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 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.
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
Solarpunk is amazing
say more words about it
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.
Or you could just google it?
100% true. Or i could offer an interested audience to someone that seems passionate about the subject.
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.
When all the bad information from the news begins to bombard me, I think back to March 2020, when the pandemic hit full swing. That might seem odd to some because many would argue that was the spark that set of the series of events that got us here. However what I see now, years later, with a bit of perspective, it was an amazing time. For the first time in human civilization almost our entire species focused in on one task and overall succeed. An existential threat to our entire way of life emerged, most people got on board and we avoided the absolute worst.
We’re not meant to process all the bad things that happen in the world every day. Our primate brains are meant for small communities, not international events. Perhaps the pandemic isn’t OPs thing or yours to think about, but I’ll bet that almost everyone has some memory that gives them hope. Think about it, hold into it. A hopeful thing happened once, it’ll happen again.
This is definitely true. A lot of people fucked around during COVID and made aspects of it worse, but they would have probably done that anyway. Overall, we did a very impressive job worldwide in managing the crisis.
If you ever think the world is shit, disconnect. Turn off the news, get off social media, spend a week interacting with your local community only. You’ll see people can be pretty awesome, and you can make a very real impact in the world by helping your local community.
I use to think like that in my 20s. But the truth is right now, it’s definitely not getting better. I teach in college/univ and the amount of ignorance and entitlement I’ve seen in the past couple of years is alarming. Elon Musk and Andrew Tates are the role models for many young men now, there is a masculinity crisis and it’s affecting everyone.
If you consider serious, global issues with empirical data, such as disease, poverty, hunger, the world is indeed improving, and has been for a while, see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs
I"m aware of that and I do agree some things are getting better. That was exactly my mindset in my 20s. But I believe you could use other data, like wealth repartition, environnement, consumption, media concentration, etc. to demonstate the opposite. The simple fact that we did more damage to the planet in 200 years that we did over 40k years is making me really worry. But yeah, I guess it depends on how you perceive certain things.
Your statement reads like “we haven’t made all the progress, so we haven’t made any.” We have learned, if nothing else. We’ve learned that our carbon emissions, for example, have an impact on the environment, and many people are moving towards bettering that. It’s not DONE, but to put on blinders and act like it’s the same as it has always been is at best ignorant.
It’s not what I said. You can call me ignorant all you want, but the truth is the F150 is the most sold car in north America, and the sales are going up each year. The vast majority of people who claim to be concerned about the environment are not about to change anything in their behavior. Flash news, Taylor Swift is worried about climate change. Unfortunatly, you and I riding our bikes and using paper straws won’t be reversing the trend.
Yeah, too many people buy trucks, but the counterpoint is
And someone could probably find more recent data that os even better.
Maybe it’s just because of the people I’m around, but it feels like society’s concepts of both masculinity and femininity have continued improving. There are of course the Tate acolytes, but they seem as much like the gasp of a dying ideology as anything. Not sure about Musk, that particular brand of personality cult prosperity gospel never seems to really go out of style.
That was already around. You had the toxic masculine movie stars of the 70s-2000s. Soldiers and fighters have been glorified since the times we’ve had soldiers and fighters. The only difference there is a wider audience. You also have an increasing number of reasonable voices out there reaching a broader and broader audience too. Violent crimes are consistently down, we just see all that there is.
From my perspective, toxic masculinity has been more assertive than ever in recent years. As mentioned in another reply, I had to intervene to protect female students from male behavior for the first time in my career this year. One of my colleagues was harassed by a student in full view several times this session. This is new for us. We have both extremely open, sensitive and respectful students, and the opposite, but the main difference is that the second group is now uninhibited and not shy about putting himself in the spotlight.
You’re using anecdotal evidence, from one perspective. You’re a university professor, surely you can see why this isn’t exactly a compelling argument compared to hard evidence, right?
I don’t want to be rude but you really should not continue teaching (at least in the same way) if you are that repulsed or disconnected from your students.
