Epiphany will never come

Condescending works better than ridiculing, so yes, don't laugh. Try a mostly disinterested, but superficially polite "Oh, is that so?", "You don't say?", "Ah, interesting perspective" and so on - basically build a repertoire of sweet nothings - and keep looking at them as if expecting more explanation for an obviously weird idea. It's in the tone, mostly. Couple of rounds of that and people start to stutter and eventually walk away with the exact opposite of what they were angling for: to have their defence against cognitive dissonance validated. Because that's essentially what's going on there. It's not like you'd need to do much research these days, it's becoming even more blatantly obvious on the daily, how utterly fucked we are at this point, so people engaging you in these conversations desperately want to have the illusion of a future that still allows for such planning mirrored back at them to help them keep believing what they already started to doubt. It's a variation on the grey rock technique used to keep narcissists at bay. So my thinking was: what works against one distorted view of reality probably will work against others too. And it does.