It’s really sad that many young people are so pessimistic about the future. Despite some setbacks the last years, in many ways the world is still in a better place than it has ever been in human history.
Child mortality is still lower than ever, (extreme) poverty is still on a declining trend, we’re actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments), AI could vastly improve our lives in the future…
That said we do live in uncertain times, fascism is on the rise again, a nuclear war could still kill us all, fighting climate change is not done,l and AI could ruine all our lives; but pessimism is not the right mindset.
Extreme poverty may be declining but that doesn’t mean more people in the west are not being pushed into food scarcity due to stagnated wages and corporate greed.
In the West too life is generally better than ever, also for people under 40
It remains sad that in the world with enough artificial nitrate fertiliser to produce enough food for everyone in abundance and enough food in abundance to feed everyone in the west companies are still putting perfectly edible food into dumpsters and then covering them in motor oil to prevent freegans and dumpster divers while elsewere, famine still happens.
I do joke a lol, but things in many areas are so much better than 30-50 years ago and considering Brits in WW II had to turn out all their lights to hinder German bombings - most of us are being peddled fear by the media and it’s not THAT bad.
Where did you get the climate hope bit? last articles I glazed over were ‘we missed 1.5 deg target and instead put the foot on the pedal to make it faster’ and ‘climate migrations coming and mass famine’.
Sounder doomerism to me but I don’t really have a good source to be optimistic at all.
In short, solar prices are declining exponentially and deployment is growing exponentially. There are even companies claiming to be able to make efuels from air using solar cheaper than fossil fuels by the end of the decade.
Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie is a good book if you want to read something optimistic.
Thanks for this. I haven’t been letting it get me down in the past, but having two kids can certainty start making me question what the heck their future will look like
Your daily life not being an actual warzone is an extremely low bar to set for things not being bad.
Also the climate claim they made was pure fantasy.
Not to mention each message to chatGPT burns the equivalent of a water bottle worth of water.
And does not provide a bottles worth of water value in return
We have climbed so high as a species in such a short time that we genuinely can’t remember where the ground was when we started.
Climate change will be devastating. But for most of human life, the fear of the future was much closer. It wasn’t about the next five or ten years, it wasn’t about the world we were leaving for our children - it was about the food we were feeding our children today. It was about making it through the next winter. It was about survival.
We didn’t have refrigeration, penicillin, HVAC, germ theory… people weren’t worried about undervaccination because there was no such thing as vaccination.
Even in recent history. In the 1920s, we had a war so huge and devastating and terrifying that they called it the war to end all wars.
Then they almost immediately did it again, but bigger.
Every adult in the early 20th century lived through the greatest horror in mankind’s history so far. The first heavy machine guns, the first aerial bombers, the first atom bomb. Then the massive, unstable world powers spent decades building up an arsenal of global annihilation, and very nearly triggered that annihilation at least twice.
All of human existence - from the daily survival of pre-industry, to The Jungle of industrialization, the still-ongoing plague of tuberculosis (“consumption”), the brutal violence of the 20th century - all of it - has been a struggle to survive.
Human existence has always been, on some level, terrifying. Disease, famine, war - these apocalyptic horsemen weren’t on the horizon, they were constant companions to historical humans. And that’s not even getting into all of the historical oppression and bigotry that always has been.
But people weren’t constantly scared by default. They made art, wrote books, told stories. Started families, had children, almost half of their children died as children, had more children anyway.
Humans just lived. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced self destruction. This isn’t the first time we’ve faced oppression, tyranny, poverty, and yes, even climate disasters. A drought could devastate nations. A harsh winter could leave no survivors. Entire settlements just… failed.
Humans are still thriving compared to one or two lifetimes ago. It feels like we plateau’d and then began to decline - because in a sense we did. We were taking massive leaps toward the future with every passing decade, and now we just feel like we’re making incremental improvements in meaningless gadgets, while social progress stalls - or worse- actively regresses.