Students will always have different priorities and mindsets than their teacher would like them to have, and most times they’ll be wrong; it’s a part of life in acads. Most of these youngsters have had very little exposure to the world and it is bound they’ll make mistakes. That’s what school is for. And they will certainly not remain the same, just like anyone from your generation as well, when they get older.
You cannot just get into teaching and not expect delinquency, that’s not how it works. Just focus on getting the subject matter of whatever you’re teaching through their heads and ensure everyone understands the concepts, the “bad” idealogues will eventually get sorted out themselves.
I dont want to be rude but you dont seems to have any no clue about what teaching is, even more so at a university. I’m a good teacher. I teach them things that are fundamental to our field and that will serve them for the rest of their lives for those who graduate. They tell me. I have a good relationship with most of my students, they like me and I like them (I’m not a dinosaure, I was in their shoes 15 years ago). Still, the reality is that each year we have to lower the pass threshold, both at the High school (my wife teaches) and university level. The level of entitlement and the view that teaching is a business like any other, on the part of both students and the institutions, reduces the level and value of learning. For the past few years now, we have been graduating students that I would never hire because they lack fundamental skills. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t even blame them, I’d blame their parents instead, because they’ve been guinea pigs for malicious technology like social networking and ubiquitous cell phones. In terms of values now, the only thing I will add is that this year, for the first time, I had to intervene to protect female students from the toxic behavior of male groups. More then once. And also It’s funny because the tone and confidence of your message actually reminds me of certain students.
this year, for the first time, I had to intervene to protect female students from the toxic behavior of male groups. More then once.
Is it that bad? Sorry, I genuinely thought you were only complaining about the kids being undisciplined in class and the like. What you’re describing is scary, may I ask what were they doing? Are today’s kids entering criminal territory of harassment? I thought things like bullying have been progressively declining over years?
Well as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. Honestly, I think its healthy to takes breaks from the news and social media if world news is getting you down, just focus on the things that you can control in your life.
I’m going to address your question in two ways it may be read.
The world is worse than it was
I completely disagree, I think the world has never been better. Look back even 70 years and you have the threat of cold war, other wars (Korean War, conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Middle East, …), much more poverty, starvation (China’s Great Famine), illiteracy, a lot more nasty pollutants that we’ve since moved away from.
To go a bit more US-centric, although much of this is mirrored elsewhere to varying degrees, you had much, much higher crime rates (possibly due to lead in gasoline), women could be raped by their husbands and had minimal rights, gay people were persecuted, black people were killed for fun (lynchings) along with other deplorable treatment, etc.
Right now you live in a world where practically all information is available at your fingertips at minimal cost, where most people will at least tolerate your presence even if you don’t fit neatly into their ideal world, where we’ve made a lot of progress on limiting and reversing environmental damage (ozone layer). We have more medical cures & treatments, longer lifespans, greater nutrition, more education, incredible entertainment options (Netflix, Steam, YouTube, etc.).
The world is better than it ever was, but the pace of improvement has slowed / gone stagnant
Yeah I get the anxiety, things do seem more unstable than they were 10 years ago. I’m super thankful to be living in our so-far-the-best age but I don’t take for granted that it can stay wonderful. Much of the benefits we now enjoy were hard-won victories that required hard work, and I suspect that to keep making the world a better place it’ll require us to pay it forward by also working hard. But don’t take it for a given that we’re due for pain and conflict; human events are too complex to follow simple narratives and it’s possible in 5 years we’ll all be relaxed and thankful that these current problems fizzled out.
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where’s your data showing this trend of rising crime that has not stopped, bud? because everything i’ve seen shows less crime than before lockdown with only comparing to during lockdowns looking like any increase. they offered data, you offer none except the assumption that there def is a trend in rising crime.
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you’re the one asserting there’s def an established trend of rising crime and dismissing data that shows you wrong while still offering no data yourself.
