifications needed to rent, minimum wage amounts, and cost of living overall. I feel awful for single parents trying their hardest to make ends meet, and can’t make 3x the rent to get qualified for the size they need (even if they could afford it), yet still making too much to qualify for income-based housing. It’s a big cycle of crap.”

—u/anonymous0271

6. “Consumerism and the mounting piles of waste and clothing everywhere from ‘disposable brands.’ E-waste from electronics because companies are intentionally using glue where they didn’t before to make it impossible to repair, thus making consumers buy more, more, more!”

—u/Fit_Illustrator9174

“My mother’s husband literally fixed washing machines for a living for 40 years. Their 2-year-old machine broke last year, and he knew what was wrong, so of course he opened it up to fix it easily.

He couldn’t get in; everything was glued, and the only way to get to the bit to repair was by smashing it apart with a hammer.

He was absolutely fuming at having to buy a new one.”

—u/Mediocre_Sprinkles

“This is why right to repair is so important, and why corporations keep spending billions lobbying against it. Political ‘donations’ (legal bribery) need to end.”

—u/hornethacker97

7. “Honestly, probably how much personal data we’re giving away online. Like, yeah, it seems boring, but it’s wild how much stuff companies track and sell without most people even realizing it.”

—u/BackgroundWar5683

“I applied for a mortgage. In less than a week, I became the target of multiple scams claiming to be ‘the underwriting team’ needing more information to finalize my loan. I get at least three calls a day. I know purchasing a home is public record (which I’m not sure I 100% agree with), but the fact that a hard inquiry on my credit report triggers scam calls before I’m even approved for a loan is extremely worrying. We’re essentially slaves to the credit bureaus, and yet they are allowed to sell our data without second thought.”

—u/isthisdearabby

“Law enforcement can get around the need for a warrant by just buying your info from a data broker. They don’t need to go through all the trouble to get a warrant to break into your phone and find the passwords to your socials, because they can just pay someone for access to everything you’ve posted.”

—u/_Bad_Bob_

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8. “The anti-intellectual movement.”

—u/Impressive_Ad_1787

9. “The monetization of our time and attention.”

—u/SituationPerfect1999

10. “Our oceans are dying.”

—u/Ok-Toe4522

“The killer whale pods in PNW are dying due to lack of salmon.”

—u/Rellcotts

11. “Groundwater depletion. We’re draining aquifers way faster than they can refill, and once they’re gone, that’s it.”

—u/XamberCloud

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—u/TipEmotional2149

—u/__lovebackwards

14. “AI. We need to legislate the shit out of it or we are cooked.”

—u/xvex24

15. “Honestly, the fact that no one’s panicking about how addicted we all are to our phones is wild.”

—u/CherryBlisz

16. “The lack of people choosing to go to medical school. Numbers have been declining for years, and it’s gonna be a real problem in the future.”

—u/2workigo

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17. “Antibiotic resistance. We have dramatically slowed down on finding new classes of antibiotics, and oftentimes by the time they hit the market, there are already resistant strains.”

—u/girthemoose

18. “Apart from Long COVID, serious viral infections like COVID have busted people’s immune systems, even if they didn’t have it severely. I recently struggled to fight off some precancerous cells due to high-risk HPVm and my doctors explained that they’re seeing much weaker immune responses after the pandemic.”

“They suspect that COVID affected almost everyone’s immunology, which means even colds are harder to fight off and everyone’s more susceptible.

In the bigger scheme of things, this will mean that a lot of the ‘bugs’ we might have previously caught and cleared without much thought and likely no intervention now linger and cause more damage. HPV is a great example: immune systems usually clear it on their own, but if it lingers longer, you now have a higher percentage of the population more likely to develop cancers.”

—u/peachpie_888

19. And finally: “The slow but steady decline in the quality of everything we buy.”

—u/Intelligent_Panic564

What are your thoughts on all this? Is there something else we all should be panicking about that you’d like to add? Feel free to share in the comments or the anonymous form below. Who knows — your response could be featured in a future BuzzFeed article.

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