But we live in the future. That’s why we plateau’d. We made it. Humans have effectively gained the power to make life on Earth as it is in Heaven, and we just choose not to. We choose other things, mainly because a small handful of humans have the power to make those choices for the rest of us.
That doesn’t mean we should lose faith. Humans can still make a golden age of the future, climate change or not.
We just need to fight for it. We live in unprecedented times, and we are capable of unprecedented things. We absolutely have the capability to make the future better than the past.
we’re actually on track to stop the worst climate change (thanks to massive Chinese investments)
No, we damn well aren’t.
AI could vastly improve our lives in the future
It could also make it vastly worse in the future, which is the more likely scenario.
No, we damn well aren’t.
It’s not a clear cut case, but if you look at the development of solar, battery and other renewable technology we definitely are on the right track to stop the worst. We might even be able to reverse some of it by the end of the century.
It could also make it vastly worse in the future, which is the more likely scenario.
Yes, I wrote that in the next paragraph…
Some times this place is really worse than Reddit, wallowing in self pity and downvoting anything positive. In many aspects this is still the best time to be alive no matter where you live in the world and the future is potentially very, very bright.
am 40. still feel this way.
over 50 and felt this way for over half the millenia and before that felt it likely to be that way given how things were going.
I wouldn’t be gentle. But then again both my parents are dead so I don’t actually have anyone to be bitter at.
Am 39 and feel this
If the cure to existential dread is turning 40, it can’t come soon enough.
I turned 40 this year. Sadly it hasn’t helped my existential dread at all.
It all goes faster downhill.
Happy 40th!
Oh yeah, years pass by like weeks. No joke, time now feels like you’re trying to hold the sand in your hands, in a storm.
Like sand through our fingers, so too are the days of our lives.
Intense workouts everyday I’m able to has helped me significantly.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it definitely is not.
Yes
I’m over 40 and struggling not to conclude life on this planet peaked 30 years ago
Yep. It peaked right around Ronnie Reagan’s sell-out to the wealthy. If folks want a better quality of life they will have to take it back from the rich.
The 90s were seriously such a bop.
You might even call it an Mmmbop.
The Matrix was right.
At this point we can only hope the Matrix is real and they reset this simulation soon because what we’re seeing are the side effects from the uprising outside.
9/11 was suppose to be the reset point, but the simulation kept running for some reason.
That was 10 years ago.
If you were a kid in the 90s, sure. Your parents shielded you from all the chaos.
The 90s also had terrorism (IRA, WTC bombing, German and French hijackings, Israeli settler massacre, sarin gas attack in Japan, Oklahoma City bombing, bombings of US service members in Saudi Arabia, PKK suicide bombers in Turkey, Dagestan bombing in Russia (possibly a Putin-orchestrated false flag)). It had the ongoing AIDS epidemic, which was terrifying. It had the first Gulf war. It had the LA riots of 1992. It had the columbine shooting.
It’s much worse today
Hey, at least you got to enjoy humanity’s peak as a teenager. I was a kid, so I never got the chance to fully appreciate the 90s. My memory of almost anything pre-1993 is incredibly hazy. My strongest childhood memories didn’t take hold until the decade was almost over.
Lucky you. I got at best the earliest of the 2010s…
The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.
Put a bird on it.
That’s nonsense.
Good things will be happening all the time!
Just not to you.
Expectation is the main ingredient to disappointment. All you have to do is lower your expectations to where the bar is, so when good things do happen, it’ll feel better when they do.
That just sounds like a race to the bottom to me
I mean, we’re already at the bottom though.
I think they’ve got it the wrong way around. The under 40s have a chance of rebuilding after the war. Yes, there are hard times ahead but they are young enough to come out on the other side.
At 49, I’m quite sure I either won’t make it through the coming storm at all or at least won’t be able to enjoy the aftermath for long once things get better again.
The under 40s are going to be the ones fighting the wars, as always. Even if there is an other side for humanity after what’s coming, no one alive today will ever have a peaceful life ever again.