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bud?
in the USA atleast, crime is increasing
Source? I’m pretty sure there was an uptick during the pandemic but then it went down again.
Everything ebbs and flows, but on the wider scale of things crime is down and life expectancy is up.
Many people in here arguing things “have never been better”. It’s true to an extent; things are pretty good in terms of poverty, liberties or world peace (for now). It’s not great, it’s never been great, but it’s a decent bit better than it’s been in the past. Overall.
We are, however, in an era of unstability and unrest, where it feels like things are constantly on the cusp of changing for the worse (and in some cases, are indeed already changing for the worse, like abortion or LGBT rights in the US, for example). Violence and discrimination are on the rise, global peace is being threatened, democracy is in jeopardy (not just in the US mind you), the 1% are getting WAY richer way faster than ever… To top it all off, climate change is objectively, unarguably as bad as it’s ever been, and it’s getting much much worse, much faster than even experts can keep up with. Like, we’re headed straight for extinction and we keep accelerating toward it.
You have every right to be worried. Yes, it’s easy to forget and take for granted the things we have now that we didn’t even a mere 60 years ago, but many of them are very much under attack at the moment. Just because shit maybe hasn’t quite yet hit the fan doesn’t mean everything is fine.
And to answer your question, I’ve found some refuge in art, both experiencing and creating it. Reading books, watching movies, playing games, etc, especially those that echo that sentiment of fear and uncertainty for the future (or present). Trying to use all that as inspiration for my own work, I think it’d help to express my feelings this way. I am indeed doing very poorly still though, it’s a lot to deal with, on top of my own personal problems.
LGBT rights in the US
LGBTQ rights in the US are, generally speaking, progressing.
climate change
I don’t think doom and gloom is warranted with climate change. Many countries have long reached peak CO2. The goal now is net zero. Rich nations also need to pony up to help developing nations that haven’t already spewed a ton of CO2 into the air as part of development. Unfortunately, that’s looking to be difficult with internal politics in the rich countries.
Some of the progress at the recent COP18 looks to be possible ground breaking. The methane related agreements in particular could be enormously beneficial. They could decrease the amount of methane released or burned off as part of fossil fuel extraction significantly. Methane has a relatively low half life, so it will cycle out of the atmosphere faster than CO2.
I don’t think doom and gloom is warranted with climate change. Many countries have long reached peak CO2. The goal now is net zero. Rich nations also need to pony up to help developing nations that haven’t already spewed a ton of CO2 into the air as part of development. Unfortunately, that’s looking to be difficult with internal politics in the rich countries.
This is like standing on the deck of the titanic and being like “meh, we have already scraped by most of the iceberg, so we are fine”.
The damage is done, look at global sea surface temperatures they are off the charts. We could stop everything now and things would still be spiraling out of control climate wise and I am sorry but that is just the reality of it :(
Don’t get me wrong, nothing is “fine” when it comes to climate change. There’s a lot of work to do, much of which has a lot of resistance from people with a stake in the status quo towards ruin. But at the same time, this is a situation that can at least be mitigated, with real work in progress. Humanity is not going extinct from climate change.
I believe you probably mean COP28 unless you are talking about one from 10 years ago.
Yes, thank you. I wish they had just numbered it to match the years…
A lot of weed
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Is it getting worse? How do we measure the goodness or badness?
One measure of economic indicators suggests we are relatively stable.
I’m sure there are a variety of measures that are up and down.
I would argue that most measures are generally trending upward, and have been for a long while. The big difference is that now people spend their lives looking at negative ragebait articles.
It’s large emotional. Many people long for the “good old days”™, fail to appreciate what’s here now and fear the uncertain future.
With some ways of looking at things, the world as a whole is getting better, rather than worse.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190111-seven-reasons-why-the-world-is-improving
I’m pretty sure long covid and climate chaos will put a stop to that soon enough but we’ll see. For now, some stuff is getting worse and some stuff is getting better.
