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.
The “Great Filter” premise assumes that there are no other “advanced” civilizations in the galaxy. Seems like that might not be the case, if the UAP news is not some massive psy-op lol
Aliens probably exist somewhere, but space is unfathomably large. They have never been here. UAPs generally fall into two categories: faked or oddities not understood at their time of capture.
Listen to Cmdr. Fravor and the three other pilots that witnessed the Nimitz UAP in the early 2000s. A tic tac shaped object, darting back and forth like a ping pong ball, that travelled from ~80,000 ft to ~20,000 ft in seconds on radar, and went to their cap point, “60 miles away in one minute”. If it isn’t NHI it is almost certainly some zero gravity tech completely unknown to the average person and is very unlikely to have not leaked at some point.
Or, much more likely, something was going on that they didn’t understand, such as this: https://youtu.be/jHDlfIaBEqw?si=_wPWoNuzIRa2CrGw&t=548
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 pandemic is still on. It isn’t over yet.
Hasn’t the WHO officially declared it over?
Well, insofar that the pandemic “won”, the infection is now endemic and part of everyday life, like herpes or the common cold.
Yes, that is correct. Therefore, it is no longer considered a pandemic. Doesn’t mean that the disease doesn’t exist anymore.
I wouldn’t believe in anything WHO says.
Why not?
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.
There have already been studies showing that this gradual swing to the right no longer holds for millennials.
The original premise that psychopathy affects a proportion of any population is true though.
Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries.
That is just not true. They do get more protective of their possessions and the status quo as they get richer and hold positions with more influence in society. Currently millennials and younger generations do not get richer in the same way that boomers did though.
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.
…and then went on to betray everything their parent’s generation fought for (some with their lives) in terms of workers rights in the US because some dumb ass actor President convinced them to throw it all in the trash in exchange for nothing…
The “hippie” thing was a flash in the pan beyond changes in superficial cultural habits when you are talking in broad terms of US society and it mostly sticks in the popular US consciousness because it is a reliable punching bag for conservatives rather than a genuine generational force for good.
Fast forward a thousand years from now and when a child sees pictures of all the animals and habitats that used to exist on earth in kids books and they ask “what happened?” the answer will have to be the boomer generation. Yes it was just the rich ones in power, but zoom out and I am not sure how much that shit matters on the scale of civilizations. Boomers like every other generation of humans inherited the earth to steward it for future generations and they literally did such a bad job of it that it is impossible for future generations to do worse or else we will just all outright go extinct.
Boomers failed catastrophically to steward the earth for future generations and honestly I hope future generations never forget that. I hope they are remembered in stories that retell and retell what happened. They deserve nothing less, especially because half of them are always lecturing young people about how climate change isn’t real, about how the devastation their generation wrought that is bloodily unfolding in front of our very eyes, is just nonsense.
Fewer millennials ate lead paint chips as kids, I know that much.
Boomers are a problem because they took power early and refuse to let go
That’s the thing with self-organizing systems like democracy or capitalism… You need constant churn, because if it stagnates, the worst kind of people entrench themselves.
So you lie to yourself, got it.
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.
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.
ignorance is bliss
ya’ll are scum
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.
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.
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.
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.
LGBTQ rights in the US are, generally speaking, progressing.
as a trans person in the USA
fuck you, ya ignorant removed
I’m not trans, but I’m gay and I have many trans friends in the LGTBQ+ community who have shared their experiences with me. Maybe lay off the insults?
Also, I’m talking broad strokes of history. Think about how the general public’s attitude towards LGBTQ+ people has changed in the last, say, 50 years (since Stonewall). It’s been a rough road with set backs, but we have the momentum. Young people are already much more LGBTQ+ friendly, and demographics is destiny.
I will lay off some insults, yes. If i hadn’t had experience with you before. Your politics are of a most silly kind.
Maybe in europe, but before your people decided to pillage and plunder the world, real civilizations in Native Americas, China, Oceania, and such had far far more progressive cultures than our own.
GenZ is the most pathetic excuse for a leftist generation. Even Boomers had wayyyyy better communists, America just killed them off.
As a trans person on the ground with trans organizers, we do not have the momentum. People’s support means little without active protection. Politics is actively stripping away our right to exist in every country on the globe. Well besides civilized countries like Cuba, Nigeria, South Africa, and China. The west is heading backward materially. Your “popular support” means nothing if no one has the spine to do something with it.
We got where we are with riots and subversion and rage, not pandering and concessions. Concessions are how we get washed away.
I can cite sources if you want them.
I am not interested with bizarre comparisons with Nigeria. I am focused on one time comparison. On average, are attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people trending positive. Let’s say you were born under similar circumstances, but fifty years earlier. Would your life as a trans woman be better or worse? Would the people around you treat you better or worse? Would the government treat you better or worse?
The DeSantises and the so called Moms for Liberty out there are unfortunately currently having their moment in some quarters. It is frustrating to see ignorance and hatred directed at my trans brethren. But I have seen too much positive movement, both historical and current, to expect that we anywhere but the right direction. History will be the judge of those who got in the way.
I’m not talking to someone who gets regularly temp banned for things like anti-semitism
fuck off
You’re talking about the world news mods who will find any excuse to ban someone who goes again a pro-Russia, pro-CCP, or pro-Hamas narrative? That community barely has rules, it’s just excuses for the mods to pick their preferred propaganda.
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
deleted by creator
Same
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.
Keep in mind that, in the USA atleast, crime is increasing and life expectancy is falling. The economic situation of the average worker has also been getting worse for a long time, which is more important than access to YouTube and Netflix
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.
Like so:
We can’t capitalism our way out of what we capitalismed ourselves into. It’s socialism or barbarism.
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.
I play videogames
I feel like a spectator at this point. Fully aware of how the system operates and powerless to affect change without grave consequences. Materially, I’m secure. Not reproducing, so I don’t have offspring to care about their future. Fuck this timeline, maybe I’ll get to return at a cooler time.
Every indivual can actually make a change, you have to realize (and more importandly appreciate) that taking small steps is equally as important to make big impact.
I avoid the news, if it’s important one of my friends or family will tell me. Also, if something is going on but isn’t actionable (I can’t do anything about it) I try not to let it occupy much of my headspace.
Also, if something is going on but isn’t actionable (I can’t do anything about it) I try not to let it occupy much of my headspace.
That’s probably the healthier approach.
Exactly. Do what you can when you can. Everyone needs a hand sometimes. Be that for the people around you. Even if you can’t agree on everything.
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’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.
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…
Bookmarked for later watching
Be the change you want to see. I switched things up and took a job where I work to feed hungry people. It’s pretty great and I feel good about myself and what I do. I’m not gonna fix the whole world, but I am making a difference for those who I reach.
