what your describing shakes out into a coping mechanism . Some one lives in the numb place that constant fear creates. When all your thoughts are terrifying at worst and uncomfortable at best with no stability. The person desensitizes, usually pulls back from human interaction and disengages from life. Some people even stop talking. It's very common in people who are dieing. It's kind of like get busy living or get busy dieing. I've taken quite a journey that I'm still in and it's been my experience that if you have no hope for the minute past the one your in Joy becomes a much duller concept .My yard stick of experience can, in some circles, be considered long and I know better than most that things we think can't happen , happen very quickly and without our permission. I would like to believe I've accepted that. I have seen people die who were the epitome of acceptance and kicked and fought all the way through their death. I think it's intrinsic in humans to want to live. So, while I wait for humans to become extinct, I want to live , not, live but just remember we're all going to die soon. I think most humans will feel that way because acceptance is just as much a dilusion as control and attachment

It's definitely not their thing.

I put it here because hope comes up around issues related to collapse, energy sources, the ability of the human collective to change the way we do business with the planet and each other, and the desirability of continuing our current arrangements at any cost.

Complete acceptance is rare, and takes a lot of mental training, as in the cases of Buddhist monks who immolate themselves in protest without flinching. The organism fears death, but to both Buddhists and Western materialists, it's the mind that sets us apart from the lower orders of the animal realm. Training the mind to accept the inevitable - like a rabbit going limp in the jaws of the fox - is perfectly reasonable.

Most people have turned their instinctive resistance to death into a moral revulsion towards acquiescence of any sort. As a result we never talk about reducing our energy consumption, only about getting more energy from slightly less damaging sources. We see that here in the hysterical drive towards renewable energy sources. Given the ecological situation humanity finds itself in at the moment, I believe this attitude is criminally counterproductive.

our irrepressible urge to procreate has become counterproductive. I don't think we'll get anywhere with idea of criminalizing basic drives. And practically speaking, that's not going to happen anyway. The economic and lifestyle issues involved are felt by most of us to be integral to who and what we are. Cars and houses or a highly paid job in the oil fields and even humanitarian projects like the Green Revolution, are key signifiers of worth and we'll fight hard to hang on to them. Hatrack's principal applies. Let the Devil worry about tomorrow. Global warming is just a hypothetical notion which, if acknowledged, may compel me to surrender important parts of my identity. We're wired to see threat as something physical and direct, that can spring on us out of the dark; kill us. AGW is still an abstraction most of us don't even begin to understand. Until it becomes pressing enough, until the threat of imminent physical harm becomes broadly apparent, not much is going to be done about it. Human intelligence is vastly over rated as a controlling factor in most human behavior. In terms of our survival as a species it may be a negative. We're just clever enough to get ourselves into a mess we can't fix. We're setting ourselves up for a Darwin award.

We want to control the outcome. I'd say being unattached to outcomes is even attempting to control the reaction to them.

Positive and negative outcomes. If the lion catches the zebra, that's a positive outcome for one, and a negative outcome for the other. If the zebra gets away from the lion, that's a positive outcome for one, and a negative outcome for the other. If the lion never catches the zebra, then there are also consequences that will be felt outside of that single relationship. If the zebra never gets away from the lion, there will also be consequences that will be felt outside of that single relationship.

One of the issues is language itself. It doesn't exist outside of the human mind, so the words we use to indicate positive or negative don't mean anything, as positive and negative don't exist. That's a value judgment, a moral judgment, and dependent on a particular perspective. Neither of which exist outside of the human mind. That's tough to accept, because we are our mind, so there must be good and bad, because we think there is. That's why we have our own laws. Which are constantly broken.

That it's different for different people, we can't accept that, as we have to control the outcome. The biggest example of that being human evolution.

There's another word that we made up; evolution. It's a process we think of as positive. It's a process that has no name, or direction, or goal. Tough to accept that too though. Like you said, we're invested in the outcome. We can't just let people do whatever they want.