Who should listen to oligarchs like Bill Gates? Philanthropy Is a Scam
He’s also the first one to be somewhere to lobby where a government decides to move away from windows, because it’s gonna hurt his stock value
He was also a major factor in denying the global south the IP-free vaccine production they had been promised.
I really hope we make sure to record in the history books that we absolutely had the capacity to save a heartbreaking number of human lives if we waived the vaccine IP and let India crank up production but instead we listened to murderers like Bill Gates who argued we had to protect intellectual property….
Pathetic is the only word for it.
Let’s create a Wikipedia page :)
Try this: Don’t Believe The Hype
(DarkMatter2525 - Is Society Collapsing)
TLDW: No, things are getting better, some things aren’t, but it’s not an easy answer because there are 8 billion perspectives to consider. We are living longer and enjoy more technology, so there’s that.
I’ll watch later. I hope it isn’t the same thing as Steven Pinker’s “things are better than ever”.
I’m also going to disagree on the “things make us happier” argument as well. Because if you’re only getting things because they flaunt your wealth, it isn’t making you happier.
I recommended it because … I had just began listening to it then scrolled and saw this post, but also because I admire his critical thinking skills; he could have put out an hour long video of himself running around and screaming over clips of looting and earthquakes while warning us about the apocalypse and which loadout to run…
But he didn’t. He created a criteria to answer the question then looked at available data. He could have gotten 2x more views, too…
I’m also going to disagree on the “things make us happier” argument as well. Because if you’re only getting things because they flaunt your wealth, it isn’t making you happier
Where did they say that?
They said we can enjoy more technology than ever before. That is 100% true.
Do you know how much joy I feel when I watch my little vacuum robot zoom around my house keeping it clean for me? It is so cool and makes me happier living in a cleaner environment.
Bookmarked for later watching
The pandemic is an interesting case because the world stopped because millions of people died. In the past that was normal. Spanish Flu sucked just as hard but people were like “oh well, try not to die”.
Every family literally lost one or two children each in normal times. Look at any history of your family and 100 years ago you will see lots of relatives that died at young ages of diseases that are preventable now.
We live in an age of unprecedented health and death is an outlier. It used to be a part of everyday life.
I don’t agree with the premise. The world on average is better than it has ever been and it just keeps getting better every year. It’s understandable that heavy consumption of news might make it seem otherwise but virtually every metric you’d use to track this shows that things have been improving and keeps doing so.
As an overall metric, but some things have definitely gotten worse. The planet is on fire for instance. That’s getting worse and we haven’t even gotten into the really bad part.
And we are still increasing the rate at which we are making it worse…
As of 2022, more than half of the US’ power was renewable. Within the country, Texas was the state with the 2nd highest solar generation and the single highest wind generation. Even if it isn’t perfect, we are making a lot of progress on climate despite all of the pushback and anti-science rhetoric.
This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.
The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.
More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.
We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.
What about climate change? Murder rates going down is nice, but murders impact individuals. Climate change impacts civilizations.
I feel like every time people say “yeah but it’s overall getting better” is missing the first for the trees. Because, yeah, what about climate change? Or the general trends in global politics?
Pretty big topic but it’s improving in most regards. Things may seem bleaker but that’s because oil lobbyists have changed strategies from denying climate change outright to trying to convince people that it’s hopeless. This in and of itself is progress.
Here’s a smattering of other facts:
- global co2 emissions have more or less flattened out over the last decade or so. Co2 emissions per capita peaked in 2012 or so and have been declining. Since most population decline is coming from the rich polluting nations and most population growth from developing nations we can expect this trend to accelerate.
- the USA passed one of the biggest climate bills ever in 2020 and it is somewhat hard for it to be reversed. Here’s a video that I think summarizes the good and the not so good of this bill.
- many countries have realistic goals to ban ice cars, while evs are far from a perfect replacement they are undeniably significantly better for climate change than ices. There are also knock on effects, as car manufacturers phase out ice production emerging markets will have a harder time getting ice cars, and as such will almost certainly develop less car dependent infrastructure. This also applies to essentially all infrastructure projects.
