I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.
It does, but it’s accomplished that over the past century by prioritizing short term growth, long term consequences be damned.
As those debts are starting to come due to collect, while it is still accurate to say that there’s been an unprecedented good run, that doesn’t mean the fast approaching wall ahead that has everyone else worried is a mirage either.
Both can be true.
Overshoots a bitch. Soon the land will be unable to feed the people and our artificial fertilizer will no longer work. It was fun while it lasted!
We’ve had market corrections. We’re coming up on some global population correction for sure in the next century or so. I guess we’ll all find out if that’s the Great Filter, or if it’s something else we haven’t found yet.
In the past we could say that humanity is still doing terrible things but becoming better in the larger picture.
Back then it was hopeful to think like this because the things we did were terrible but not long lasting.
The problem now is that the terrible things we are capable of are now world changing and can affect us globally … climate change, nuclear war, AI technology, biological experimention (or even biological warfare)
50 years ago we had the capability of making decisions or choices that could cost the lives of millions … now our decisions and choices are capable of affecting the survival of our species on this planet.
and while things might be getting worse in the smaller scale, the general trend is improvement
ex. A lot of the current issues are related to a little global pandemic we had recently
The provisional count of all US deaths involving COVID-19 was 48,615 compared to over 200,000 during the same time period in 2022. Of those 98.4% of the deaths were elderly Americans. The pandemic is long over.
You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I’m not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.
I also rejoice that the largest generation of terrible people will all be dying off in the next 20 years, and the millennials will be taking over control.
Every generation has its psychopaths and psychopaths tend to pursue power. I wouldn’t put my hopes in millennials any more than in boomers. I’m happy to be wrong on this though.
Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.
I just don’t expose myself to the 24h news cycle very much. My life is good, the life of the people around me is good, and nobody is helped by worrying about things I can’t change.
This.
News are the reason your mental health sucks ass. The world is doing okay actually if you just look around instead.
Or if you ACTUALLY care about real news:
CRIME is at an ALL TIME LOW in all western world
China and many other countries have taken a billion people out of extreme poverty
Communist dictators are loosing ground in south america
Inflation is back to normal levels
Solar panels and infrastructure IS becoming CHEAP
Etc
I don’t think inflation is normal here. It’s still about 8%.
I wonder whether these positive comments come from those that are well off.
The economys still fucked though. People are still underpaid.
The economy’s always been fucked though. People have always been underpaid though.
Absolutely the way to go. Everyone in my circle is doing better than they were 5-10 years ago. My outlook could be better if my country decided to nope out, uproot itself and settle somewhere sub-tropical, far away from the Russian border we now share, but since I am considering emigrating after finishing training anyway, I don’t worry about that too much.
get into areas like solarpunk that hold out hope against the dystopia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHI61GHNGJM
Andewism has a ton of great videos about it I suggest watching more than just this one to get an idea. That video I linked is a good introduction but its 3 years old so some of the more recent videos have a more evolved view on it.
At the moment Solarpunk is a somewhat small and not very well defined movement, but it’s slowly growing and coming into its own. It started as a call to writers to write more hopeful fiction about the future as a response to the disproportionate prevalence of dystopian fiction, chiefly cyberpunk.
Here is a more comprehensive write-up about it. Solarpunk imagines a future where humanity finds a way to live in balance with nature, technology, and each other, with a heavy focus on being realistic, grounded, and attainable. Politically it’s very socially progressive, environmentalist, anticapitalist, and anti-authoritarian.
It’s getting harder every year.
I remember well the constant fear of nuclear war in the 1980’s.
I remember the wonder we felt when the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union collapsed. A hope of a tomorrow free of fear.
I remember the dreadful recession of the early 1990’s and the steep economical rise that followed it.
I remember the amazing advancements in technology and the standard of living in the late 1990’s. And at the same time, it felt like the world was coming to it’s senses.
I was 21 in the year 2000. The world was full of promise, technological advancements were just pouring in, old mortal enemies were finding common ground and it seemed that we were slowly heading towards a Star Trek - like post scarcity utopia.
This age of hope eneded by the finance crisis of 2007-2008. Russia tried the waters with the war in Georgia. The general atmosphere of the world turned towards gloom again. And the downward spiral just seems to keeps going and going…
Yet I continue the work I started when I chose teaching as my profession in those golden years of hope. The kids are very different today, any class from 20 years ago would be a piece of cake compared with the problems they have now. But if a change for the better is to come, it will come from the kids. My generation is hopelessly lost in consumer greed and watching mindless “reality” shows that they somehow feel more important than real life.
I alone cannot be the change we need, but I CAN educate a few hundred kids and with good luck, maybe a dozen or few of them will have a some effect for a better future.
By realizing that it IS getting better. We live in a world now where information has exploded out of control. What this means is that we now know exactly what’s going on everywhere, and it turns out that’s a lot of shit.
That shit was still happening, but until fairly recently it was just out of the picture. The average person didn’t know about any of it , couldn’t do anything about it anyway, and thus it didn’t really impact them.
Fast forward to today you hear of tragedies ALL THE TIME. Bad shit happening to good people for seemingly no reason. The difference here is that you just happen to know about it. The objective truth is that bad shit happens less today than it did at any other time in history. We just see every instance of it, not just our local community instances.