I’ll take prison or a bullet to the head before I decide to fight for a nation that has pulled the rug out from underneath me.
I hope more young people see it this way, maybe we’ll actually get to a point where we can watch all these leaders duke it out in person because no one will fight for them
Wait til they hand you the gun, play good boy til they let you touch the weapons
Then, aim them at the most superior officers possible and open fire indiscriminately
You do the world a favor and are likely to have your end come suddenly from a direction you don’t see
In my 30s, feel the same way. Why would I offer myself to the meat grinder for a nation that bitches about me all the time?
Gen Xer here (born in '67). I would encourage young people to NOT join the military at this point in the timeline. It’s not about serving your country any more, it’s about a bunch of greedy fucks using you to further their fucked up, anti-working class, anti-humanity agenda.
I assumed we were talking about a civil war against fascism
Wait, your parents don’t understand that everybody under 40 has the same outlook on life? What a pair of idiots.
Half a century here, I’ve never had a time in my life where the next year was better than the last
Same age-ish, and I feel the same.
The hard part is trying to figure out what part of that comes from societal collapse, and how much of that comes from just getting older and seeing more and more of how the world works… or doesn’t work.
Despite all we see and hear, objectively the world is better than it’s ever been. We are at a shocking low level of international conflict, starvation, disease, crime, famine, even teen pregnancy has fallen to the lowest rates we’ve ever seen.
But all of these gains have been made by people forming communities of various kinds, of linking up, sharing ideals and compiling resources. This “downturn” we’re feeling is a localized result of a lot of people turning their backs on community.
We are incredibly communal animals, we need social identities to survive. This has been studied. When community abandons you, or when it feels like they have, people broadly stop caring about things and themselves and become selfish, bitter, cynical and hateful. We’re feeling this all around us, and inside us. And I don’t think it’s a natural phenomenon, there are active groups working to cause this, they want to undo all that progress and bypass war and pillaging and destruction and just rot out the world’s wealthiest countries from the inside out.
I don’t know if these objective, global gains will continue for everyone. But I fully believe that the USA at least is in a nose-dive it won’t pull out of. Things are breaking as we speak, in ways we can’t repair.
I am over 60 and I can plainly see everything it fucked.
I’m quickly catching up to your age and I don’t really understand either why it would be a young people thing either. (not that I’m not still young of course, my white hair are just an affectation)
It’s just a matter of looking around.Welcome to the age of the smartphone, where we’re more informed while being more misinformed and where we’re all connected but can’t actually connect. We’ve hit the point where people can watch something, stare the truth in the eye and say “that’s a lie” or be told an obvious lie that could be disproved in less than a minute and say “that’s so true.”
There’s no easy way out of the hole now either. If the government stepped in, the people spreading lies would simply lie and say the government was misleading people and people would gobble it up, and there’s no way I’d trust anything privately owned to tell me the truth.
Our huge problem here is that we’ve ignored warning signs for so long, that the entire system is broadly fuuuuucked. We always said “well the education system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “Well the heathcare system here sucks, I’m sure someone will fix it eventually.”
Then we said “The internet is becoming weird, it’s making people think different because of algorithms and outside influence, I hope someone fixes it eventually.”
Then we said “Corporations are consolidating power and making the wealth-gap much wider, we’re losing our entire middle-class and educated people… is someone going to fix this?”
The whole time not wanting to admit what we all know somewhere deep inside, which is nobody is coming.
Agreed, we’ve spent so long waiting it’s all we’re conditioned to do. We believed our elected officials would do what’s in the country’s interest but here we are.
We as a nation need to bury both political parties and get this train back on the tracks because while Dems are far better than maga they’re still corpo bootlickers.
I landed a job a job at a company that’s circling the drain, I feel like a parasite feeding off a host until it’s gone and I move to a new one
I’m a public librarian. Just dreading the day we are defunded. They’ve already attacked our national orgs.