It is not too late, and for the first time, we are actually starting to win.
A little context on point one: annual CO2 emissions have more or less flattened out, but that means that the growth has stopped. We’re still emitting more CO2 per year than ever in history. (And it’s hard to say how durable that trend is, since it occurred over the years during which the pandemic drastically curtailed some of the top-emitting activities.) That’s a long, long, long way from net-zero.
The decrease in per-capita emissions from rich nations is consistent with the pattern observed for many pollutants. As economies gain wealth through polluting activities, the rising standard of living causes people to demand less pollution, and improving technology can meet the demand. The trick that we need to pull off here is for the wealthy nations to spread that technology as rapidly as possible to developing nations, so that they can increase their own standard of living without going through the polluting phase.
I just accept our fate.
Humanity will probably realize we seriously fucked up around 2050 and near the end of the century mass migration will lead to a death count much bigger than WW2 or the chinese civil wars.
The only grace is that most of us reading this thread will die from various reason before the second stage.
I will still do my part by reducing my CO2 footprint but unless we find some miracle technology producing nuclear power plant levels of energy for the cost of a charcoal power plant, shitty world leaders and corporations will ruin everything for fake wealth.
The technology already exists mate. Solar and wind are waaaay quicker to spin up than nuclear. It’s a lack of political will due to entrenched industry buying out the political parties.
Solar and wind are not cheap enough
Solar on itself works between a few less than 8 hours and 16 hours depending on the solstice you are the nearest of.
And that’s the theorical best.
Reality is efficiency will drop during summer because of the record temperatures each year and in winter we are seeing more sun (Haven’t seen snow in 7-8 years btw) but the production is still relatively low.
If you want it to run 24h/24, you need to build batteries which adds more carbon and cost. And that’s on top of the maintenance cost for the panels themselves.
Wind can work 24h/24 but you cannot predict it long term.
Wind too strong? We stop the plant. Wind too weak? Subpar production. And with climate change, your expectations on a few years basis can change very rapidly.
So how do you make sure we produce the same amount of energy with certainty? You build oversized farms more expensive than what you theorically predicted.
There is also the problem of land.
A wind or solar power farm requires a lot of land comparatively to nuclear if you want to approach the same power production.
That land can be occupied instead for housing, farming or anything else.
Comparatively, a nuclear plant can easily be circled in a few minutes by foot and produce over 1 Tera Watt of energy.
Once you compound everything, nuclear is the best solution we have at our current technology level but ridiculous anti-nuclear propaganda acts like it is a thing from the demon.(My green party almost closed several nuclear power plants. During the start of the russian war. To open gas power plant instead. Like WTF?).
So what will the rich people do?
Refuse to build nuclear because their fearmongering to push gas/oil backfired on humanity and refuse to build solar/wind because we could build 50 Disneylands in the same area.
I would love them to eat their shit and choose either solution still. But it’s only a dream.
Read the last paragraph on page 3. Things are not getting worse. Your perception of the world around you is cynical as a by product of our evolution and saturation of news/media.
Your perspective is distorted, things are incredible and getting better by most metrics.
- The average person today lives better than kings of old.
- We have abundant water, food, and sanitation. In America, food is so subsidized that it is ridiculously cheap by historical standards.
- Your odds of dying to violence or disease have never been lower in all of human history.
- You have all human knowledge at your fingertips, and technology is expected to keep improving our lives in novel ways.
- You can visit any place on Earth in a matter of hours and have access to cheap exotic foreign goods.
- Civil rights are protected a lot more today than they were in many/most civilizations of the past.
- Entertainment is abundant and cheap, and takes forms that people of the past could only dream about.
While we certainly have our challenges to overcome, like climate change, wealth inequality, and social problems, let’s not forget how good we have it.
