And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.
But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign.
I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead.
That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.
It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.
Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not.
Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.
Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending.
But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end
The example I like to think about for this is imagine being born in the eastern European bloodlands - Eastern Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Byelorussia or Ukraine around 1895-1900. Things are pretty good up until the Great War starts, which back then you would be old enough to be considered an adult for, and then it is wars, famines, repressions and totalitarianism for the rest of your life as you likely die just short of the Iron Curtain falling. That's a pretty bleak life. Yet many people lived it, and found love and purpose and had families under it and those civilizations as a whole eventually recovered.
The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage. Nor the fact that we haven't had hurricanes in the Gulf but massive flooding everywhere... my response doesn't come from emotion but from the lack of emotion I see in our leaders to the catastrophes.
We haven't even begin to cut emissions enough to slow down the climate catastrophe and I doubt we ever will. While I imagine the US will start protecting its own supply chains I imagine it will act as it always has, protect the wealthiest and best off and leave middle and lower classes to fight for scraps. Just look at our healthcare system, best in the world for the richest, and one of the worst in the western world for lower classes.
Sorry, but where are you living/getting news from because I am jealous and I want to be that isolated.
Literally every new story, list of headlines, broadcast, tweet, and conversation today includes COVID. CNN used to have daily death counts and totals. Every single person's life, from the way we study, work, shop etc has changed because of COVID.
If your thesis is that somehow this big crisis hasn't been sufficiently publicized and people aren't aware, I just have a really hard time connecting to your perspective on the world.
This seems like an understudied thing to me.