Maybe this varies geographically, but our town’s libraries are directly funded by the town. We recently improved a millage for renovations. I hope they would be pretty insulated from… sillyness.
Most libraries also have significant federal funding, and rely on resources maintained with federal funding, even if state and local funding is higher
Absolutely this. Our federal money actually comes through the state org which takes care of a whole bunch of stuff like our inter library loans and access to Kanopy/Libby.
Jeez, that’s a brave thing to openly admit right now. And I work in public education.
I have 'iterally been saying to my classes (especially as my various NIH/NSF/.gov links are breaking during class) “pretend nothing is happening outside the walls of this school, just for a few minutes”.
Oof, “active shooter” vibes, shelter in place :/
In the US, I blame a lot of this in public education. So much American Exceptionalism hard coded into generations and if you question any of it, you get put down by the other students and teachers.
I envied the education of developing nations because those school systems acted like they had something to prove with their students.
Please don’t blame this on public education, wholesale. I get that there are plenty of issues with public education, but there are teachers, departments, entire schools, and entire districts that put kids and their ability to realistically navigate the real world. I’ve worked with many teachers would would (and have) told politicians to fuck off than keep their teaching cert by abandoning their beliefs.
I’m proud to have worked for years in a school where teachers were comfortable telling students that American exceptionalism is a lie and that blindly believing anything different is a quick way to fall behind.
What the hell does “realistically navigate the real world” mean anymore. I had teachers, therapists, and guidance counselors all working to make sure I had a safe and useful education. Meaning, because I was misdiagnosed, that they would never risk my unhappiness(or their metrics) by allowing me in classes there I might fail because, by their own words, “if you fail at that class, you may be unhappy”. Fuck that shit. I succeed at their goals, not mine and I’m miserable.
I called up my old school recently to try and get them to send me a document stating that because I never fulfilled the basic state requirements, I did not actually graduate. They refused, but accidentally admired that I tested proficient in science, but was still placed in remedial classes. I doubt they think I remember those meetings in grade school, but I do. I remember being calmly explained that I would do better in this class or that class, but they never really explained what “practical” or “modified” or “academic” meant. I remember those meetings. When I talked to my school, I could tell they weren’t expecting me to remember the day we took the HSPA test and how I was pulled out of the regular students and placed in the remedial area despite being told I was declassified or how I shouldn’t have passed because I deliberately failed the writing section. It’s all fucking theater. They’ve been passing everyone for decades regardless of merit and now this country is a joke.
I’m so sorry to hear this and I’m really sad to hear how your “role models” failed you like that. It sounds like your school said that your diploma was proof that you’re ready to succeed in the world while merely trusting standardized tests to determine how successful you’d be.
I hope you’ve since felt more proud in your daily life.
Absolutely know the feeling
When I quit a few years ago are my last employer, I was thinking, I’m the rat leaving the sinking ship
Fucking card house still hasn’t collapsed somehow and old employer is now my main customer.
So…not much changed, besides that I don’t have much security anymoreBut hey! Illusion of freedom, when being self employed! ;-)
Kind of feels like there’s two kinds of people out there right now in the US. Once you think we’re fucked, and the ones who think they have enough generational wealth that “their” kids won’t be fucked.
There’s probably a sizeable third pool out there that are just watching propaganda and going everything is fine everybody’s overreacting or I don’t care it doesn’t affect me. I think even that pool’s shrinking a bit.
There’s also people who are absolutely going to get fucked but are still living in a comfortable dream-world where they think someone is going to come make everything normal again.
Some of us know its fucked and are just trying to get by.
There are whole swathes of us who are still foolishly optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive too.
optimistic enough to think we can pull ourselves out of this nose dive
To be precise, they think someone else is going to pull us out of the nose-dive, and that because we’ve had a lifetime of comforts and status-quo, there’s no chance of bad things happening to them personally… that’s just stuff that happens on TV, right???
I fear we’re into parachute territory, we’ll need to rebuild the plane from parts after we touch down.
Please don’t let it be a Lost sequel…Please…