The snark it is strong, I can’t hold it in today. I have to say, yeah, and the world economy, particularly the U.S. housing market, was incredible in 2006. Okay, that out of the way, for perspective:
- The standard of living for most of the world has declined in the past couple of years, and the trend seems likely to continue.
- We don’t have enough water in the U.S. Some of that subsidy that makes food artificially cheap is in the form of fossil water from rapidly-depleting aquifers, or surface waters that are facing long-term decline, like the Colorado River. The populous western United States was settled during a relative wet period, which is drying out. It only seems abundant now because we’re not conserving it for the future.
- The odds of dying to violence seem poised to increase dramatically in the very near future, what with conflicts emerging around the world threatening to turn into regional wars, the prospect of climate migration and contention over resources (especially water) increasing conflicts, and the real prospect of the collapse of democratic government in the U.S. As for disease, the infectious disease experts tell us that the prospects for another global pandemic in the coming years are good.
- The means exist to visit any place on Earth in a matter of hours, true, but they are not equally available to all people.
- Civil rights are under active attack and in steep decline.
- The year in which the number of books published exceeded the number than a human could possibly read occurred centuries ago. The abundance of entertainment options is really a non-sequitur to quality of life.
All in all, I agree that we have had it pretty good for the past 70 years, and we should not forget that. But let’s also not breezily dismiss the looming disasters we face, because if the world were a Titanic metaphor, we’ve just hit the iceberg. The buffet is still laid out, the band is still playing, the lights are on, and the champagne is still bubbling, but it’d be ridiculous to dismiss fellow passengers’ anxiety.
I agree with all of this whole heartedly. I particularly like the titanic metaphor.
It seems absurd to me to say that “things are going great! we have abundant food & water!”. Science is telling us very clearly that water scarcity is going to be a huge problem in the near future.
We’re presently living through a mass extinction event also - very concerning as regards food stocks.
water scarcity is going to be a huge problem in the near future.
How near?
Judging by the skyrocketing prices of arable land in high rainfall areas… now ?
Don’t forget accelerating global warming that will get catastrophic in just a few decades, even if we went carbon negative right at this second
Some might say that “your perspective is distorted.” things are incredible for the top 10% of the socio-economic scale and getting better by most metrics (do not look at the numbers for maternal and infant mortality).
- The average person in a G7 state today lives better than kings of old.
- We in G7 countries have abundant water, food, and sanitation. In America, food is so subsidized that it is ridiculously cheap by historical standards.
- Your odds of dying to violence or disease have never been lower in all of human history unless you are one of the world’s 100 million refugees, live in Africa (pop. 1400 m) or Central America (pop. 52.7 m), or in one of the world’s 27 [1] current conflict zones (approx pop. 2800 m)… that’s over 4 billion people or half of humanity
- You have all human knowledge at your fingertips, and technology is expected to keep improving our lives in novel ways as long as you can afford it.
- You can visit any place on Earth in a matter of hours if your passport permits you to do so and as long as there is jet fuel and have access to cheap exotic foreign goods which are unreliable, break easily, produce garbage, and are slowly killing the planet and its peoplr.
- Civil rights are protected a lot more today than they were in many/most civilizations of the past unless you’re trans-, or black, or a woman, or a black trans-woman.
- Entertainment is abundant and cheap, and takes forms that people of the past could only dream about.
While we certainly have our incredibly massive, systemic challenges to overcome, like climate change (ha!), wealth inequality (ha ha!), and social problems (hahaha!), let’s not forget how good we (when you say we, you certainly mean your ingroup) could have it if we tore down this corrupt edifice and built an efficient, sustainable, just world.
This is a great outlook. It’s important to not lose sight of the problems that do exist and try to work towards solving them, yes. But don’t lose sight of the positives, either.
My answer to the question asked would likely be, I’ve been depressed my whole life, what’s another problem. Lol
But we do have to recognize that in spite of all of the bad we can list, there’s a lot of good as well.
Facts
Preach
I play videogames
