In fact life is so positive, media outlets have to pull out all the stops to find something outrageous and incendiary for you to click on. Cable news will play the same anxiety inducing clip from news from hundreds of miles away that have nothing to do with our lives.
In the recent past tons of horrifying stuff happened that would not get commented on. It would stay in local news as a local issue. We are now far more aware of what’s happening in distant places for better or worse.
In fact because lives are so positive, we can now focus on these problems, whereas in the past they’d just go undiscussed.
Are you talking creature comforts? Physical "stuff"? Are you talking basic services (e.g., clean water)? Or what about liberty and privacy vs perception of safety? Or what about social mobility and income inequality?
If you value liberty and privacy then odds are worse is most likely. If you value comfort and consuming "stuff" then the system will continue to do its best to stroke you and coddle you.
There are broader improvements (e.g., more ppl die from too much food than not enough). But all in all we're headed for The Matrix.
What are some of the things you are seeing becoming progressively worse?
Political polarization is worse than it was.
Wealth inequality is worse than it was. Economic opportunity for the lower and lower middle classes is worse than it was.
I don't buy the "climate change is going to destroy everything" pessimism. I don't buy "covid forever, we'll never return to normal" either, though it can start to feel like that. But there are some things that are legitimately getting worse, and they're concerning.
Capability based security should be the norm in a decade, and people will be able to just run random shit without risking their computers once again. This will allow the flourishing of small web sites that are currently shunned because of stranger danger. This will lead to less centralization of censorship.
We'll come to a collective decision about omnipresent surveillance, so the ghosts of Orwell won't be haunting us. I for one and ok with it, as long as some randomly chosen citizens get to watch the watchers, on a constant ongoing basis.
If it exists, the breakaway civilization inside the black projects world should be revealing some pretty awesome technology to save the planet, by making energy cheap and clean, any day now.
Work life balance has come back into focus as something we all deserve.
Miami might be able to keep rising tides at bay for 50 years but Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and California won’t be able to do much about heat and wildfire smoke. Arizona and Nevada might not be so bad because they’re built for the heat already.
Climate change is something humans missed their chance to fix decades ago. Now we’re getting set to pay the bill that’s already due. We have to pretend like we’ve still got a chance to “solve” it because the alternative (admitting it’s a lost cause) is just too sad.
I'm sorry, I try to be charitable, but this guy reads like a well-written National Review comments section nutter.
I'm in the pessimistic camp too, but the quasi-Stalinist revolution this guy sees coming seems profoundly unlikely.
I think I only agree in part. If this is an accurate picture of what's going on, though, the "elite" effort is doomed, because as the pie shrinks the masses are going to become increasingly resistant to the elites wasting resources on make-work programs for their allies.
And, that question at the end? The only politician I can see that could pull off such a thing is Trump. He would do it on behalf of a different set of elites, though - ones with less structural power than the regular set. (And one could guess that the incredible hostility of the establishment elites toward Trump was caused by him threatening their gravy train.)
The only real trick is figuring out when to retire somewhere tropical. I’d say hold out until the prime rate goes to 2% or debt to GDP reaches 150%, sell enough to cover your debt and ride it out in Margaritaville.
The tl;dr of that is that the world is getting better at a rate that's almost impossible to believe. In fact, it is impossible to believe, which is why so many people don't. It explores the psychology of that a bit.
https://fee.org/articles/average-americans-today-are-richer-...
200 years from now, when the average American is incalculably richer than Elon Musk is today, we'll still be having this conversation. Or capitalism may have ended and the phrase "richer than Elon Musk" may not mean anything. Or we may all be uploaded to the central core. I don't know, but if I had to bet, it'll be better regardless.
Climate change is admittedly a pretty nasty problem. But we have lots of solutions (geoengineering); it's just a matter of whether we give up on the idea that this particular crisis is the end of capitalism in time to use them.